[HN Gopher] What made the Irish famine so deadly
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What made the Irish famine so deadly
Author : pepys
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-03-10 21:24 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/AfeHU
| hinkley wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
| Especially not on divisive topics, as
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html requests:
|
| " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
| rayiner wrote:
| A crazy fact is that a higher percentage of Irish died in the
| Great Famine (well over 10% of the population) than in the Bengal
| famine in India in 1943 (about 3.5%).
|
| This is a fascinating point:
|
| > In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the
| first volume of "Democracy in America," his lifelong
| collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the
| two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont
| produced in 1839, "L'Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,"
| was a grim companion piece to his friend's largely optimistic
| vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the
| Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de
| Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor
| had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British
| political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland
| was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was "the land where
| destitution is the exception," Ireland "the country where misery
| is the common rule."
| abeppu wrote:
| Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some
| estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.
|
| > In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel's Conservative
| government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as
| maize, from America to feed the starving. The government
| insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free
| food would merely reinforce Irish indolence)
|
| Compare this to the 1876 response in which "relief work" camps
| had workers doing strenuous labor in order to receive a meager
| ration of far fewer calories than would have been expended in
| the work.
|
| > ... this 'Temple wage' consisted of 450 grams (1 lb) of grain
| plus one anna for a man, and a slightly reduced amount for a
| woman or working child,[12] for a "long day of hard labour
| without shade or rest."[13] The rationale behind the reduced
| wage, which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the
| time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency'
| ...
| Loughla wrote:
| >which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time,
| was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...
|
| Now where have I heard that recently
| jmyeet wrote:
| This should be your daily reminder that _every_ famine is
| political, meaning it is the result of one group of people
| willing to starve another group of people. In this case, the
| British starved the Irish.
|
| This whole thing was exacerbated by relatively few landholders
| and a system of rent-seeking landlords that only worked when
| there was a good potato crop so when that failed, the English
| remained fed, the land tenants could no longer produce enough to
| eat and the Irish starved.
|
| The world now produces an excess of food yet millions die of
| famine every year. We are quite deliberately letting people
| starve while food rots.
| markdown wrote:
| USAID has been gutted, and yes, it was political.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > every famine is political
|
| Well probably not those directly caused by natural disasters at
| least.
| lucideer wrote:
| All famines are caused by natural disasters. What makes them
| political is that people die when their ability to overcome
| natural disasters is restricted or removed.
|
| E.g. for the Irish Famine, the natural disaster was the
| outbreak of the phytophthora infestans disease affecting
| potato crops - the outbreak spread from North America across
| Europe, affecting Belgium, Netherlands, France & the UK. The
| cause of death in Ireland was the English exporting all food
| produced in Ireland that wasn't potatoes. An interestingly
| relevant historical record here is the Australian Convict
| Collection showing the number of Irish convicts sent to
| Australia & Tasmania for stealing food during the famine
| years.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Many of those convicts were children.
| unsnap_biceps wrote:
| So far, if it's lasted long enough to be considered a famine,
| it's political. Yes, there's temporary and severe
| interruptions due to natural disasters, but if the political
| will is there, resources would be able to arrive anywhere in
| the world in the matter of days.
| FredPret wrote:
| On the plus side, hunger is decreasing quickly.
|
| For the couple of remaining places with hunger, the causes are
| political as you say. But the rest of the world is in most
| cases not "letting it" happen. We're sending food and aid,
| sometimes at risk to the aid workers delivering the food.
| davidw wrote:
| > We're sending food and aid
|
| We (US) were, now we are cutting back. People will starve
| because of this.
| yesco wrote:
| I've always seen it as a logistical problem. With the Irish
| famine the British had a sophisticated world spanning
| logistical system that deliberately de-prioritized the Irish,
| even during an active famine that was a consequence of their
| own design. It's hard not to point fingers here when the
| culprit is obvious.
|
| With modern famines it becomes more nuanced though imo. The
| logistical systems are not already in place like with Ireland,
| they are often built and sustained reactively, like a bridge
| during a storm. Some never "turn off" properly and undercut
| local farmers creating a stronger potential for future famines
| in the region. The solution isn't just allowing everyone to
| starve of course, but doing a better job at the follow-up work.
|
| I'm not saying this is some impossible problem, just that it's
| a delicate one despite best intentions. Food grown in abundance
| in one region of the world might be rotting by the time it
| arrives where it's needed. While we have systems through the UN
| and non profits for this I still think we could do a lot
| better.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They used that logistics system to export most of the food
| that Ireland produced as they were growing more food than
| they needed, not even counting potatoes. But the English
| would pay more, so another great free market experiment.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The world produces excess of food but the distribution costs
| are very high for example. Would you go into debt sending food
| to another country or are you relying on the government to bear
| the burden of that through taxes? There's a secondary factor
| which is that we've learned through efforts in the 80s that
| charity breeds dependence and the food aid drives often had a
| paradoxical effect of preventing those countries from building
| up their own local farm base which is more harmful long term
| for everyone involved. I don't think it's quite clear and dry
| as you paint it and that every famine is the result of one
| group intentionally trying to starve another.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Well, that's the thing, right? If we were thinking about
| humanity as a global populace, the second (bear the burden of
| that through taxes) would be the obvious answer, for
| precisely the same reason Americans in Florida pay taxes into
| a FEMA system to address wildfires in California, even if
| they never visit California. Besides ideological reasons,
| there's also the practical that that same FEMA is going to
| help Florida the next time it's hurricane season.
|
| The concern about suppressing local agriculture is relevant
| (although I do wonder if one can make the same argument
| regarding FEMA and "suppressing local blue-tarp
| manufacturing"). But if food rots while people starve, the
| taxes probably aren't high enough. We've recognized (in the
| US, at least) the role of government in distribution and
| management of distribution policy since at least the Great
| Depression.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Which is why most non-failed countries try to self-sustain a
| large amount of their food requirements and agriculture is
| subsidized and protected. But it also means _food export_ isn
| 't a big business.
| lucideer wrote:
| Which countries are these?
| watwut wrote:
| Pretty much all western ones.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Let's talk about the way in which the West uses the IMF and
| World Bank to create economic crises and famine.
| Specifically, let's talk about Somalia. The playbook is
| basically this:
|
| 1. A country borrows money for some project. There's often
| corruption involved here (as the leaders siphon off work to
| make themselves rich);
|
| 2. The IMF imposes conditions on those loans. These includes
| financializing the food supply. Typically, what might've been
| a self-sufficient agricultural sector tends to get banned
| from producing food for themselves. Instead they have to
| produce export crops and buy food from, surprise surprise,
| Western nations. This tends to lead to a drop in food prices
| that means farmers can no longer support themselves. They
| then often become destitute and move to cities to find work;
|
| 3. If the loan is for an infrastructure project, it's usually
| Western companies doing it so the US is funding the IMF to
| give money to Western companies, basically;
|
| 4. As inevitably happens, the currency ends up tanking. The
| foreign food that decimated local production is now much more
| expensive in local terms. The government's ability to service
| the debt also gets savaged;
|
| 5. The IMF steps in with "structural programs" (including
| those like the financialization of agriculture) to take money
| out of the government to service IMF debt, which has similar
| devastating effects "austerity" measures do in Western
| countries;
|
| 6. The country is now trapped in debt, so much so that some
| call this "debt colonialism".
|
| This has happened to Haiti and other countries.
|
| The point is that Western interference most often comes with
| destroying agricultural self-sufficiency, creating famine.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Like the Holodomor, like the Bengal famine, this was a genocide.
| trhway wrote:
| to me that is the gist. Genocide by the system without the people
| in the system intending it to happen (with those people even
| trying to mitigate its damage) It has been happening again and
| again - a system follows orthodoxy/ideology despite its subjects
| mass dying as a result, and we still don't have a machinery in
| place which should serve as emergency brakes on any system once
| that system, for whatever, and frequently even good sounding
| reasons at that, starts to cause such pain and suffering and
| deaths:
|
| >Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the
| famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized
| as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even
| became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed
| in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to
| portray the famine "as a human rights violation akin to genocide,
| slavery and the Holocaust."
|
| >Pataki announced that "history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger
| was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop
| but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British
| to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive." But
| this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate
| conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray,
| who wrote that there was "not a policy of deliberate genocide" on
| the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure
| of the British government was ideological--"a dogmatic refusal to
| recognise that measures intended to 'encourage industry, [and] to
| do battle with sloth' . . . were based on false premises." The
| British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did
| launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very
| large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from
| America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of
| public works to employ those who were starving. But they were
| blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two
| orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their
| belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor
| and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so
| devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes,
| mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| They literally fired cannons from warships at people protesting
| the exportation of food when they are starving to death.
| genewitch wrote:
| Can't have them stealing someone else's profits...
| trhway wrote:
| I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons
| explicitly wanted those people to starve. I'd suspect they
| were enforcing the laws of public order and trade. That is
| the systemic issue - the laws taking precedence over mass
| starving. And we still don't have a good solution to such
| issues - just look at the recent court decision and city
| actions on homeless even here in Silicon Valley, one of the
| most richest place. And 700M people faced hunger in 2023.
| Almost 10%. Why we can't help them? I see the same systemic
| issue as the machinery of the current economic order (really
| powerful, no doubt, and the best we could so far come up with
| as a civilization) still fails here.
| sorokod wrote:
| The arguments stemming from the rule of law always remind
| of this:
|
| _The rain it raineth on the just And also on the unjust
| fella; But chiefly on the just, because The unjust hath the
| just's umbrella._
| er4hn wrote:
| This is very clever and an interestingly adversarial (the
| unjust steal from the just) take on the quote that came
| to my mind: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids
| rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the
| streets, and to steal their bread."
| sorokod wrote:
| They complement each other beautifully.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| > I don't think the officers ordering to fire cannons
| explicitly wanted those people to starve.
|
| While I take your broader point about it being a system
| level issue - when you're firing cannon at starving people
| so you can continue to export their food, you're complicit,
| laws be damned.
| elliotto wrote:
| I think performing apologetics for a system that resulted in
| the genocide of a people is a difficult position to hold. At
| some point you need to hold the people who perpetuate the
| system accountable for the devastation it causes. This is a
| difficult thing to do on a SV based startup forum. I love
| drones!
| m348e912 wrote:
| In 1847, one of the bleakest years of the Irish famine, Khaleefah
| Abdul-Majid I, Sultan of an Ottoman Empire offered PS10,000
| (which was quite a sum at the time) to help alleviate the
| suffering of the Irish people.
|
| Queen Victoria, upon learning of this, requested that he reduce
| his donation to a more modest PS1,000, so as not to embarrass her
| own relatively meagre offering of PS2,000. Reluctantly, the
| Sultan agreed, but bolstered his contribution by secretly sending
| five ships loaded with food.
|
| https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Britain-refuse-Ottomans-aid-to...
|
| My conclusion is that the famine was as much political as it was
| environmental. (as they often are)
| genewitch wrote:
| I wrote a song called greenocide where my Irish friend
| explained this in a particularly straightforward way.
|
| The English already owned all the land so they figured let the
| Irish die out. In essence.
| mritun wrote:
| That's pretty much what the British did in Bengal.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Is there an academic source available for that?
| lolinder wrote:
| Wikipedia says that the provenance is... sketchy, to say the
| least:
|
| > The claim that he had wanted to give PS10,000 first appears
| in Taylor & Mackay's Life and Times of Sir Robert Peel
| (1851), but the book is not referenced and no source is
| given. A second source, dating to 1894, is more explicit: the
| Irish nationalist William J. O'Neill Daunt claimed to have
| heard from the son of the sultan's personal physician that he
| "had intended to give PS10,000 to the famine-stricken Irish,
| but was deterred by the English ambassador, Lord Cowley, as
| Her Majesty, who had only subscribed PS1000, would have been
| annoyed had a foreign sovereign given a larger sum..."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat.
| ..
| s_dev wrote:
| https://www.mfa.gov.tr/relations-between-turkiye-and-
| ireland...
|
| The 1,000 Pound claim at least can be sourced from this
| website.
|
| It very much was policy that killed the Irish and not the
| lack of food. Ireland exported enough food to feed the
| country four times over -- during the Famine.
| lolinder wrote:
| This source notably does not make the claim that the amount
| was lowered in response to a request from Queen Victoria,
| which is the actually damning claim.
| thfuran wrote:
| That entire claim is unnecessary for the given
| conclusion, which is substantiated by other evidence.
| lolinder wrote:
| Agreed. So there's no need to perpetuate claims whose
| provenance is "someone 40 years later claimed to have
| heard this from the sultan's physician's son" (see my
| reply to GP). We have plenty else to use.
| FjordWarden wrote:
| Something even more remarkable, the Indians that where only a
| few years ago forcibly relocated and experienced their own
| starvations during the events of the Trail of Teers, collected
| about 700$ in donations and send it as aid to the starving
| Irish in a grand gesture of empathy amongst oppressed people.
| lolinder wrote:
| I agree with your conclusion, but this story is very badly
| sourced and really should not be used [0]. We only have two
| sources from the 1800s that claim it: one is contemporary but
| provides no attribution and we have no reason to believe they
| had firsthand knowledge. The other is 40 years later and is
| attributed to a conversation with the son of the sultan's
| personal physician. Yeah.
|
| With such bad evidence for _such_ an incendiary claim, I think
| we 're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other
| evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this
| particular story die.
|
| (What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent
| PS1k. The rest has no reliable source.)
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the
| Third World" is a great book by Mike Davis about similar famines
| in the late 19th century caused by colonial powers putting
| profits and the sanctity of markets above human lives during
| periods when forces in the natural world impacted food production
| (climate swings in this case).
| morkalork wrote:
| Eerie.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| One of the most interesting and informative books I've ever
| read. Depressing as fuck though.
| senderista wrote:
| "There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems
| truly anachronistic--millions of refugees were saved because
| other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen
| now."
| soperj wrote:
| Many countries took in a lot of refugees from both Ukraine and
| Syria. Syria used to take in refugees from all over the middle
| east.
|
| Canada alone approved over a million applications from Ukraine,
| numbers that have actually come are more in the 300,000 range.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| The present could never be the past. Having said that, never in
| History there has been so much migration.
| rayiner wrote:
| There's no famines going on anywhere in Latin America. Yet we
| had more immigrants to the U.S. last year than during the
| entire ten year period from Ireland during the great famine.
| umachin wrote:
| The economist Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize partially
| for his research on famines and the conclusion that most are
| social and political. He was a young child during the Bengal
| famine (famously not due a food shortage) and witnessed it up
| close.
| senderista wrote:
| I've always found this song about the Great Famine to be moving:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5onHLICxgc
| beezlewax wrote:
| The man in charge of the British response to the great hunger was
| Charles Trevelyan. He famously said of the Irish "[The Famine] is
| a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious
| country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are
| suffering from an affliction of God's providence."
|
| The British actively exported grains meats and other food leaving
| the local population to starve.
|
| It was a famine only because they made it one.
| favorited wrote:
| He also famously suggested that the Irish should simply grow
| corn, if there was a potato blight. As if, in the middle of a
| famine, farmers can simply pivot to another crop that they've
| never grown before.
| fergal_reid wrote:
| As an Irish person when I saw the article title, I was
| immediately sceptical.
|
| I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from
| the horror of it, and also from a frank discussion.
|
| Going to give some subjective opinion here: people generally
| downplay the role of the British government and ruling class in
| it.
|
| Why? One personal theory - growing up in the 80s in Ireland there
| was a lot of violence in the north. (Most) Irish people who were
| educated or middle class were worried about basically their kids
| joining the IRA, and so kind of downplayed the historical beef
| with the British. That's come through in the culture.
|
| There's also kind of a fight over the historical narrative with
| the British, maybe including the history establishment, who yes
| care a lot about historical accuracy, but, also, very
| subjectively, see the world through a different lens, and often
| come up through British institutions that view the British empire
| positively.
|
| It's often easier to say the famine was the blight, rather than
| political. (They do teach the political angle in schools in
| Ireland; but I think it's fair to say it's contested or
| downplayed in the popular understanding, especially in Britain.)
|
| However that article is written by a famous Irish journalist and
| doesn't shy away from going beyond that.
|
| Perhaps a note of caution - even by Irish standards he'd be left
| leaning, so would be very politically left by American standards;
| he's maybe prone to emphasize the angle that the root cause was
| lassiez-faire economic and political policies. (I'm not saying it
| wasn't.)
|
| I personally would emphasize more the fact that the government
| did not care as much about the Irish people specifically.
|
| Some did, of course, and some did try to help. But I personally
| do not think the famine would have happened in England, no matter
| how lassiez-faire the economic policies of the government.
|
| It's not an easy thing to come to terms with even today. I
| recently recorded a video talking about how fast the build out of
| rail infrastructure was, in the UK, as an analogy for how fast
| the AI infra build out could be; and I got a little quesy
| realizing that during the Irish potato famine the UK was spending
| double digit GDP percent on rail build out. Far sighted, yes, and
| powering the industrial revolution, but wow, doing that while
| mass exporting food from the starving country next door, yikes.
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