famine question

Kind of like a recession, only much worse. In a recession, some people are fine in the first year - their job is safe, they still get good pay and perks. Only the people at the bottom fall off: the casual workers, the subcontractors, the people working in the industry hardest hit. A core of people with secure jobs are safe, and often don't even realise what's happening to others. But as it goes on and things tighten up, it hits more and more people.

Same thing with a famine. In Ireland, in 1840 there was a massive crop failure as the potato blight spread rapidly across the country. The poorest - and the poorest in Ireland were desperately poor - were immediately left without any food at all, as they were living only on potatoes with a little 'kitchen' or flavouring from the odd bit of cabbage or fish. The blight had hit potatoes everywhere, so they couldn't buy replacement potatoes, and other food became much dearer as demand rose and the prices hoiked up.

Those who were a bit better off and had some savings did relatively ok, and any decent landlords tried to help by lowering rent and (since giving people money for nothing was considered immoral) providing building work. Unfortunately, many were already so weak from hunger that this work killed them.

It would be better the next year - or so people thought. But the blight returned again, and returned each year until 1850; five years of failure of the main food, five years of rising prices, falling work.

Weakened people get diseases - you've seen reports of cholera in Haiti's camps, still remaining years after the earthquake? The same in Ireland: cholera and typhoid (spread by sewage in water), typhus (spread by lice), virulent types of smallpox and other diseases raged through the country to such an extent that not only humans died but even animals lay unburied in the fields, people too weak from hunger to bury the dead.

In Galway, the starving fishermen of the Claddagh had their boats confiscated and were jailed if they illegally fished with nets without paying a hefty net licence. Local Quakers bailed them out, paid their net licences and redeemed their boats to get them back fishing, but the men were so weak from hunger that it was difficult for them to face the Atlantic waves. Middle-class propaganda, especially in England, also mocked people for starving when they lived by the richest herring fishing grounds in the world. A Quaker study found that an unusual change in the shoaling pattern of herring off the west coast meant the herring had gone missing, changing their feeding grounds. There was much less fish to find.

The result of this and worse was that taxes rose and rose: people with nice houses and good jobs had to tighten their belts as year after year the poor rates - local taxes supporting the workhouses - rose inexorably. And the middle classes were not immune to the epidemics: my own great-great-grandfather, a 40-year-old rector in a well-off district, died on Christmas Eve 1850; I always thought he'd died of cholera, which was endemic in his midland district at the time, but recently discovered that it was smallpox that killed him, leaving a widow and nine children.

Decent people got together to make huge vats of soup to feed the starving. Landlords who wanted to clear the land of unprofitable tenants and replace them with cattle paid for tickets to send starving families of small farmers en masse to Canada and America.

People were very religious then, and many used the soup kitchens to try to win converts, asking hungry people to say a prayer and listen to Bible readings and even to convert, to change their religion, before they would be fed (a practice much denounced in Protestants then, which I saw reported in Catholics last week by homeless people who said they wouldn't be given a bed in a hostel without praying and agreeing that they were Catholics). 'Taking the Soup' became a synonym for losing your religious principles.

Even before the Famine, conditions were dire; an 1813 Kildare pamphlet aimed at landlords has one landlord saying to another, "I have, with disgust. I would scarcely lodge my hogs in such a manner, but I suppose they imagine that dirt keeps them warm."

His friend replies, "How pallid are the countenances, and how many are bending under premature old age, of those, who, from their years, we should expect to be in the ruddy prime of life! How many more orphans do we meet here than in England. This is a remarkable circumstance, partly, I know, attributable to the rebellion, and partly to the use of ardent spirits, but often occasioned by fevers, a disorder comparatively unknown in an English village. But who can wonder at this who sees the poor heap of rubbish called a bed, on the damp ground, from whence the heat of the body exhales that unwholesome humidity which tortures the frame with rheumatism, and united with the effects of poor living and whiskey, so often excites that dreadful disorder, a putrid fever."

(You can download the whole book here: http://heatseekers.blogspot.ie/2012/12/the-landlords-friend-free-ebook.html) Here's a piece about a few contemporary books http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/smithfra.htm - you'll find some of these on archive.org

I hope this long palaver is some help to you in understanding how starvation and its effects can redound from year to year. And from generation to generation; the village of Skibbereen was wiped out in the Famine, and "Remember Skibbereen" was a war cry for generations after.

If you want to know more, Cathal Poirtéir wrote several books, with a great deal of contemporary quotation, in the 250th years' anniversary of the Famine.