You couldn’t work under those temperatures today, and people died before the work started. And they went from feeding them on soup and so on to shutting the food depots, to confining the relief to be paid on task work on roads, some of which would be under four foot of snow. Famine relief, any kind of relief, had to have a repulsive element in it, as he called it. When the blight came first, Peel, the conservative prime minister, tried to alleviate it and he actually, sub rosa, smuggled in grain, on ships, and symbolically the very first act of the Whigs who supplanted them was to turn the ships round, and Trevelyan, secretary of the Treasury and became the architect of relief and had the ear of the cabinet, Charles Wood: he turned them round, and that was his attitude throughout. And there they were, on these tiny plots, living on potatoes, propagating, everything getting worse. The Act of Union had transferred the buzz and the government and the power to London and everyone of consequence had got out, the artist, the plumber, the politician, the poet, the publisher.
Let’s go further than this, how we explain this tragedy. There’s widespread agreement this was just an appalling tragedy, of course Tim Pat. The scale of this tragedy is best summed up by the fact there are fewer people living in Ireland today than before the famine. Whereas you get these awful famines we see on television in Africa and it’s probably something in the order of 250,000 that die, a quarter of a million, and it’s a terrible loss but it comes from a population of 19 million.
And you have to remember the impact on society was about nine million. But probably it’s something nearer nine million than eight when the Famine broke out, and it came down to somewhere nearer six when the Famine was over in’51, and the Hunger continued, so probably a far greater impact. And anyway census-taking in the deserts of Mayo and people lived in bog caves and so on, it was nearly impossible to map how many people lived there in the first place. Probably more, because modern scholarship points out to averted births and the families died and there was no one left to record the deaths.
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