Oh God that bread should be so dear

Oh God that bread should be so dear

Having more time to enjoy, if that is the right word, a movie during the current lockdown, I watched again the excellent ‘Black 47’ a film about a returning soldier seeking revenge on those who wronged his family. Set against the backdrop of the great hunger in Ireland in the year 1847 it is a brooding and at times harrowing film. The effects An Gota Mor had on Ireland reverberate to this day. It is only European country with a smaller population now than in 1841. In that year 8.2 million people lived on the island of Ireland. Today the figure is around 6.6 million. It also greatly affected the national consciousness of the Irish themselves.

At the height of the Brexit debate it was reported that Conservative MP Priti Patel had suggested that negotiations with Ireland over the backstop could see Britain use possible food shortages in Ireland as leverage to get a good deal for the UK. The insensitivity and historical illiteracy in her remarks caused a huge row at the time as commentators on both sides of the Irish Sea reminded her of Britain’s callous policies at the time of the great hunger in Ireland which contributed to the disaster which engulfed the country in the mid nineteenth century. Labour MP and descendent of Irish immigrants Jim McMahon asked the Prime Minister…

"In 1997, the British prime minister issued an apology to the people of Ireland for their historic role in the great famine. A famine that saw one million people die and a million people displaced from their homeland. That sent out a powerful and important message. Will the Prime Minister condemn any notion - or suggestion - that food shortages in Ireland will be used to strengthen Britain's hand during the Brexit negotiations?,"

The crassness of Patel’s remarks is all the more marked given that her grandparents came from Gujarat in India, a land which also suffered famine due to British mismanagement. She isn’t the first British politician to show a degree of ignorance about the turbulent history of British-Irish relations. Indeed the man Parliament gave the task of overseeing relief works at the height of the great hunger, Charles Trevelyan,  said that famine was an…

“effective mechanism for reducing surplus population and was the judgement of God The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people”

The tragedy which befell Ireland in the years after 1845 was the culmination of long years of mismanagement and the treatment of Ireland as a colony to be exploited and not in fact a part of the UK which it was following the 1800 Act of Union. In 1846 around 90% of the potato crop failed due to the blight but there was surplus of oats and other crops and had these been distributed to the people rather than exported then mass starvation would not have occurred. Would the British government have allowed such a catastrophe to occur in Yorkshire or the Home Counties?

An archaeological dig at the site of Kilkenny Workhouse found the remains of almost a thousand victims of the great hunger. Modern scientific techniques demonstrated that they suffered from the effects of malnutrition and the diseases which come from it. The site at Kilkenny is sadly one of hundreds of such sites dotted across Ireland. One of the largest is of course to be found in Abbeystrewry graveyard in Skibbereen, County Cork. There the remains of 9000 victims of the great hunger were buried in a mass grave without coffin or shroud. Today there are poignant and fitting memorial stones but little can assuage the trauma An Gorta Mor caused there and indeed to the whole of the country. It led many to conclude that Ireland would be best served controlling its own destiny rather than relying on colonial masters who seemed only interested in what they could wring from an already impoverished land.

The Highlands of Scotland suffered to in the years of potato blight but to a far less extent than Ireland where a quarter of the population relied on the potato as their basic sustenance. There was great hardship in the Highlands but immigration, forced and voluntary, to places such as Canada or the growing industrial cities was an option for many. The Scottish crofters were not as deeply impoverished or disenfranchised as their Irish counterparts. There were even serious disturbances as food prices soared and the military became involved. As a bitter winter gripped the land, the Highlanders would have known of the calamitous famine ravaging in Ireland and did not want a repeat in Scotland. Grain carts were seized by rioters, ships boarded, harbours blockaded and a jail forced open before the military intervened. The army opened fired on one set of rioters and savage jail sentences were imposed on others however the people gained key concessions chiefly among them was cheaper food. Our old friend Charles Trevelyan said in a letter about the hardship in the Highlands of Scotland, ‘the people cannot under any circumstances be allowed to starve’ and the government forced Landlord’s to help their tenants, a far cry from the attitude in Ireland.

Trevelyan’s attitude towards Scotland was in marked contrast to his actions in Ireland. Scotland did suffer, grievously in places but the poor of Ireland were sacrificed on the altar of free market dogmatism and up to a million perished. Over a million others found escape on famine ships across the Atlantic or cattle boats to England or Scotland. There they faced an uncertain future in the harsh crucible of the industrial revolution.

In the darkest days of the great hunger there were those who tried help. The Choctaw Native American tribe who had themselves known hunger and hardship on their ‘trail of tears’ raised $170 for famine relief in Ireland. ($5000 in today’s terms) It was an incredible gesture from people living 4000 miles away who were themselves dispossessed. In 2015 a sculpture commemorating this event was unveiled in Midleton, County Cork. It is called ‘Kindred Spirits’ and shows huge steel feathers in the shape of a food bowl. A delegation of twenty Choctaw people attended the unveiling and received the heartfelt thanks of the Irish nation.

In the sad cemetery at Skibbereen there are various plaques commemorating An Gorta Mor. Perhaps the most poignant contains the following words…

‘Oh God! That bread should be so dear and human  flesh so cheap…’