March 17, 2015
While you are preparing your St Patrick’s Day dinner today is a good day to reflect on the history of the Great Famine which effected Ireland for generations to come. The traditional Irish-American Corned Beef and Cabbage dinner is a favorite in my home. Today I as I prepare my St. Patrick’s dinner to share with my family, I reflect on one the key components of the dinner, potatoes, and all that the poor in Ireland suffered for its reliance on the potato as its main source of food.
The Great Famine of 1845-1849 is perhaps the most significant event in Ireland’s history. It was a catastrophic event in the history of Europe and the considered the worst famine ever recorded in the world. The Great Famine primarily effected the poor in Ireland, which accounted for 2/3’s of the Irish population. This majority population were also “dangerously dependent on the potato for survival,” and the potato had a limited storage life of one year. The short shelf life made it impossible to compensate from stored crops between good and bad harvests. This set a dangerous precedent for famine in Ireland in the nineteenth century coupled with the British government’s grave disinterest in its closest colony, Ireland.
The land system in Ireland at this time was quite precarious and volatile at the time. Relationships between landlords and tenants were on tenuous terms financially and politically. England’s industrial revolution had had disastrous effects on the many “cottage industries in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s, especially the weaving and spinning of textiles, and many hundreds of thousands were left without employment,” that supported the working class Irish people. There was little investment being made into the Irish economy, instead, those who could afford to invest invested outside of Ireland in Britain. (more…)
