The noble spud

[Rodney Mills]

I must have read a dozen books that blamed the "evil English" for the "Great Potato Famine" of the nineteenth century. The principle theme that ran through them was the "English" Lords introduced it to starve the Irish into subjugation or to make them vacate the land. In veritably the hero, watches his worn-out mother, or an elder sister who raised him from a wee thing, or his childhood sweetheart die of starvation. In a fit of righteous rage he kills the "English" Lord (who's ancestors had occupied the castle and lands longer I do believe, than King George and his descendants have occupied their lands and homes) or his equally evil overseer, who's favorite sport was whipping peasants and deflowering young colleens, and our hero is forced to flee to the United States. Well sorry mates, the villain was P. infestan. And here is how it came about.

I have studied the history of the potato, its benefit to N. America and Europe, and the potato famine. Its cause and effect in deaths and the economic and social mayhem this tragedy had, to N. America; huge swaths of Europe, and to what was then the British Isles. So here goes.

A wild tuber- we know today as the potato- grows wild in the Andes, the longest mountain chain on earth and were poisonous. Over time, the Andean people of Peru neutralised the poison and created non-poisonous varieties to safely consume. Spanish explorers led by Pizarro in 1532 were introduced to the spud; on their return to Spain they brought back seed potatoes and plants, introducing this tuber to Europe. Sir Francis Drake was erroneously given the credit in 1586, but potatoes had already been successfully cultivated in Spain and the Netherlands- then a Spanish possession- for years.

Famines were a fact of life throughout the world, and the everyday diet- both quantity and quality- was on par with BANGLADESH and sub-Saharan countries today. England alone had 15 recorded major famines in less than a hundred years, and that doesn't consider localized famines. England and Europe could not feed themselves. With all this, acceptance of the potato was a long time coming.

Finally, the value of the potato was recognized- and the acceptance of this new crop actually doubled the food harvest almost instantly. From Poland to England to Spain, the potato accounted from 10% to (in the northern countries) 30% of the solid food people ate, and better, it could be stored through the winter months. In Ireland it accounted for 40%- the sole source of solid food for most of the Irish people.

For the first time in history starvation became a memory.

Guano is the dried remains off fish-eating birds urine. Off the Peruvian coast lay islands buried under hundreds of feet of this fantastically rich fertilizer. It was already known that the addition of nitrogen to cultivated land restores it, but this stuff was magic, With the introduction of guano, yields doubled and tripled, fortunes were made...except... Peru owned it! The demand became so bad that war was actually threatened and gun-boats sent. Everybody wanted more of it ,but at a cheaper price. "Britain threatened to seize the islands". U.S. congress passed "The Guano Islands Act of 1856", authorizing Americans [M.N.] to seize any guano deposits they discovered".

It is said, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh".

Proof will never be found, but it is believed that tiny a air-borne spoor from Peru arrived in Antwerp from a guano ship. What was proved is that the blight P. infestan broke out in Belgium near the French border. Within weeks it had jumped from this border region to beyond Paris, and then spread to the Netherlands; Germany and Poland etc. and into England. It was first reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845. In three months it had wiped out a million acres of potatoes, almost 50% of Ireland's acreage. The next year it got the rest. Europe and the British Isles were devastated. Once more the scourge of famine abounded. Ireland was hit the worst, as it was in the main a single crop country and most of the people relied on the potato as their staple diet. The effects on Ireland from death and mass migrations it caused are felt to this day. Ireland is the only country that has a lessor population today than it had 150 years ago.

Death and migration hit every country that consumed the potato, albeit to a lessor degree, and today this tragedy has become a benefit to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others, where Irish, English, Poles, Germans and others have assimilated and contributed to the growth of their new country.

So my Irish friends and shipmates, please don't blame P.infestan on the English, you can blame other things on them but not the potato famine.

Cheers, Rodney

[Keith at Tregenna]

The 'Great Hunger' was one of many famines in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century, but the size of the disaster dwarfed those that preceded it. A contemporary comment was that "God sent the blight, but the English made the famine: and to some extent this was true because the governments of both Peel and Lord John Russell did little to help the Irish population.

The Irish population had exploded in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching about 8.5 million by 1845. The peasants were almost totally dependent on the potato as a source of food because this crop produced more food per acre than wheat and could also be sold as a source of income. Because of the widespread practise of conacre, the peasants needed to produce the biggest crop possible and so the type of potato most favoured was the "Aran Banner," a large variety. Unfortunately, this particular strain was highly susceptive to the fungus, Phytophthora infestans, commonly known as blight, which had spread from North America to Europe. The blight destroyed the potato crop of 1845 and by the early autumn of that year it was clear that famine was imminent in Ireland. Peel's government was slow to react. Peel said that the Irish had a habit of exaggerating reports of distress; since he had been Chief Secretary for Ireland between 1812 and 1818, his experience might have told him that there might have had some truth in his comment, but in 1816 he had produced a contingency plan for the government in case economic disaster ever struck Ireland. Consequently his lack of action is difficult to explain.

During the winter of 1845-1846 Peel's government spent £100,000 on American maize which was sold to the destitute. The Irish called the maize 'Peel's brimstone'. Eventually the government also initiated relief schemes such as canal-building and road building to provide employment. The workers were paid at the end of the week and often men had died of starvation before their wages arrived. Even worse, many of the schemes were of little used: men filled in valleys and flattened hills just so the government could justify the cash payments. The Irish crisis was used as an excuse by Peel in order for him to the repeal the Corn Laws in 1846, but their removal brought Ireland little benefit. The major problem was not that there was no food in Ireland — there was plenty of wheat, meat and dairy produce, much of which was being exported to England — but that the Irish peasants had no money with which to buy the food. The repeal of the Corn Laws had no effect on Ireland because however cheap grain was, without money the Irish peasants could not buy it.

K.

[Keith at Tregenna]

Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–1783, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.

Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as "the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.

Christine Kinealy writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the poor had no money to buy food and the government then did not ban exports.

The following poem written by Miss Jane Francesca Elgee (later Lady Wilde), a well known and popular author, was carried in The Nation:

Weary men, what reap ye? Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, Hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing.
There's a proud array of soldiers—what do they round your door?
They guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? 'Would to God that we were dead—
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.

In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language it is called an Gorta Mór meaning "the Great Hunger" or an Drochshaol meaning "the bad times".


The famine is still a controversial event in Irish history. Debate and discussion on the British government's response to the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, the exportation of food crops and livestock, the subsequent large-scale starvation, and whether or not this constituted genocide, remains a historically and politically charged issue.

K.

[Lou Barron]

Nothing like new potatoes straight out the garden .I have them every year

[happy daze john in oz]

I assume Lou you have other foods as well at the other times of the year.

[happy daze john in oz]

In the late 1950's much of the county of Kent was hit with potato blight, something which many farmers had never experienced. As a result the ministry of agriculture banned the planting of potao crops in thta area for two years. A very good family friend had planted some five acres not far from Biggin Hill, it almost made him bankrupt.

[Ivan Cloherty]

.......................So my Irish friends and shipmates, please don't blame P.infestan on the English, you can blame other things on them but not the potato famine.

Rodney, whilst I agree with what you say, I think that you maybe pizzing against the wind in trying to get people not to blame the English for ALL the ills that beget or begat the world now and then. As a young man I studied Irish history,(my father was Irish, as was my late wife) most of it forgotten now but the more I studied the more convinced I became that most of Ireland's troubled past was brought upon itself by its indigenous peoples, it is always easy to blame others for your own failings. People today call for a "United" Ireland, and conveniently forget (or are unaware) that Ireland was never united but consisted of many warring factions, whom King Brian tried to unite to repel the advances of the Scottish Celts who had designs on Ulster, yes it was Celts invading Celts, but the others tribes would not unite with him and thus the Scots had their way and became intergrated with the northern tribe thus Scottish names "Mac" and Irish derivative "Mc". It was only when England intergrated Scotland within the United Kingdom that Northern Ireland became its province.

The truth does not suit the film makers who have a way of influencing and distorting history to suit their "Box Office" ends and fables told at mother's knee become fact although that fact be nowhere near the truth but does make a good story. Lets face it on a lighter note the English did give three things to the Irish, the English language so that they could trade internationally and two songs "Galway Bay" and "Danny Boy" so that they could sing about their land.

Whilst we are in this vein, I do wish that the British Government would stop apologising on my behalf for all the alleged crimes committed by the "English" during history.

Did the Romans apologise for invading Britain, did the Spanish, Portugeuse and French apologise for invading Africa, the West Indies, south America, did the Dutch apologise for taking over the East Indies and Indonesia, have the Americans apologised for kicking us out of the USA, will the Arabs the masters of the slave trade apologise for the slave tradeof course not: and why should they, it is history and it was the way the world worked then and without the intrepid explorers and bucanneers of those times everyone would be living in an isolationist world with no cross trade to keep us all alive. And lets not forget many of those intrepid explorers and bucaneers were Irish, Scottish and Welsh but apparently the only bad ones were the English, the others were stuff of romance and fortitude.

Well no doubt there will be a few exocets heading my way, but as always it is inconvenient to let truth stand in the way of fiction

[Jim Brady]

Ivan,when you studied the History Of Ireland what did it say about The Irish Slave Trade,I suspect that that was "airbrushed" out.I'm sure that 300,000 Irish men,woman and children did'nt bring that on themselves as you put it.Do yourself a favour and google it,read it,digest it and I think maybe you will change you mind about Irish History.
Regards.
Jim.B.

[john sutton]

jim
regarding the irish slave trade.
the article i read would appear to be here say from unresearched sources.there are many such stories from such organisations on all sorts of subjects.During my long(very)life I have many irish friends and aquaintances ,many of them militant and none of them have ever mentioned slave trades to the west indies or even america.you may be aware that thousands of english indentured persons(read slaves) were transported to the americas.these were not neccesarily criminals but simply people with no defence against deportation
john sutton

[Ivan Cloherty]

Ivan,when you studied the History Of Ireland what did it say about The Irish Slave Trade,I suspect that that was "airbrushed" out.I'm sure that 300,000 Irish men,woman and children did'nt bring that on themselves as you put it.Do yourself a favour and google it,read it,digest it and I think maybe you will change you mind about Irish History.
Regards.
Jim.B.

Aah Jim! Google !, the font of all knowledge !! The books on Irish History I read were written by Native Irish Historians, I doubt very much they had an axe to grind. As for the Irish slave trade, the only people recorded as taking slaves from Ireland were the people from Brittany and Northern Spain, the latter when the Moors were prevalent in Spain, the others were economic migrants and those sent to populate the Colonies along with their English, Welsh and Scottish counterparts.

Also I have no axe to grind as my family name may suggest, my father was Irish, as was my grandfather, greatgrandfather etc etc and can trace our Irish connections back into the 16th Century. Many great books on factual Irish history written and compiled by Irish historians can be found in the Library of Dublin University, which I believe is still open to the public, although I may be wrong on that assumption, but I am sure you will be able to Google or Wikepedia it.

As stated I have no axe to grind, but fables and films can alter the course of history, lets just look at how the USA captured Enigma Machine, how a lone USA pilot won the Battle of Britain (although he was never credited with one kill) I believe Tom Cruise is to portray him, how the Hovercraft and the Harrier jet have become American inventions, as has the jet engine, the Ski jump on aircraft carriers. I always remember an encounter in recent years with a bunch of Irish Americans with Irish accents (who admitted they had never been there) asking me when the English were going to get out of Dublin !! the same type of people make films about Irish history.

But each person has their own view on history and if that version suits them, so be it.

Regards Ivan

I am sure that Google and Wikepedia have plenty of valid information for consumption and are a useful tool, but they also have many omissions and not so accurate information, how many times have you googled something about our own profession and have been amazed or disappointed at information portrayed which you know is not correct from your own experiences