Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In Ireland before and after the famine, Cormac O'Grada points out, "Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and eIn History Ireland magazine (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed.
The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.
[79]
The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.
[80]xporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with."
[78]
Emigrants Leave Ireland, engraving by
Henry Doyle (1827–1893), from
Mary Frances Cusack's Illustrated History of Ireland, 1868.
While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. Nor was it even the era when mass emigration from Ireland commenced. That can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland over a period of 50 years to settle in the
New World. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, "at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated".
[101] However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants leaving from western Ireland than any other part.
A graph of the populations of Ireland [left axis] and Europe [right axis] indexed against date;
According to
Peter Gray, in his book
The Irish Famine, the government spent £7,000,000 for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one percent of the British
gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million pounds compensation given to
West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s."
[109]
Several writers single out the decision of the government to permit the continued export of food from Ireland as suggestive of the policy-makers' attitudes.
Leon Uris suggested that "there was ample food within Ireland", while all the Irish-bred cattle were being shipped off to England.
[147] The following exchange appeared in Act IV of
George Bernard Shaw's play
Man and Superman:
MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about. My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
VIOLET. The Famine?
MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in my mother's arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the best of it. I want no middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector. That's straightforward isn't it, like yourself?
Dennis Clark, an
Irish-American historian and critic of empire, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..."
[The Course of Empire: The Savage State by Thomas Cole (1836)
