On the night of December 23rd, 1899, 65-year-old Hugh Dorian walked the streets of Derry looking for his wife, Catherine. He did not find her. Four days later, her body was taken out of the Graving Dock.
On the evening that she went missing, Catherine had been arrested for public drunkenness on Waterloo Place. Brought to the nearest barracks, she had been released when she sobered up to get somebody to fetch one of her daughters who had been arrested with her. And somehow on her way home she had entered the Foyle.
Hugh was described in a report on the inquest as a “respectable, hard-working man”. Perhaps he was. Certainly, he was a hard-drinking man who had squandered opportunities for advancement. Born in 1834 on a pitifully small holding in Fánaid, north Donegal, he was appointed a teacher in a new national school in 1851, but in 1872, facing dismissal for brawling in public houses, he had quit teaching at age 38 and moved into Derry where he worked as a clerk and a labourer.
Dorian died in poverty in the Bogside in 1914. He would have been forgotten but that, in 1890, he composed a lengthy account of the Famine’s transformation of his homeplace. In powerful prose, Dorian blamed Britain, in the long term and the short, for the calamity. The peasant, he wrote, “has his ancestors’ history open before him everyday he rises: it is exhibited in the large characters – the ocean, the mountain, and his own state of poverty – and if he reads anything he must read how it is that he is there and why”.
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As for the Famine itself, he remembered relief schemes, that required half-starved men to labour on roads to nowhere, as the point at which “government advisers dealt out the successful blow – and it would appear premeditated – the great blow for slowly taking away human life, getting rid of the population and nothing else”. It was, he wrote, “next to slow murder”.
But blaming Britain was less important to Dorian than detailing the experience of his community. He describes the physical effects of malnutrition and also the mental toll of hunger and disease: “men lived as if they dreaded each other”. He writes, in a non-judgmental manner, of people denying food to family members and then, at considerable length, of land-grabbing, which he deplores. The landlords are often condemned for their “oppression, cruelty and tyranny”, he opines, but “very often a man’s very neighbour is just as pitiless a tyrant as any man”. Reflecting on the outcome of the crisis, he is cold:
“Arising from death, emigration and dispersion to all parts, the population soon dwindled away. And indeed I hope it will not be any way uncharitable to say it, but with the multitude also disappeared many turbulent and indifferent persons and characters who were only a disgrace to the good, the honest and the well-doing, and if there was poverty, there was peace too.”
[ Unspoken realities: The Great Famine eroded moral values in IrelandOpens in new window ]
It is a remarkable comment, not least given the arc of his own life, and a reminder too that any comprehensive history of the Famine must concern itself with matters other than blame – and, indeed, matters beyond it.
Yet as Padraic X Scanlan insists in Rot, “blame matters”. No fewer than a million people died of hunger and disease in the Famine and another 1½ million emigrated. Those dearly departed millions, whether their fate was eternity or elsewhere, and those who suffered but survived, were subjects of the most powerful state in the world, then presiding over a vast empire. And their suffering, as Scanlan argues, “calls out for moral judgment”.
Rot is not concerned with individual culpability, however. Scanlan is not in the business of putting politicos or civil servants in the dock of history. The heartless Sir Charles Trevelyan, who thought Ireland might usefully shed a couple of million people, gets gentler treatment than the hapless RTÉ executives called before the Public Accounts Committee.
“No individual caused the Famine; no individual could have prevented it”, Scanlan writes. What matters are the structures and systems that made the crisis. His conclusion is that “Although the UK did not commit the crime of starvation in Ireland, it was not innocent”. The UK did not do it, he is arguing, but it can be said to have let it happen. Not unlike Dorian, he is suggesting that government policy was “next to slow murder”, but it was not murder, and if it “would appear premeditated”, appearances do deceive.
The rot that most concerns Scanlan is neither phytophthora infestans, the blight that ravaged Europe’s potatoes from 1845, nor the rotten policies that in Ireland were Westminster’s disastrous response to it. Rather, it is the rot before the rot – the socio-economic, political and ideological systems that, by the 1840s, had made the Irish poor vulnerable to disaster if any leg of the three-legged stool of their subsistence – the potato, the pig, and “peat” (turf) – were to give way.
Three of Scanlan’s six chapters concern that rot – a socioeconomic and political system shaped by conquest and colonialism and, fatally for the poor, by a conviction that austerity and the market would deliver “improvement”. The others concern the time of the rot, when the “principle of austerity” and “faith in markets and economic incentives” underpinned almost all efforts to mitigate the crisis. “The former was cruel”, he writes, “the latter deluded”.
Notwithstanding the Act of Union, which purported to amalgamate two “sister kingdoms”, Ireland was not governed as if it were as British as Finchley. And during the Famine “the legacies of conquest and colonialism collided with a deep imperial faith in markets, commerce and capitalism as the only remedies for social problems, even amid catastrophic ecological and economic collapse”.
It was that “collision” that produced the most rotten policies – the failure to close ports to food exports, with a view to bringing down prices and giving hope; the winding-up of soup kitchens when hunger and disease were still widespread; and the Quarter Acre Clause, which required people to surrender all but a quarter acre of ground to obtain relief without entering the workhouse.
The three-legged stool itself was “disconcertingly modern”, “an unintended consequence of the exploitation of Irish land and labour within a shrinking and accelerating world”.
The potato, of course, was an “introduced crop”. It had arrived from the New World in the late 1500s, but only started to become a staple from the mid-1700s, when Britain, industrialising and expanding its empire, needed more foodstuffs.
[ Great Famine and Irish independence struggle linked by geography and historyOpens in new window ]
It had a higher nutritional yield per acre than cereals and would grow where they could not. The poor could now live on less land and land of lesser quality. Cereals grown on better land could go to market, to be shipped away, with the tenant’s cow and the poor man’s pig, fattened on potato scraps, to feed Britain’s cities, soldiers and sailors.
The poor who survived on potatoes were derided as hidebound in tradition with a “primitive” mode of living, but Scanlan insists they were “heartbreakingly, almost quintessentially, modern”. And modern too was the blight that destroyed their world – an inadvertently introduced pathogen, carried across the Atlantic in steamships steered by the logic of global trading networks.
There is much that is familiar in Rot, but everywhere Scanlan looks at the familiar in new and interesting ways. In discussing the potato, he takes aim at the widely-quoted claim that a typical Irish labourer was consuming 14lb of potatoes a day: it is “so physiologically unlikely as to be impossible”. And while historians are prone to listing the benefits of a potato diet, he flags some negatives, including flatulence. Who knew?
There is much in Rot to debate, not least Scanlan’s resort to a conservative trope when discussing political violence and intimidation, acts the state dubbed “outrages”: “Many more of the luckless seeking conacre were beaten than landlords or tenants; many more cottages than mansions were burned”. If Captain Moonlight was only hurting his own people, one wonders why he was so popular.
Towards the end of Rot, Scanlan notes that eviction is a potent political issue in contemporary Ireland, and he references the furore in 2023 when the artist Spicebag included some gardaí in his reworking of Daniel McDonald’s The Eviction (1850).
He will probably regret that Rot went to press before John Cummins, Minister of State at the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, effectively advised working people to take a hint from the pre-Famine poor and convince their parents to give them plots in the garden on which to build cabins.
Subdivision once again? Never was Marx’s dictum more apposite: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.”
Breandán Mac Suibhne is a historian of society and culture in modern Ireland at the University of Galway. His The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2017) was awarded the inaugural Michel Déon Biennial Prize for Nonfiction
Further reading
Peter Gray’s The Irish Famine (1995) is the best short introduction to the horror that overwhelmed Ireland in the mid-1800s and no big book tells the story better than Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–49 (1962).
Revisionists, who disparaged “Mrs Woodham-Smith’s” international bestseller for “exaggeration” and “emotive” language, hit peak denial about the severity of the Famine in 1981 when UCD historian Mary Daly pulled a death toll of “perhaps half a million” out of methodological thin air.
Joel Mokyr, a Dutch-American economist with no skin in our political games, had already applied clearly explained methods to estimating the scale of the crisis and came up with a human deficit of 1.08–1.49 million. That range is central to his landmark Why Ireland Starved? A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 (1983) and other clear-headed economists, notably Cormac Ó Gráda, have, with minor adjustments, confirmed it.
Our history is not bereft of irony. Michael Davitt pegged the Famine death toll at 1 million and John Mitchel put it at 1.5 million. So the rebels were right, all along. You have to wonder what revisionism, with its pieties about “objectivity” and “debunking myth”, was really all about.
The interdisciplinary essays collected in Ó Gráda’s Black’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (2000) showcase the variety and sheer quality of his contributions to the study of the Famine: he has defined the field since the 1970s and continues to raise the bar.
Exploring the socio-economic, political and ideological systems that made the Irish poor vulnerable to disaster
