Great Famine (Ireland) - Reaction in Ireland

Reaction in Ireland

The Corporation of Dublin sent a memorial to the Queen, "praying her" to call Parliament together early (Parliament was at this time prorogued), and to recommend the requisition of some public money for public works, especially railways in Ireland. The Town Council of Belfast met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to Mitchel. "They demanded that, if Ireland was indeed an Integral part of the realm, the common exchequer of both islands should be used—not to give alms, but to provide employment on public works of general utility." It was Mitchel's opinion that "if Yorkshire and Lancashire had sustained a like calamity in England, there is no doubt such measures as these would have been taken, promptly and liberally."

A deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster, the Lord Mayor, Lord Cloncurry, and Daniel O'Connell, went to the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and offered suggestions, such as opening the ports to foreign corn for a time, stopping distillation from grain, or providing public works; that this was extremely urgent, as millions of people would shortly be without food. Lord Heytesbury told them they "were premature", and told them not to be alarmed, that learned men (Playfair and Lindley) had been sent from England to enquire into all those matters; and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts; and there was no "immediate pressure on the market". Of these reports from Lord Heytesbury, Peel in a letter to Sir James Graham was to say that he found the accounts "very alarming", though he reminded him that there was, according to Woodham-Smith "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".

On December 8, 1845, Daniel O'Connell, in the Repeal Association, proposed the following remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of "Tenant-Right" as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements.

O'Connell then pointed out the means used by the Belgian legislature during the same season: shutting their ports against the export of provisions, but opening them to imports. He suggested that if Ireland had a domestic Parliament the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament would provide for the people both food and employment, saying that a repeal of the Act of Union was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.

John Mitchel, one of the leading political writers of Young Ireland, as early as 1844, in The Nation raised the issue of the "Potato Disease" in Ireland noting how powerful an agent hunger had been in certain revolutions. On February 14, 1846, he put forward his views on "the wretched way in which the famine was being trifled with", and asked, had not the Government even yet any conception that there might be soon "millions of human beings in Ireland having nothing to eat."

On February 28, writing on the Coercion Bill which was then going through the House of Lords, he noted that this was the only kind of legislation that was sure to meet with no obstruction in the British House of Commons. His view was that however the government may differ about feeding the Irish people, "they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them." (As it happened, the bill was subsequently defeated, and Peel's government fell.)

In an article on "English Rule" on March 7, Mitchel wrote that the Irish People were "expecting famine day by day" and they attributed it collectively, not to "the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England." He continued in the same article to write that the people "believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of England's rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish." The people, Mitchel wrote, watched as their "food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth," all the while watching "heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England."

Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) in 1861. It established the widespread view that the treatment of the famine by the British was a deliberate murder of the Irish, and contained the famous phrase:

The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."

Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings, but this charge was dropped and he was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.

The Nation according to Charles Gavan Duffy, insisted that the one remedy was that which the rest of Europe had adopted, which even the parliaments of the Pale had adopted in periods of distress, which was to retain in the country the food raised by her people till the people were fed.

Ireland at this time was, according to the Act of Union of 1801, an integral part of the British imperial homeland, "the richest empire on the globe," and was "the most fertile portion of that empire," in addition; Ireland was sheltered by both "... Habeas Corpus and trial by jury ...". And yet Ireland's elected representatives seemed powerless to act on the country's behalf as Members of the British Parliament. Commenting on this at the time John Mitchel wrote: "That an island which is said to be an integral part of the richest empire on the globe ... should in five years lose two and a half millions of its people (more than one fourth) by hunger, and fever the consequence of hunger, and flight beyond sea to escape from hunger ..." The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. A more radical Young Ireland group seceded from the Repeal movement and attempted an armed rebellion in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. It was unsuccessful.