Potato Blight Research Paper

The actions of the British government during the potato blight constituted genocide against the Irish people. Over hundreds of years the British had looked down on their Irish neighbors as nothing more than barbarians. Even when Ireland became part of the United Kingdom the Irish were still seen as second class citizens, repressed by misrule and neglect. This neglect was mainly influenced by the british accepting a Laissez-faire, hands off, form of government for rule of Ireland which meant that the British took no part in the governing of Ireland. In the early 1840s a blight stuck much of Europe, destroying countless crops over the three successive years that the potato blight lasted; but the Irish were hit the hardest. The Irish suffered

through the blight more than anyone else. For the Irish, Potatoes were the only things the British government had not seized and sent away. The Irish received minimal support from the british government, were hit harder by the blight than anywhere else, and were unfairly evicted from their homes without interference from the British government. The British view of the Irish was that they were inferior and were a weight holding the rest of the United Kingdom behind.

For five years during and after the great hunger Ireland had only received seven million Pounds in relief efforts from the British government.

Dr. Gray, a professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast pointed out that these measly funds were; “less than half of one percent of the British gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the twenty million Pounds compensation given to the West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s” (NJCHE 2). The fact that the british government saw the losses in the slave trade across an ocean more important than the losses of more than one million Irish lives next door is shocking. John Mitchell, the leader of the Young Ireland Movement wrote, “But potatoes in like manner all over Europe; yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud - second a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the blight, but the English created the famine” (NJCHE 3).The fertile Irish land had always produced a surplus of food but starved because the British had been shipping all of the profitable foods out of Ireland for decades prior to the blight. The British also stood by while protestant landlords stole Irish farmland for their own profit. This left the Irish to survive on nothing but potatoes which meant that when the Blight hit the only thing keeping the Irish alive was also taken away. England's failure to act on the severe problems in Ireland were what caused so many Irish to

perish.

The tens of thousands of evictions that took place during the Great Hunger was an attempt by Northern Irish, Protestant landlords to clear out all Catholic Irish from their lands and to gain more land for the protestants. These evictions were undoubtedly supported by the British government as more Protestants meant more people loyal to the crown in Ireland. Professor James S. Donnelly Jr., a historian at the university of Wisconsin wrote, “the government’s abject failure to stop or even slow the clearances contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind” (NJCHE 3). For the decades before the blight Ireland's population was growing exponentially which became a growing problem for protestants because catholics were becoming the overwhelming majority in Ireland. The blight came at the perfect time for the British government as it would wipe out the Poor, Catholic, Irish population that was only a burden in their minds. Professor Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian, on the probability of an accidental famine; “England had presided over an epochal disaster too monstrous and too impersonal to be a mere product of individual ill-will or the fiendish outcome of a well-planned conspiracy” (NJCHE 2). The British government forgetting about the Irish people was too big of a disaster to have been an accident, but rather a purposeful neglect in order to further weaken the poor Irish into either leaving their land or dying of starvation.
The idea that the british intentionally let the Irish starve is further proven by the opinions that many british people had towards the Irish. At the time of the blight Nassau Senior, professor of economics at Oxford University said that the famine “would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good” (NJCHE 3). The British saw the catholics in Ireland as roadblocks in their way of gaining full control over Ireland. The blight was seen as an opportunity to thin out the number of catholics in Ireland. The British government’s excuse to letting these people die was that they practiced a laissez-faire government in Ireland and doing so prohibited them from taking action in business or natural occurrences. Cecil Woodham- Smith, a british historian, talks about some british policies that they followed during the blight. She says, “the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and corrupting the Irish people by kindness, and so stifling the virtues of self reliance and industry” (NJCHE 4). The idea that being too nice to you citizens and corrupting their virtues of self reliance is ridiculous. In addition the british laws over ireland limited the irish to poverty and dependence. The british took away the Irish land and civil rights while at the same time consoling themselves with platitudes of helping the Irish be industrious.