In the mid-19th century, British-occupied Ireland lost roughly one-third of its population during a years-long catastrophe known as “The Great Hunger” or, “The Irish Potato Famine.” In the years that followed, some have wondered if the tragedy wasn’t the result of a natural disaster, but the intentional efforts of the British government to annihilate Irish people and their culture. The idea that the British pulled off a secret genocide has taken root in the Irish identity– but is it true? Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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In early 1847, Irish illustrator James Mahoney is at work on a grim assignment. His country is in the throes of a devastating potato famine, and Mahoney is traveling through desperation and death to report on it for a London newspaper. Mahoney draws and writes about many ghastly scenes, but it's one of the less showy incidents that speaks the loudest about the British role in the catastrophe.
In Skull, a village on the Atlantic coast of Ireland, Mahoney and his team come upon a huge crowd of women in the street, at least 300. They're all there for the same reason, to buy cornmeal for their starving families. One woman tells Mahoney that she's been there since dawn. The cornmeal everyone is waiting for arrives in the local port with a military escort.
Without the protection, desperate locals might have tried to steal the food. Now, a government official is meeting out small portions at exorbitant prices. But even with these tiny rations, some of these women will return to their hungry families empty-handed.
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From 1845 to 1852, potatoes in Ireland suffered a series of blights or diseases that the country has yet to fully recover from to this day. Three million people either died or fled Ireland. And even more than 150 years later, historians are asking, how could this have happened? In order to really understand the potato famine, we have to understand the context in which it occurred.
In 1801, Great Britain and Ireland merge under an agreement called the Act of Union. Don't let the paperwork fool you into thinking this is a partnership. At this time, Ireland is a British colony exploited for its farmland. By the 1840s, exported Irish grain feeds about 2 million Brits a year, a crop output Britain could never hope to produce itself.
British landlords own virtually all of the productive Irish farmland. Many of them manage it remotely from England, leaving desperately poor native Irish laborers to work the land. In addition to working on their landlord's parcel, most of these Irish farmers also rent small plots, feeding their families with the crops they grow. With very few exceptions, they all grow one thing.
The Irish lumper potato. The Irish lumper has a lot to offer the peasant farmer. One, it provides a high yield, even on a small square footage. See, the land available to farmers is limited to begin with. And as Irish families grow and pass down land to younger generations, those rental plots get divided up and become smaller and smaller.
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