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WHAT MADE THE IRISH FAMINE SO DEADLY  
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intan O’Toole
March 10, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the
poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be
obeyed at all costs. _

Roughly two of every three people born in Ireland in the early
eighteen-thirties were killed by the famine or joined the exodus to
North America, Britain, and Australia., Photo illustration by Lucy
Jones; Source photographs by Andrew Harnik / Getty; Brendan

 

In the first act of the wittiest Irish play of the nineteenth century,
Oscar Wilde’s “Importance of Being Earnest
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there is much ado about a shortage of food. The fearsome Aunt Augusta
is coming to tea, but we have watched the feckless Algernon eat all
the cucumber sandwiches prepared for her by his manservant, Lane. The
servant saves the day when the aunt arrives, expecting her sandwiches,
by lying: “There were no cucumbers in the market this morning, sir.
I went down twice.” Algy responds with high emotion: “I am greatly
distressed, Aunt Augusta, about there being no cucumbers, not even for
ready money.”

The play, first performed in 1895, is subtitled “A Trivial Comedy
for Serious People,” and this scene is an exquisite exercise in
trivialization. Wilde is imagining what a food crisis might look like
if it were happening among the English upper classes rather than in
his home country. The panic and dread of searching for nourishment and
finding none is transformed into an airy nothing: a fake story about
the nonexistent dearth of a plant that has relatively little
nutritional value, and a charade of great distress. The comedy is so
wonderfully weightless as to seem entirely free from the gravitational
pull of the history that had preoccupied Wilde’s family, and of a
place called Ireland, where the unfortunately unavailable food was not
the cucumber but the potato.

In 1854, when Oscar was born, his father was also engaged in the
sublimation of horror. William Wilde, a pioneering surgeon and medical
statistician, was the assistant commissioner for the census of Ireland
that was conducted in 1851—the one that recorded the disappearance
from what was then the richest, most powerful, and most
technologically advanced country in the world, the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland, of some one and a half million people. They
had died in, or fled from, what the Irish poor called in their native
language An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, a catastrophe that was then
continuing into its sixth year.

The year Oscar turned two, William published the results of his
immersion in the minutiae of the famine as an official report of the
British Parliament. The two-volume work is called the “Tables of
Deaths.” Because the census relied on the information given by
survivors, and thus did not count many victims whose entire families
had been wiped out or had left Ireland as desperate refugees, it
actually underestimated the number of lives lost in the Great Hunger.

William and his assistants were nonetheless able to build solid
pillars of data, mass death broken down into discrete numerals to
represent sexes, ages, locations, seasons, years, and causes of
mortality, which included starvation, scurvy, dysentery, cholera,
typhus, and relapsing fever. The tables of deaths occupy hundreds of
double-page spreads, laid out with exemplary clarity and precision.
They speak of order, regularity, the capacity of Victorian governance
for infinite comprehension. The staggering rise in mortality may have
demanded extraordinary efforts from the statisticians, but they were
equal to their task. They tabulated calamity, confined it safely
within vertical and horizontal lines on the pages of sturdily bound
official tomes. There are no names of human beings.

This dutiful, sober, and rigorously unemotional work might also have
been titled “The Importance of Being Earnest,” albeit without a
hint of Oscar’s playful irony. William’s safely anonymized figures
are, in their way, just as weightless as Oscar’s sharply amusing
figments. In the introduction to his volume, he uses the remote and
clinical language of officialdom: “The labours of the Commissioners
in this particular portion of their work greatly exceed those
connected with the Tables of Deaths published in the Census of 1841,
chiefly owing to the extraordinary increase in the numbers of
deaths.” It almost seems as though the reader’s sympathy is being
evoked not for the people behind the statistics but for the
commissioners who had to work so hard to categorize the circumstances
in which those people expired.

There was also a third kind of language used to cloak the horrors of
the famine: an accusatory rage against the British authorities who had
failed to prevent it. As it happens, it was another Wilde, Oscar’s
mother and William’s wife, Jane, writing as a passionate and
incendiary Irish nationalist under the pen name Speranza, who helped
to invent that language. In 1847, she published a poem about the
famine whose voice is that of the “wretches, famished, scorned,”
who warn their oppressors that their deaths will be avenged: “But
our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, / From the
cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, // A
ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, / And
arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.”

Jane’s fiercely unforgiving tone was adopted by militant Irish
nationalists for whom the famine stood as the ultimate proof of
English perfidy. But in her poem, too, the victims appear as an
undifferentiated mass. Her avenging army of the undead is in its own
way just as distanced as the numbers in her husband’s tables.

One difficulty in writing about the Great Hunger is scale. There have
been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen,
the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, concluded, in “no other
famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as
large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that
caused it was a fungus-like water mold called _Phytophthora
infestans_. Its effect on the potato gives “Rot
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a vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine by the historian
Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The blight began to infect the crop
across much of western and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In
the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent
famine—a terrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in
Ireland. It is, oddly, easier to form a mental picture of what it
might have been like to witness the Dutch tragedy than to truly convey
the magnitude of the suffering in Ireland.

Another difficulty is that the Great Hunger was not just an Irish
event. It bled far beyond its own borders, seeping into the national
narratives of the rest of the Anglophone world. Only about one in
three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die
at home of old age. The other two either were consumed by the famine
or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5
million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain
and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the
history of those countries, too.

There has long been something inarticulable about this vast human
disaster. In a preface to the monumental “Atlas of the Great Irish
Famine
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published in 2012, the former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese,
observed that “for many years the event was cloaked in silence, its
memory for the most part buried or neglected.” The editors of the
“Atlas” noted that, until recently, “there was a strange
reluctance on the part of historians, historical geographers and
others to address” the vast archival records. Right up to the
nineteen-nineties, the annual rate of publication of scholarly papers
on the subject of the famine never rose above a half-dozen.

The novelist Colm Tóibín
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in 1998, that the problem “may lie in the relationship between
catastrophe and analytic narrative. How do you write about the Famine?
What tone do you use?” He speculated, moreover, that the Great
Hunger had created a great divide even in Irish consciousness. If, he
said, he were to write a novel about his home town, Enniscorthy, that
took place after the famine years, “I would not have to do much
research”—because the place would resemble the one he grew up in.
But he would find the years before and during the event itself
“difficult to imagine.”

It is easy to sympathize with this difficulty. The famine set in
motion a process of depopulation—even now, after many decades of
growth, the island has a million fewer inhabitants than it had in
1841. It disproportionately affected those who spoke the Irish
language, creating an Anglophone Ireland. It led ultimately to a
radical reform of land ownership, which passed to a new class of
Catholic farmers. The profoundly uncomfortable truth is that Ireland
started to become modern when its poorest people were wiped out or
sent into exile—a reality that is too painful to be faced without
deep unease.

Even before the potato blight, there was a degree of hunger among the
Irish rural underclass that seemed like an ugly remnant of a receding
past. In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the
first volume of “Democracy in America
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his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a
country the two men had previously visited together. The book de
Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et
Religieuse
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was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision
of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic.
De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette,
understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to
create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he
and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit.
America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the
exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common
rule.”

The problem was not that the land was barren: Scanlan records that,
“in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms
raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000
pigs.” But almost none of this food was available for consumption by
the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to
the burgeoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers
who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been regarded
as well off, ate meat only at Christmas. “If an Irish family
slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and
other offal,” Scanlan writes. He quotes the testimony of a farmer to
a parliamentary commission, in 1836, that “he knew other
leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. ‘We sell
them now,’ he explained.”

 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand
people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were
Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who
benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic
owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year
in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of
whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a
tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of
his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value
of a farm’s saleable produce.”

Landlords could extract these high rents because their tenants, in
turn, made money by subletting little parcels of land, often as small
as a quarter of an acre, to laborers who had none of their own. The
whole system was possible only because of the potato. Most years,
those micro farms could produce enough of this wonder crop to keep a
family alive. It provided enough calories to sustain hardworking
people and also delivered the necessary minerals and vitamins. By the
eighteen-forties, as many as 2.7 million people (more than a quarter
of the entire population) were surviving on potatoes they grew in tiny
fields that encroached on ever more marginal land, clinging to bogs
and the sides of stony mountains.

De Beaumont, noting that these laboring families had to endure a
“life of fasting” when their store of potatoes ran out in the
summer or when the crop was scanty, grasped the precarity of this
situation. One of his most striking insights was that the
exceptionally cruel nature of Irish poverty made it seem incredible to
outsiders: “The word _famine_, employed to describe the misery of
Ireland, appeared to them a metaphorical expression for great
distress, and not the exact term to express the state of human
beings _really_ famishing and perishing from sheer want of food.”
It was, he suggested, particularly in England that “persons were
pleased to keep themselves in this state of doubt.”

Yet de Beaumont himself felt he could not describe what he saw on his
travels. Words were not adequate to the task. Adopting a disembodied
third-person voice, he asked, “Shall he relate what he saw?—No.
There are misfortunes so far beyond the pale of humanity, that human
language has no words to represent them.” If he were to “recall
the sinister impressions produced” by the contrasts between the
wealth of the Irish landowning aristocracy and the destitution of the
rural poor, “he feels that the pen would fall from his hands, and
that he would not have the courage to complete the task which he has
undertaken to accomplish.”

This feeling that Irish reality was at once incredible and
indescribable became almost a standard response to the Great Hunger.
In one of the first widely circulated eyewitness accounts, an open
letter written to the Duke of Wellington by Nicholas Cummins, a
magistrate in Cork, Cummins struggled to articulate what he saw when
he entered a settlement outside Skibbereen, in December, 1846. “I
was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted,” he
wrote. “I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the
scenes which presented themselves were such as no pen or tongue can
convey the slightest idea of. . . . It is impossible to go through
the details.”

Asenath Nicholson, a woman from Vermont who began a one-person relief
operation in Ireland, in 1847, recorded a moment when a man invited
her to inspect a cabin where a mother, a father, and their two
children lay dead: “The man called, begging me to look in. I did
not, and could not endure, as the famine progressed, such
sights . . . they were too real, and these realities became a
dread.”

The Great Hunger was excessively real to many European and North
American observers because it was in the wrong place at the wrong
time. It was happening not in India or China but in what was supposed
to be the Empire’s heartland. Its victims were white, Christian, and
(notionally, at least) subjects of the United Kingdom with the same
rights as the inhabitants of Hampstead Heath or Tunbridge Wells.

It was also an affront to the liberal Victorian certainty that
progress was linear and inevitable. The British Prime Minister Lord
John Russell told the House of Commons, in January, 1847, that “the
famine is such as has not been known in modern times; indeed, I should
say it is like a famine of the thirteenth century acting upon the
population of the nineteenth.” What the British ruling class could
not grasp was that the Irish famine was a phenomenon of “modern
times,” the product, as Scanlan convincingly argues, of a
particularly virulent form of exploitative capitalism that left
millions of people utterly exposed to the instability of short-term
rental of land, to fluctuating food markets, and to wages driven
downward by the pressure of too many laborers looking for too little
work.

Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the
famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a
genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an
official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by
then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine
“as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the
Holocaust.”

Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was
not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but
rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny
the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not
what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one
drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was
“not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British.
Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was
ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures
intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with
sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not
cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the
standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to
keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup
kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those
who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and
a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in
our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings
of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine
was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes,
mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.

It was obvious to outsiders that the root of Ireland’s misery was
what de Beaumont characterized as a “bad aristocracy”—the
monopolization of land by a small élite that had no cultural or
religious affinity with its tenantry and little sense of obligation to
develop sustainable agriculture. But an English ruling class in which
many leading politicians were themselves owners of vast estates in
Ireland was unable to acknowledge this inconvenient truth. Who, if not
the landlord system, could be to blame? It must be the Irish poor
themselves. As Scanlan puts it, “Intensive monoculture made Irish
potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate
famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and
political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market
that fuelled the crisis to begin with.”

In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on
the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was
relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who
did so had clearly chosen the easy life. “Ireland, through this
lens,” Scanlan writes, “was a kind of living fossil within the
United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert
and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and
content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.” Or, as William
Carleton, the first major writer in the English language to have
sprung from the Irish Catholic peasantry, put it with withering
sarcasm, the Irish poor had not learned “to starve in an enlightened
manner”: “Political economy had not then taught the people how to
be poor upon the most scientific principles.”

Civilized people ate meat—England’s unofficial national anthem was
“The Roast Beef of Old England.” The desire to consume animal
flesh stimulated effort and enterprise. Thus, the destruction of the
potato crop, however terrible and regrettable its short-term effects,
would teach the Irish to crave meat instead and become proper
capitalist wage earners so that they could afford to buy it. “When
the Celts once cease to be potatophagi,” wrote the editors of the
London _Times_, “they must become carnivorous.” Let them, as
Marie Antoinette did not say, eat steak.

This arrant nonsense obscured the reality that the Irish had no
particular love of potatoes. Their historically varied diet, based on
oats, milk, and butter, had been reduced by economic oppression to one
tuber. Nor were they reluctant to work for wages. Many travelled long
distances to earn money as seasonal migrant laborers on farms in
England and Scotland, and Irish immigrants were integrating themselves
into the capitalist money economy in the mills of Massachusetts and
the factories of New York.

Yet, as stupid as this bigotry undoubtedly was, it was also deadly.
The idea of Irish indolence fused with a quasi-religious faith in the
laws of the market to shape the British response to the famine. In its
first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government
imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from
America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be
sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish
indolence), and those who received it had little idea at first how to
cook it. Nonetheless, the plan was reasonably effective in keeping
people alive.

The general assumption, however, was that the blight of 1845 was a
one-off event. At the end of July, 1846, it became crushingly obvious
that the blight had spread even wider, wiping out more than ninety per
cent of the new crop. By then, most of the poor tenants had sold
whatever goods they had, leaving nothing with which to stave off
starvation. Fishermen on the coasts had pawned their nets for money to
buy maize. The terrible year that followed is still remembered in
Ireland as Black ’47, though the famine would, in fact, last until
1852.

In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis
coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological
commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were
determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the
free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing
corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ
starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic
that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them
something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the
already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market
would not be upset.

The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly
debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for
wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive.
Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as
landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and
free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined
hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.

“Rot” provides a convincing answer to Tóibín’s question of
what tone you should use in writing about the famine. Scanlan’s
voice is cool but never cold. The book is richly underpinned by
research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical
scholarship, and it does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying the
famine as deliberate genocide. But a proper sense of outrage runs
between the lines and carries a consistently high voltage.

Above all, “Rot” reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very
modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the
ascendant. The poor are the authors of their own misery. The warning
signs of impending environmental disaster can be ignored. Gross
inequalities are natural, and God-given. The market must be obeyed at
all costs. There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now
seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because
other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen
now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the March 17, 2025
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headline “Indescribable.”

_FINTAN O'TOOLE is an Irish journalist, literary editor, and drama
critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988.
O'Toole was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001
and is Advising Editor and a regular contributor to The New York
Review of Books. Wikipedia_

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* Book Review
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* ireland
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* famine
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* potatoes
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* Oscar Wilde
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* poverty
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* class struggle
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* free market
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* Free Trade
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* emigration
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