Deasy's point in saying "I remember the famine in '46" seems
to be not only to remind Stephen how long he has been around,
but also to lay claim to some historical authenticity, as if
he knew the sufferings and can speak authoritatively about
their significance. Perhaps no single perspective can be
adequate for comprehending this appalling holocaust, but if
anyone is not fit to claim special insight, it is a
Unionist member of the Protestant ruling class.
Many have claimed that what happened in 1845-52 was not a
famine at all, since food was being produced abundantly in
Ireland throughout these years, but rather a genocidal
government policy of mass starvation. This claim is highly
debatable, but it cannot be denied that the more than one
million deaths, and the comparable number of people driven to
leave their ancestral land for America (in a population of
only eight million), were not caused by a fungal blight on the
potato crop. They were caused by a brutally oppressive system
of landholding that had reduced rural Catholics to a state of
serfdom so inhumanly wretched that millions were subsisting by
eating nothing but potatoes (eight pounds a day were
required), while the rich fruits of a fertile country (corn,
wheat, beef, pork) were exported to England. For a long time,
British government policy had discouraged Irish industry while
encouraging the export of wheat and cattle to feed English
appetites. Huge numbers of peasants, unable to earn money in
any way, subsisted on the potatoes that they could grow on
their tiny plots of land.
Nor can it plausibly be claimed that the crop failure could
not be foreseen or managed. In the famine of 1782-83, the
government in Dublin had closed the ports to exports, over the
objections of merchants. Food prices fell, and people ate. In
the famine that began in 1845, the government in Westminster
kept the ports open, and people starved. (Daniel O'Connell observed in
1845 that Belgium was dealing with the blight by closing its
ports to exports and opening them to imports. He argued that
the same would be happening in Ireland if the country had self-government.)
Over the course of at least a century potato crops had failed
many times before, and dozens of government commissions and
studies in the decades prior to the arrival of the fungus had
predicted disaster in rural Ireland, but nothing had been done
to forestall it. As the magnitude of the looming crisis began
to be apparent, the government did undertake programs to
alleviate it, but most of them were poorly conceived,
niggardly, and ineffectual.
The famine was not a happy time for Protestant landlords.
Gifford notes that "many tried to tide their peasants over the
famine and were ruined in the process" (35). But their
families bore as much responsibility as the British government
for the economic arrangements that produced "the worst event
of its kind recorded in European history at a time of peace"
(Gifford, 35).
