Really, I’m seriously not sure:
And the Irish potato crop, along with milk, was the main source of sustenance for most of the poorest people in Ireland, of whom there were 8 million at that time, with the Irish population having never recovered since they died, as a large number of people did as a consequence.
There was absolutely no reason for that. There was sufficient wheat in Ireland to feed everyone. But the British government in London would not allow that wheat to be used for the purposes of relieving the famine that was arising amongst those who were dependent upon potatoes, meaning that what actually happened in Ireland was not a famine at all. It was a starvation or a genocide.
Really? The minimalist, even minarchist, government of the time actually prevented folk from feeding the starving with locally available food?
You sure about that Spud?
And we get even more food knowledge here:
We know, for example, that one substance, which I admit is not core to wellbeing in terms of food, but which is incredibly commonly used, which is bananas, is intensely vulnerable to the risk of disease at present because of all the types of banana in the world that exists – and there are lots – we literally only consume one. And because we have so intensively cultivated it, it is now heavily vulnerable to disease.
No, westerners, mass market stuff, just the one, the Cavendish. Which is a clone which is why it is vulnerable. Out there in the boonies where the banana is a staple food they do not eat just Cavendish. But, you know.
Chickens are also heavily vulnerable disease, precisely because we have overbred them. And also cattle are similarly vulnerable to disease, as we saw not long ago.
All of this raises the question about the vulnerability that has been created to world food supply as a consequence of the industrial dependence upon monoculture to feed us via ultra-processed food. Nobody seems to be asking this question. What happens if any of these fail?
Sigh. The avian bird flu thing comes from wild birds. And outside raised chooks – floating around the farmyard stuff – are *more* prone to it.
1822, local MP asked for salt taxes to be quashed
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1822/jun/28/salt-duties
Remote parts of Ireland would have had herring and potato rather than just potato.
Those Corn Laws have a lot to answer for.
It’s taught in irish schools and is an accepted truth by most of the usual suspects here
sigh
The British govt did not intervene, until too late, of course. That was the whole problem. Irish farmers were happily exporting wheat . A more interventionist state like France or Prussia might have ordered the wheat to be sold at a loss to the peasants.
Famines were pretty common in Ireland. It was seen as just another one. This was before the days of USAid or Oxfam. People forget that.
ps It was a running gag that Irish were depicted in cartoons carrying a small pail of buttermilk.
As a former bureaucrat, a total fuckup seems much more plausible to me than a conspiracy to starve.
But perhaps you Brits were much more efficient in the 19th century???
If the authorities weren’t so keen on slaughtering all chickens at the hint of an outbreak, the survivors would be great to bread resistant stock from.
Tim’s right. There’s a vast over estimation of the powers of historic governments. Any wheat grown in Ireland would have been private property. It’s owners wouldn’t have just meekly accepted its seizure. It’s the same with the slave trade & slavery. Apart from the very brief government involvement with the largely unsuccessful South Sea Company it was done a long way away by private individuals. Even if it wanted to, government didn’t have the power or reach to enforce any policies.
I’ve read there was an attempt to alleviate the famine with maize. But it went unused because the Irish didn’t know how to prepare it for cooking. It requires soaking in lye or limewater to make it digestible.
” It requires soaking in lye or limewater to make it digestible.”
Not wholly. For the long term, yes, in order to liberate the niacin – the absence of which gives you pellagra. But short to medium term, days to months, it’ll keep you going without lye. Sweetcorn nourishes after all.
“…with the Irish population having never recovered since they died,…”
I think he’s right there! And M sure he checked it with his wife, the medic.
What Tim said. The MesoAmerican Indians, who are responsible for creating corn in the first place, had a method of treating the dried corn in lye called “nixtamalization”. The corn is perfectly usable without it, but the process releases nutrients that otherwise are not available.
When the eating of dried corn went to Italy (think polenta) the nixtamalization process didn’t go with it. Hence the very high rates of pellgra among the Italian poor.
Also worth looking at population growth figures for the period before the famine & comparing Ireland’s with England’s. Ireland’s has a very steep rise. England had exactly the same opportunity after the introduction of the potato. But one might surmise they didn’t have the stupidity to over-breed in reliance on a mono-culture food crop. Difference between Catholics & Protestants?
Also, southern US. Thus the line in the Tom Lehrer song about pellagra….
There is that. There was also inheirtance law. Prods had primgeniture. Papists were forced to continue with – as in Iberia now – equal division among all children. Therefore farms got ever smaller each generation.
The English insisted the Papists followed that law – got rid of any remaining Papist Lords or even yeomanry over the generations.
Conveniently: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/13/christian-love-is-the-eternal-cure-for-hatred/
Christian love is the eternal cure for hatred
The essence of the Palm Sunday message remains the same today as it was 2,000 years ago – Jesus’s humility can vanquish all
More like the cause of a thousand years of religious wars. And there’s Spud trying to rekindle the embers of another one.
The OP is suggesting that we are all in danger of starvation because certain individual foodstuffs are lacking in genetic diversity and hence prone to being wiped out. This is a ridiculous assertion due to the modern diet being extremely varied. If one individual foodstuff becomes unavailable we can just eat something else. Where the fact that some food is heavily processed fits into this argument is anyone’s guess.
Sweetcorn nourishes after all.
Sweetcorn’s a different plant.
Sweetcorn’s a different plant.
But it’s still *a* maize. It’s a maize that had been bred for uniformity of colour, high sugar content, and large multiple cobs.
Sorta and not so much. More a cultivar than anything else. In your local lingo, maiz and maiz tierno.
If you’d ever tried eating the other sort as “sweetcorn”you’d understand the difference. I used to have unlimited free access to it from the field opposite my French place. I bought sweetcorn from the supermarket.
I’ve heard it conjecture that a tattie famine is what you get when you don’t have an enclosures( England) or a clearances ( Highland scotland).
Compounded by generations subdividing marginal farms / crofts, food transport and Norman landlords of course
One of the most successful instances of gaslighting is the collective Oirish blaming the eeevil English for the potato blight.
Conviently ignoring that the (Norman French) Irish landowners/ farmers were the ones doing it.
Said landowners still there of course & still blaming the English natch.
Some changed their names.
Others – anyone think De Valera is a native oirish name.
Papists were forced to continue with – as in Iberia now – equal division among all children.
Aren’t you getting that one the wrong way round, Tim? I know, from here, if you tried to enforce primogenitor on the dagos you’d one helluva squabble with the family members being disinherited. Bad enough without it.
BiS – You are correct, Christianity is not a religion of peace, it’s an Army of God.
Sell your cloak and buy a sword.
Chickens are also heavily vulnerable disease, precisely because we have overbred them
He’s never heard of Marek’s disease, the the disastrous vaccinations which elevated it from a disease which killed a few chickens to a disease which kills pretty much all chickens.
>”with the Irish population having never recovered since they died, as a large number of people did as a consequence”
Was he drunk when he wrote this?
Possibly on poteen, Ag
”with the Irish population having never recovered since they died, as a large number of people did as a consequence”
Are they all still voting for the Irish equivalent of the Democrats?
(Trick question. Every Irish party is the equivalent of the Democrats. That’s why Conor McGregor, the personification of “we’ve tried everything else and they all suck”, simply has to be stopped).
Interested @ 12.30, and those Rolls Royce brains that run our world that thought that ‘vaccinating’ the peeps against a ‘virus’ in the middle of an outbreak was a good idea.
Culling every bird is dumb – let those that survive the infection breed and you get something unherd (sic) of – herd immunity…….
I wonder why so many of those who got ‘vaxxed’ when Boris told them to are still getting ‘covid’……………
“a tattie famine is what you get when you don’t have an enclosures( England) or a clearances
( Highland Scotland).”
Actually the Highlands did get a tattie famine but it was easier to get food to the people because they mostly lived near the coast. Many of course just moved to the cities. (There may also have been wisdom among the Highland tenants in not forever threatening to cut the throats of the landlord and his wife and bairns. The endless Irish threats in that vein (or should I say artery) was hardly going to endear them to their landlords.)
The idea that you pass wheat (grown in the east of Ireland) to the starving wretches (living in the west of Ireland) would have been no easy matter – no railways and, as far as I know, no canals. There were also oddities, such as large numbers of the Irish being disinclined to eat fish (how did they survive on Fridays?) And such as when maize/corn was imported and distributed many of the poor refused to eat it because it was unfamiliar. What a fucking shambles.
P.S. the notion that the English enclosures depopulated the countryside is mere agitprop. Here’s a simple question: in Cambridge about 1800 there were two large tracts of land where farming was done “in common”. I’ve seen the figures for one, the “West Field”. The population of the city is given as 9,000: how many of them were minor “commoners” in the sense of having no arable rights but only grazing rights and rights to mow hay? Have a guess.
Next guess what happened to them when the West Field was enclosed.
The Shetland museum has a piece on how the blight hit their islands and the population today is still about 1/4 below the peak in the early 1840s.
No starvation, but it might have been easier to lay your hands on whale blubber or herring at the time, or emigrate.
@Dearieme: I’m going to guess 7 heads of families had common rights for West Field. And some ganged up to arson the landowner when it was enclosed. Fascinating question though.
@Bongo: seven is about the right order of magnitude – there were 20 people who had rights only to grazing/hay. They were offered a choice: the other commoners would pay to hedge a pasture entirely for grazing in common or instead those twenty could accept allotments of freehold land in compensation. They voted 19:1 in favour of freehold land as long as it could be distributed to abut land they already owned or tenanted. The surveyors showed that it could be done and so it was. (The one who voted against was associated with the ruling gang in the town council so voted on political not economic grounds).
The paper I read implied, but did not state, that they kept their rights to hay – which makes sense since if they wanted to continue with cattle they’d need hay. And if not they could simply sell it. In their shoes I might have moved to pigs, or an orchard and chickens, or growing vegetables, or whatever – the beauty of freehold land, eh?
Long term their families will have done well from the decision as the city expanded so that they must have sold their new land profitably.
(The numbers are from memory and therefore roughly right but the vote by all-but-one is certainly right. When I stated this in the comments thread on an American blog one idiot said that it couldn’t be true because commoners didn’t have the vote at the time. Dear God! I assume twaddle about commoners and enclosure (and voting) may have been taught in US elementary schools as a justification for their war of secession.)
The people who had had arable and grazing rights all automatically got allotments of freehold land – and so did the tithe holders and the Lord of the Manor. It turned out that nobody knew who the Lord of the Manor was – not even ancient College records revealed the fact. So Merton College (Oxford) was appointed Lord of the Manor and did rather well out of it. Perhaps the Cambridge colleges didn’t trust each other. How was the common field managed without a Manor Court? Presumably they all met in a pub a few times a year and made their decisions without a Lord to chair proceedings and treat them all to beer.)
@Bongo: seven is about the right order of magnitude – there were 20 people who had rights only to grazing/hay. They were offered a choice: the other commoners would pay to hedge a pasture entirely for grazing in common or instead those twenty could accept allotments of freehold land in compensation. They voted 19:1 in favour of freehold land as long as it could be distributed to abut land they already owned or tenanted. The surveyors showed that it could be done and so it was. (The one who voted against was associated with the ruling gang in the town council so voted on political not economic grounds).
The paper I read implied, but did not state, that they kept their rights to hay – which makes sense since if they wanted to continue with cattle they’d need hay. And if not they could simply sell it. In their shoes I might have moved to pigs, or an orchard and chickens, or growing vegetables, or whatever – the beauty of freehold land, eh?
Long term their families will have done well from the decision as the city expanded so that they must have sold their new land profitably.
(The numbers are from memory and therefore roughly right but the vote by all-but-one is certainly right. When I stated this in the comments thread on an American blog one idiot said that it couldn’t be true because commoners didn’t have the vote at the time. Dear God! I assume twaddle about commoners and enclosure (and voting) may have been taught in US elementary schools as a justification for their war of secession.)
The people who had had arable and grazing rights all automatically got allotments of freehold land – and so did the tithe holders and the Lord of the Manor. It turned out that nobody knew who the Lord of the Manor was – not even ancient College records revealed the fact. So Merton College (Oxford) was appointed Lord of the Manor and did rather well out of it. Perhaps the Cambridge colleges didn’t trust each other. How had the common field been managed without a Manor Court? Presumably they all met in a pub a few times a year and made their decisions without a Lord to chair proceedings and treat them all to beer. Who did they elect to chair proceedings? No idea. But I doubt if he’d pay for the beer.)
Ironman, you raised a laugh there.
Reading Bongo’s Hansard excerpt, something very striking stands out
In the north of Ireland, employment kept the people in a state of comfort, and consequently of tranquillity. Let this tax be repealed, and the same would be the case in the south, and every man might then have a herring to his potatoe. (sic)
The Protestant Scots in the north of Ireland lived in plenty whereas the Papists in the south lived in penury.
I wonder if Max Weber ever studied Ireland ?
Christianity is not a religion of peace, it’s an Army of God.
Armies of God, Steve. Takes two sides to have a war (Although, to be fair, Christians have managed three sides or even four when in good form.)
@Ottokring – “The British govt did not intervene, until too late, of course”
The government had already intervened to make the situation worse through the Corn Laws which prevented imports. This was repealed and the sudden change in trade is striking: see the table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_exports
BiS – that the Enemy delights in such things should surprise no child of God, we’ve read Screwtape’s correspondence.
Steve. Customarily, you’re your own Enemy.
“commoners didn’t have the vote at the time”
Which “the” vote? It’s like the twaddle about women in the UK not having “the” vote before 1918. Which “the” vote? My great-grandmother had “the” vote in 1917 as a householder, her mother had “the” vote in 1895 as a householder and then as a buisness holder, my great-grandmother’s aunts also had “the” vote. “The” vote being the municipal vote.
Which “the” vote?
That was my point. It seemed to be beyond the American’s imagination that 20 Commoners could have a vote on something that affected them in ca. 1800.
How many of those Commoners had a parliamentary vote I have no idea. It would be a borough seat. Some of those gave the vote based on the “potwalloper” qualification – a householder who was self-sustaining (i.e. made no claim on poor relief) and who had his own hearth on which he could cook or boil (wallop) a pot.
(I say “he” but I’ve seen it said that some seats allowed the vote to women heads of household who met the same terms as men.) If – if – that were the case in Cambridge all 20 would probably have had a parliamentary vote. But that is of no relevance at all to their vote about grazing in common.
@Addolff
those Rolls Royce brains that run our world that thought that ‘vaccinating’ the peeps against a ‘virus’ in the middle of an outbreak was a good idea.
It is a good idea if you want a lot of people to die. Hmmm.
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