If the Famine had not happened in Ireland in the 1840s what do you think the country would be like?

AMKC

What do you think the Country would be like today?

Would the population be double what it is now?

Would going to the shops or buying a new or second hand vehicle be cheaper?

Would we be more like Belgium or the UK?

Would we be one Country or still divided as it is today?

Would the 1916 Easter rising and war of Independence being much different with a bigger opposing force and our Civil war have been much bloodied?

ancapailldorcha

Impossible to tell. What is undeniably true was that the country's population growth was permanently retarded by the famine. It was 8.5 million before the blight hit. A million died and another million emigrated, triggering a wave of emigration that would endure for several decades.

dxhound2005

There would be no Fields of Athenry.

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486481#Comment_120486481

Those maps paint such a stark picture. Whatever about pictures being worth a 1000 words, those maps in sequence? Devastation and exodus.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486811#Comment_120486811

I f*cking love maps.

It's possible that an Ireland that never experienced the famine would still be part of the UK. We've no idea how things might have panned out culturally or economically.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486481#Comment_120486481

The population of the island of Ireland is now just over 7 million. I'd quite like to see 2023 maps included in the above as they'd be quite a way on from 2002 where the population was 5.5 million.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486847#Comment_120486847

Will you accept 2022?

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486867#Comment_120486867

That's one funky looking map!

Shame we cant see it using the same scale as those blue maps, 2022 shouldn't look too far off the 1841 map now. We're 82% of the way back to pre famine numbers. So certainly getting there.

It's interesting to wonder how we'd be without the famine though. We were almost half the UK population which sat at 18 million.

They are currently 67 million now. If we were half that we'd be a whopping 33.5 million. Hard to imagine!

whisky_galore

The then population, to use that overused word, was unsustainable.

Land subdivision couldn't go on forever, people couldn't go on living from hand to mouth in mud hovels, something would have had to give sometime. There may have been a slow-burn famine when food shortages rather than an overall crop failure began to bite. Relief works and assisted emigration like the Highland Clearances happening when landlords could make more out of cattle or sheep rather than tenants.

I don't see the pre Famine population as any sort of target we need to aspire to now.

Bob the Seducer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487137#Comment_120487137

To claim that the pre famine population of Ireland was unsustainable is something of a fallacy, what was unsustainable was the was of life imposed on the Irish by the landlord system. The majority of tenant farms were small - mostly under 15 acres, with a significant number under 5 acres, hence the over reliance on the potato crop for food (as it was the one thing you could grow enough of on a small plot of land). Other lands were being used to grow cash crops of grain for export (crops that required significant effort to turn into usable food).

With our current population, we're frequently at or near the top of the global Food Security Index and a figure often quoted is that we produce enough food to feed 40-45 million. There are plenty of countries with far higher population density than ours that seem to be managing just fine.

cj maxx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058292694/if-the-famine-had-not-happened-in-ireland-in-the-1840s-what-do-you-think-the-country-would-be-like

This is a bug bear of mine . There never was a famine on Ireland . A famine is a shortage of food . There was more than enough food for the population of around 8 million . In fact exports of food to England increased in the 1840’ s as the blight took hold as recorded in Dublin port records . Of course to call them exports is a bit disingenuous . Food such as grain , beef , lamb and pork and horses and yes potatoes were and taken under under British army escort to Dublin port and loaded onto ships to Liverpool and other English ports . The blight also hit the Scottish highlands and western Isles but England provided much more relief to the Albanach as by and large they were more subjugated. . When Turkey offered money for relief it caused a diplomatic row between England and them as I think they may have offered up to 10 million pounds of relief compared to Englands 1 million. ( numbers might not be accurate but the point remains the same ) . The so called Great Hunger was a policy of Genocide by the English government rather than just a natural calamity . It was the inspiration for Hitlers living room policy where he targeted the vast Polish grain supply and exported it back to Germany. The East India company , a branch of the fascist Empire caused a ‘famine’ in India killing around 165 million people according to the book ‘ Inglorious Empire.

So to my mind , if that hadn’t of happened we would be , and happy to be , a ‘country’ of the uk waving union jacks for Charlies coronation.

A NYT article for subscribers

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/24/opinion/l-irish-potato-famine-didn-t-just-happen-487995.html#:~:text=The%20%22famine%22%20ended%20in%201849,2.5%20million%2C%20to%206.5%20million.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487458#Comment_120487458

Using the famine as a way to spout drivel like this is just disingenuous and highly disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands who died.

cj maxx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487478#Comment_120487478

How exactly ? It’s not drivel or a anti-English rant . It’s history , backed up by historical documents. Just because you’re ignorant of it doesn’t make it not happen . I’d suggest before you start calling someone a bull-shitter you actually KNOW what you’re talking about.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487531#Comment_120487531

You posted Anglophobic drivel without a single source and finished with a linkdump.

cj maxx

As I said in my PM , find your own resources. The Custom House is a good starting point

RoTelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058292694/if-the-famine-had-not-happened-in-ireland-in-the-1840s-what-do-you-think-the-country-would-be-like

You'd have also had to industrialize the country. The famine is only the tipping point of de-population. There are other factors to consider.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487674#Comment_120487674

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487674#Comment_120487674

In other words, research your argument for you. No thanks.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487458#Comment_120487458

A genocide is 'the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.'

The UK's inadequate response to the potato blight was not a 'deliberate killing of'. If anything it was just severe neglect and indifference. Those two things are not the same.

ancapailldorcha

I think we can be confident that Irish soft power would be a shadow of what it is without the Irish disapora advocating for us abroad.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487706#Comment_120487706

That's actually a really interesting angle I never considered, has to make you then wonder what the landscape in the US would look like without that Irish diaspora.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487688#Comment_120487688

This 'not a famine' stuff was cooked up in the US and only lately has its adherents here, usually the sort of people who rely on memes for info and don't crack open a book too often.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487688#Comment_120487688

The British Empire was the largest and most powerful empire that has ever existed. If they wanted to exterminate the natives of a small island in the eastern Atlantic, nobody would have stopped them. The Irish had no friends after the defeat of Napoleonic France. It's why the genocide theory falls apart IMO.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487715#Comment_120487715

Indeed. It opens up a whole lot of interesting questions. Would there even be an independent Irish republic I wonder?

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487355#Comment_120487355

If anything the world needs less humans, not more.

Oh yeah funny how we can't house and look after the people we have already, must be the Brits fault.

cj maxx

Sending your army to provide armed protection for food exports to your own country from one facing starvation , is a deliberate act , at any time. To try and infer that that was the way things were done back then is rubbish. As I’ve said , the paperwork is there . It’s not something I’ve just invented . But to get back to the original post , if there wasn’t the great hunger, we’d be a happy British country of the uk

Furze99

The various famines and it wasn't just one event had a profound effect on land ownership and inheritance. One of the drivers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries seems to have been the policy of absorbing the growth within the existing land management practices. So a type of rundale was common where strips of land were allocated from year to year, you had in farms and out farms - mountain lands for booleying during summer months. But this had it's limits and couldn't indefinitely absorb expansion of population. As the 19th century wore on and with the various land acts, this changed towards the eldest son being passed on land and the rest could feck off. Daughters were for marrying off and if possible to lads (of any age) with land.

Emigration was always going to feature. I know from looking at my own family history that many were emigrating in the early 1800s, well before the 'famine' periods.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486481#Comment_120486481

Jeysus Tipperary took some battering. You always hear about the Connacht counties and Clare but there are some surprisingly high populations like Tipp and Tyrone.

Packrat

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487718#Comment_120487718

Whilst I agree with what you're trying to get across ie: some people try to make the misery worse for their own ends, there are ships manifests freely available online to indicate the level of food export right throughout the period, and the quantities are truly staggering.

No serious historian purports to it having been a genocide, more of a happy coincidence to some - and again there is plenty documented evidence of this.

Certainly, Some Irish people and classes benefitted from the misery and deaths of others. As did some English.

Like almost everything else the truth lies in the grey areas.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487706#Comment_120487706

We would have a little bit more hard power though with a Dutch or Belgian size population.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487761#Comment_120487761

Even my native Donegal took a serious battering...

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487718#Comment_120487718

Not true.

John Mitchel, who lived through the Famine in Co. Down, was the first person to say it.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487772#Comment_120487772

A fair point but without allies and given our geographical position, we'd still be easy prey for the Brits. I can envision something like a Habsburg monarch style solution involving limited autonomy via Home Rule as a solution.

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487686#Comment_120487686

While I dont ascribe to the it was a genocide view, the situation was certainly not helped and made significantly worse by British policies. Look at what they did in India. There is nothing Anglophobe about correctly denouncing the atrocities carried out by them.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487791#Comment_120487791

I would say independence still happens it's just as you say we wouldn't have a US lobby or others.

Would most likely be better at sport which would be nice.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487804#Comment_120487804

I never denied that the British response (and lack thereof at the onset of the crisis) exacerbated the situation. There's a huge gap between that and some imported genocide narrative from the US. I read history so I know full well what the Brits did in India. Bengal had a famine during Churchill's time with casualties in the millions.

Where the Anglophobia comes in is the cynical exploitation of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to take shots at another country.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120486847#Comment_120486847

Is that correct ?

The 7m is the island where as I thought 4.7m in 2002 was just the republic. Were things that bad when I was young that it's doubled in my adult life.

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487821#Comment_120487821

Ok.. look it is a fact that huge amount of food was exported from Ireland at the time, it is a fact that Queen Victoria demanded the Ottoman downgrade their donation from 10k to 1k so her 2 k seemed more substantial. That is enough sh1thousery from our former colonialist masters to warrant anger being directed their direction for the effects of the famine. There is also the fact that every genocide has some people that either down play it or outright deny it happened. So I wouldnt ascribe to the view it is cynical exploitation.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487856#Comment_120487856

Do you have a source for that?

AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487727#Comment_120487727

The British Empire was the largest and most powerful empire that has ever existed. If they wanted to exterminate the natives of a small island in the eastern Atlantic, nobody would have stopped them.

Fixed your post for you.

o1s1n

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487755#Comment_120487755

Sending your army to provide armed protection for food exports is not a deliberate act to murder people or wipe out a nation. It's a deliberate act to export food.

Where is your paperwork to prove it's a deliberate act of genocide?

As I said, the British response was one of neglect. Yes they exported food. Why? Because it would have being a lucrative thing to do. Not because they were deliberately trying to wipe Irish people out.

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487821#Comment_120487821

It's not a narrative imported from the US.

John Mitchel, Archbishop MacHale, and other native Irish nationalist/Republicans who lived through the Famine are the origin of the genocide theory.

dxhound2005

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058292694/if-the-famine-had-not-happened-in-ireland-in-the-1840s-what-do-you-think-the-country-would-be-like

I think the discussion has not addressed your questions, apart from some references to population. I would be particularly interested to see the Belgian angle get some attention. I don't actually know the answer myself.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487875#Comment_120487875

Maybe like Halloween it went out and came back.

I certainly hadn't heard that narrative much (I didn't say never) until recently.

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487862#Comment_120487862

Get Christine Kinealys "Death Dealing Famine"

RobbingBandit

Probably would have mounted a better fight in any uprisings, a larger proportion of Irishmen would have died fighting in WWI.

The potato blight was a larger part of the famine but given the land wars population density and the general industrial revolutions taking place at the time Galway Cork Waterford Dublin Limerick and Belfast and Derry would have seen mass exoduses towards them leaving very similar fates to what we have now in Dublin high rents ,illnesses such as Cholera TB and others wiping out large amounts of poorer people forced into slums.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487899#Comment_120487899

Nothing then.

Sudden Valley

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487871#Comment_120487871

If someone is starving on the street and you take food away from them and then they die, that is a bit more than neglect. Wasnt that the whole issue with Somalia when the UN was providing food and the warlord scum were stealing it and letting their own people starve?

Im not automatically believing the story that Ireland was exporting food but I imagine that the landowners in England that were exporting and owned that food may not have been that sympathetic to the starving in Ireland.

Dslatt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487907#Comment_120487907

It is probably the most thorough collection of data regarding the imports and exports of the country at the time.

Here knock yourself out

History Ireland

dxhound2005

We are still suffering from inter-generational trauma, and survivor guilt. Perhaps a better class of internet warrior would have emerged from the population mixture, if the millions of deaths had been avoided.

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487782#Comment_120487782

It still doesn't follow that he was correct in saying it.

Furze99

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487875#Comment_120487875

MacHale was a prominent bigoted hypocrite, who cared more about expanding the influence of the Catholic church and building grandiose churches than he did of the ordinary welfare of people. An empire builder he was. Take Achill Island - good example. MacHale couldn't give a toss about the people there starving or otherwise until the Prods moved in, started a mission and a school to help educate with new farm practices. Then MacHale takes notice when he sees his Catholic souls being stolen and set up rival Catholic schools and a religious war.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120487936#Comment_120487936

Another linkdump. It doesn't even mention the Ottomans. I'm dismissing this as debunked at this point.