What are some political aspects to the Irish potato Famine?

[brynie]

I have to write a MLA format paper on the Irish potato famine, for my Humanities class. And yes, there were politics involved.If you think that the famine was just potatoes rotting, please don't respond to this, I need serious answers. I'm having trouble separating political, social, and economical Aspects, they seem to all chain.

[Go AZ]

All the aspects that you talk about DO intertwine. You have Irish Catholic population with no rights, absentee landlords, families in abject poverty, eating only the one crop - potatoes, and inept rule from London - before and during the famine.
This is a lot to look at, but each site has a bit that may not be in others. Good luck.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory...index.html
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/history...famine.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_potato_famine
http://www.squidoo.com/IPFamine
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Irish_potato_famine
http://www.my-secret-northern-ireland.co...amine.html (1 of three pages)

[BILL]

Yes, brynie, it was entirely political. As John Mitchel said at the time, "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."

The fact that Ireland over-relied on the potato in 1845 had everything to do with British laws that gave Irish land to English landowners, and kept the native Irish poor, but the famine was to expose much uglier truths.

They fall, generally into two categories: the political expression of deeply racist attitudes toward Ireland, and what might be described as one of the most vivid expressions of the politics of laissez-faire capitalism in history.

Britain's rule over Ireland had been brutal, certainly, from Cromwell's massacres to the Penal Laws to the "Plantations" that pushed the Irish off their land. Indeed, Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser had asked "how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation", but in "enlightened" nineteenth century Britain, attitudes had not moderated. Philosopher Thomas Carlyle often referred to Ireland as a "human swinery", a "black howling Babel of superstitious savages". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford, complained that the Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good."

The political consequences of those attitudes were literally murderous. While the government of Sir Robert Peel did little, it did buy a quantity of American corn to sell in Ireland. It wasn't a good match -- malnutrition often arose whenever corn was introduced as a staple food, partly due to protein deficiency -- but it staved off starvation for a few. But Peel lost power, and the new Whig government was fervently laissez-faire. If the free market couldn't provide food, then people should die.

The new Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the man in charge of British relief during the Irish famine, was Charles Trevelyan.

Trevelyan shut down the food depots in Ireland that had been selling Peel's corn, and turned back another boatload of corn already headed for Ireland. He explained that he planned to prevent the Irish from becoming "habitually dependent" on the British government.

The death and disease wreaked by the famine had already shocked the world, but home-grown oats, grain, and cattle were shipped to England, on a regular schedule. "British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats" says one source, "as they passed before the starving eyes of peasants watching on shore."

Trevelyan wrote that "the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson" and saw in the Famine "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence, the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part."

The best estimates show that the British government spent seven million pounds for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, compared to the 20 million pounds compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s.

The extent of British mismanagement, and perhaps intent, during and long after the Famine can be found in population numbers. In 1840, Ireland's population stood at 8.5 million, with England and Wales at 15.9 million. Ireland's population continued to fall, for more than a century, not beginning a recovery until 1970. Today, Ireland stands at six million, and England and Wales, by contrast, at 52 million.