Two of the leading Whig government personalities, namely Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to the treasury, and Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary, are named as being particularly culpable as responsible for withholding relief and in effect using the Famine to reshape the Irish population. Even The Times welcomed the famine as 'a blessing', while Punch, which prided itself on being moderately subversive if not exactly left-wing by the standards of the day, was crudely and unashamedly racist in its references to the Irish at their time of greatest need. To salve their consciences, the government and the press alike portrayed the situation as being brought on by a combination of the incompetence of Irish landlords, the inadequacy of the Irish character in general, and the will of Providence. Instead of famine relief, useless work schemes which were poorly paid and too taxing for the workers' failing strength were instituted, while the old and the infirm were expelled from workhouses poorly-clothed, hungry families with young children were driven from their cottages during the worst of the winter weather and food depots were closed. Several powerful cabinet ministers in the new government had large estates in Ireland, and it was in their personal interests (in other words, their profit margins) to reduce the number of people on the land in order to keep more cattle and holdings there instead. This might have averted or at least minimised the problem, had the Whigs not come to power under Lord John Russell the following year. The title indicates a fierce polemic, and the thrust of his book is that the British government of the day was not merely responsible for exacerbating the famine conditions through mismanagement and failure to respond adequately to the failure of the potato crop, but in fact deliberately engineered a food shortage in what was one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing.Īt the first signs of the problem in 1845, the Tory administration of Sir Robert Peel at Westminster took steps to import American corn in order to feed the people. Yet as Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan argues in this account, the famine was more than a tragedy. The net total was about a quarter of the existing population. As a result, about a million of its citizens died from starvation and a further million emigrated, with so many perishing en route that it was said you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies. The great famine of Ireland in the 1840s was a major disaster and a tragedy. Summary: A history of the Irish famine of the 1840s, in which the author argues that Britain was partly responsible for the tragedy in what was one of the earliest recorded cases of ethnic cleansing.

The Famine Plot by Tim Pat Coogan