Great Famine (Ireland) - Government Response

Government Response

F.S.L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early less severe phase of the famine as "prompt and relatively successful." Confronted by widespread crop failure in the autumn of 1845, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America. Baring Brothers & Co initially acted as purchasing agents for the Prime Minister. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846.

The maize corn was then re-sold for a penny a pound. The corn when it arrived had not been ground and was inedible, and this task involved a long and complicated process if it was to be done correctly and it was unlikely to be carried out locally. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be 'very much' cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Because of maize's (commonly) yellow colour, and the fact that it had to be ground twice, it became known in Ireland as 'Peel's brimstone'. In 1846, Peel then moved to repeal the Corn Laws, tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread artificially high. The famine situation worsened during 1846 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland but was forced to resign as Prime Minister on 29 June." This fall came on June 25, when he was defeated in the House of Commons on a motion that the Irish Coercion Bill be read a second time. According to Michael Doheny, the majority against him was 73, and it was made of the "Whig party, the extreme Conservatives, the ultra-Radicals and Irish Repealers." Ten days after, Lord John Russell assumed the seals of office.

The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Lord John Russell, proved comparatively "inadequate" as the crisis deepened. Russell's ministry introduced public works projects, which by December 1846 employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer. Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government's actual relief because he thought "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". For his policy, he was commemorated in the song The Fields of Athenry. The Public Works were "strictly ordered" to be unproductive—that is, they would create no fund to repay their own expenses. Many hundreds of thousands of "feeble and starving men" according to John Mitchel, were kept digging holes, and breaking up roads, which was doing no service.

The new Lord John Russell Whig administration, influenced by their laissez-faire belief that the market would provide the food needed but at the same time ignoring the food exports to England, then halted government food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without any work, money or food. In January, the government abandoned these projects and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through the Poor Law, the latter through soup kitchens. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, who in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants. This was then facilitated through the "Cheap Ejectment Acts." The poor law amendment act was passed in June 1847. According to James Donnelly in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, it embodied the principle popular in Britain that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. It was asserted however, that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in the Illustrated London News on 13 February 13, 1847, "There was no laws it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On 24 March The Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race."

The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law prohibited anyone who held at least ¼ of an acre from receiving relief. This in practice meant that if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay rent, duties, rates and taxes, should be reduced, as many thousands of them were, to applying for public outdoor relief, he would not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Of this Law Mitchel was to write: "it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed — if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies." This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse" — a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.