How does all this compare with the Holocaust? In absolute terms the numbers dying unnaturally during the Nazi era were higher: in excess of five or six millions.
In proportional terms, relative to population that is, the story is incomparably bleak. In Belzec, in the south of Poland, where , were exterminated between May and August , there were only two known survivors. In Poland, of some 3 million Jews, fewer than one in ten survived. We could look at the Holocaust in terms of the categories of region, class, and gender. There are regional dimensions to the Holocaust and temporal variations in its incidence, but I am not sure that those perspectives take us very far.
Consequently, death rates approached saturation point where there was German occupation. Neither does it make much sense to speak of age, gender or occupational factors in shaping overall death rates. It is true that those chosen for slave labour were selected on the basis of age, gender and special skills — and these factors could prove vital to the survival of individuals and small groups of survivors.
The remarkable fact about Nazism was how it subordinated major forms of social hierarchy — class, status and gender — to a hierarchy of race. In the case of the Great Famine no reputable historian believes that the British state intended the destruction of the Irish people, and the Famine-Holocaust comparisons provide no support either. Yet one million died. Does intentionality matter?
It does matter, for at least three reasons. First, it directly determines the scale of the tragedy. It is easy to forget that had Germany not lost the war, many more Jews would have been killed, such was the strength of commitment to the Final Solution.
By contrast, when the Irish economy recovered some strength at the end of the s the crisis was largely, though not wholly over — to the evident relief, not only of people in Ireland but of British policy makers also. Second, the cruelty, often wanton cruelty which attached to the treatment of Jews has virtually no parallels in the Irish case. We know much, for instance, about the ineffectual role of medicine during the Great Famine, despite the zeal of many Irish doctors, but no one has uncovered cases of medical experiments at the expense of Famine victims.
True enough, evictions were heartless affairs and on a massive scale, but even in these cases there was the assumption that alternatives, however bleak, existed. Third, intentionality is relevant to the question of responsibility, a question inextricably bound up with the politics of memory.
Mitchell makes a useful distinction, albeit implicitly, between causation and responsibility. The Famine was an ecological disaster but it was not simply that.
I think it is important to distinguish between 3 distinct notions: causation, responsibility and blame. And at the bar of history we might want to call to account, not only Lord John Russell and his Whig administration, but a host of other historical actors as well, from landlords to Young Irelanders and the strong farmers and merchants of eastern Ireland.
But to narrow the focus simply to the role of the British government for a moment: for all the massive irresponsibility and buck-passing that characterised the five years of crisis, the state succeeded in organising public relief schemes that employed three-quarters of a million workers, and at one point was responsible for feeding three million people on a daily basis.
Have a question about Irish History or studying at Queen's? Have an opinion? Check out the Discussion Forum!! Approach to Crisis II. Workhouses and ghettoes III. Mortality IV. Intentionality Introduction The most traumatic event of modern Irish history is undoubtedly the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. For the Jewish peoples of Europe their darkest hour belongs to living memory.
The mass destruction of some six million Jews in the mid twentieth century at the hands of the German Nazis, and their enthusiastic collaborators in Poland, the Baltic countries, the Ukraine, Hungary and in parts of the former Yugoslavia, seemed to mark a turning point not only in Jewish but in world history. But most managed to survive, and their descendants have become a vibrant part of American culture. Even before the famine, Ireland was a country of extreme poverty.
A Frenchman named Gustave de Beaumont traveled the country in the s and wrote about his travels. In all countries,. In most of Ireland, housing conditions were terrible. A census report in found that nearly half the families in rural areas lived in windowless mud cabins, most with no furniture other than a stool. Pigs slept with their owners and heaps of manure lay by the doors.
Boys and girls married young, with no money and almost no possessions. They would build a mud hut, and move in with no more than a pot and a stool. A major cause of Irish poverty was that more and more people were competing for land. Ireland was not industrialized. The few industries that had been established were failing. The fisheries were undeveloped, and some fishermen could not even buy enough salt to preserve their catch. And there was no agricultural industry. Most of the large and productive farms were owned by English Protestant gentry who collected rents and lived abroad.
Many owners visited their property only once or twice in their lifetime. Their property was managed by middlemen, who split up the farms into smaller and smaller sections to increase the rents. The farms became too small to require hired labor. By , three quarters of Irish laborers had no regular employment of any kind.
With no employment available, the only way that a laborer could live and support a family was to get a patch of land and grow potatoes. Potatoes were unique in many ways. Large numbers of them could be grown on small plots of land. An acre and a half could provide a family of six with enough food for a year. Potatoes were nutritious and easy to cook, and they could be fed to pigs and cattle and fowl. And families did not need a plough to grow potatoes.
All they needed was a spade, and they could grow potatoes in wet ground and on mountain sides where no other kinds of plants could be cultivated. More than half of the Irish people depended on the potato as the main part of their diet, and almost 40 percent had a diet consisting almost entirely of potatoes, with some milk or fish as the only other source of nourishment. Potatoes could not be stored for more than a year. If the potato crop failed, there was nothing to replace it.
In the years before , many committees and commissions had issued reports on the state of Ireland, and all predicted disaster.
In the summer of , the potato crop appeared to be flourishing. But when the main crop was harvested in October, there were signs of disease.
Within a few days after they were dug up, the potatoes began to rot. Scientific commissions were set up to investigate the problem and recommend ways to prevent the decay. Farmers were told to try drying the potatoes in ovens or to treat them with lime and salt or with chlorine gas.
But nothing worked. People ate anything they could find, including the leaves and bark of trees and even grass. The blight did not go away. In , the whole potato crop was wiped out. In , a shortage of seeds led to fewer crops, as only about a quarter of the land was planted compared to the year before. The crop flourished, but not enough food was produced, and the famine continued.
By this time, the mass emigration abroad had begun. The flight to America and Canada continued in when the blight struck again. In , the famine was officially at an end, but suffering continued throughout Ireland. More than 1 million people died between and as a result of the Potato Famine.
Many of these died from starvation. Many more died from diseases that preyed on people weakened by loss of food. People streamed into towns, begging for food and crowding the workhouses and soup kitchens.
Little, if any, medical care was available for the sick. One of the most high profile cases was that of Major Dennis Mahon, of the Strokestown estate in county Roscommon, who cleared 1, families off his land during the famine. Mahon was later murdered by his vengeful tenants.
In all over 70, evictions took place during the famine, displacing up to , people. Being evicted often meant that Bailiffs and the Sheriff, usually with a police or military escort, not only ejected tenants from their homes but also commonly burned the cabins to prevent their reoccupation.
Losing a house and shelter in midst of the famine greatly increased the chances of dying. Though some landlords went to great lengths to set up charities and soup kitchens, the popular memory of the famine years was of the tyranny of cruel landlords backed by the British state.
The British administration in Dublin was overwhelmed by the famine crisis, seeing 5 Chief Secretaries and 4 Lord Lieutenants in just six years from Russell and the Treasury official in charge of famine relief, Charles Trevelyan are therefore often seen as being culpable for the worst of the famine. They were reluctant to either stop the export of food from Ireland or to control prices and did neither, in fact deploying troops to guard food that was being exported from Ireland.
They put more faith in the public works scheme, first initiated by the Peel government, by which the destitute poor worked for wages.
But many were by this stage too weak and malnourished to work. The Liberal Government cancelled the soup kitchen aid programme at the height of the famine and discontinued direct financial aid from the London government. In January , the Government set up free soup kitchens; which were inexpensive and relatively successful at feeding the poor.
But, worried that the poor, 3 million of whom were attending the soup kitchens by mid , would become dependent on the Government, they discontinued the soup kitchens at the height of the famine in August In June of that year, the Government decided not to use any more Imperial i. It is calculated that only one third of landlords actually contributed at all towards famine relief.
Taken together, these decisions had a calamitous impact, not only failing to solve the crisis but undoubtedly making it far worse than it need have been. Relieving the famine ranked low on British Government spending priorities.
Connaught and Munster were the worst affected provinces followed by Ulster and then Leinster, but the latter still saw well over , deaths. Cities such as Dublin, Belfast and Cork saw a rise in population as the destitute flocked there in the hope of aid. Skibbereen in West Cork, one of the worst affected areas, became the site of mass graves , holding up to 10, bodies. But the famine mortality was as high in predominantly Presbyterian areas of Ulster as many other majority Catholic areas.
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