November 9th, 1846: The English know as little about the west of Ireland as of west Africa. This is the opinion of army commissariat officers serving in Irish relief.
For instance, senior British officials fail to grasp the place of the grain harvest in Irish life. Corn is not grown to eat but to pay the rent and, for the Irish peasant, failure to pay his rent means eviction.
"If the people are forced to consume their oats and other grain, where is the rent to come from?" a commissariat officer asks in Westport. It is a long way to Whitehall, where Charles Trevelyan writes: "I cannot believe there is no store of food in Roscommon from the oat harvest."
Commissary-general Routh told that he asks too much for Ireland. The food scarcity, he is reminded in a Treasury minute, extends over the whole western Europe and the UK.
Nothing ought to be done for the west of Ireland which might send prices still higher for people "who, unlike the inhabitants of the west coast of Ireland, have to depend on their own exertions".
The London Times, in an editorial entitled "Sermon for Ireland", preaches that this year "the Irishman is destitute, so is the Scotchman and so is the Englishman ... It appears to us to be of the very first importance to all classes of Irish society to impress on them that there is nothing so peculiar, so exceptional, in the condition which they look on as the pit of utter despair.. Why is that so terrible in Ireland which in England does not create perplexity and hardly moves compassion?"
Indeed, Well might Lord Monteagle, the humane Limerick landowner, doubt "if the magnitude of the existing calamity and its dangers are appreciated in Downing Street".
Trevelyan - who has moved into lodgings to devote more time to scrutinising the deluge of applications for public works from Ireland - claims that "government establishments are strained to the utmost to alleviate this great calamity. My purchases are carried to the utmost point short of transferring the famine from Ireland to England."
At least the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury admits there is a famine in Ireland and not in Britain.
He then lectures Lord Monteagle on political economy: It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food or to increase the productive powers of the land."
Trevelyan sees a bright light shining through the dark cloud which at present hangs over Ireland. "The morbid habits are gradually giving way to a more healthy action. The deep and inveterate root of social evil remains, and I hope I am not guilty of irreverence in thinking that, this being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise providence ..."
He sees the blight as a heaven-sent opportunity to convert the land from a potato economy to grain cultivation.