How did the Irish Potato Famine end?

[purplecat]

Everyone is terribly coy about the subject. Wikipedia, for instance, just says it ended.

I've found one web site which attributes the end to the reduced population but that doesn't really make sense to me. The small-holding population of Ireland was dependent on the potato as its one crop and the blight, as I understand it, was pretty pervasive especially in any damp season (which are not uncommon in Ireland).

So it seems to me you need a diversification of the basic diet, possibly to other varieties of potato or some other change in farming practices that limits the spread of the blight. Or, you need sufficient population decrease that potato fields are widely enough apart that the blight has difficultly spreading - even assuming a 20% decrease in the population (based on census records which most historians seem to agree are inaccurate) that seems unlikely to me. Or some sort of mutation in the potato, or the disease, or climate change (given the blight was worse in damp years)?

Or am I misunderstanding how the blight works? I mean it came back consistently four years out of five, only letting up in one dry season so it seems pretty pervasive to me, not the sort of thing that burns itself out?

Anyone have any idea how the famine ended?

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Potato blight does not usually survive cold weather, and the Irish blight is usually attributed to the fact that the Irish grew a very restricted number of potato varieties.

It's not a disease that I'd expect to continue unstoppably forever: a cold winter, burn the infected foliage, perhaps fresh seed potatoes (maybe more blight-resistant ones) and away you go... Most potato growers get a bit of blight from time to time, it's always floating about.

[purplecat]

What puzzles me is that no one says there was a cold winter and they diversified the crop - but that would make sense. Apparently before the famine the Irish were reliant on one variety and, in fact, most of the potatos were clones of a very small number of original plants.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Could it be that they didn't understand what was going on at the time and there's no extant proof one way or the other?

If the blight took out the plants that were most susceptible and the plants that survived were ones that had slightly mutated to produce better blight resistance, or the blight itself mutated to become less infectious, I suppose that might not be apparent to the people doing the growing. To them the blight may have just 'got better' even though they didn't do anything obvious different?

They must have had resistant stock of some sort: you can't grow new potatoes by taking slips from a blighted potato, so whatever they grew from by year 3 must have been either from outside, or was descended from the more resistant plants.

[purplecat]

Could it be that they didn't understand what was going on at the time and there's no extant proof one way or the other?

That's quite likely. I suppose I'm a little surprised at the apparent lack of speculation on the part of historians but maybe I'm over-estimating their willingness to admit to total ignorance.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Intrigued by this issue, I did some googling and found:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010611071858.htm

which suggests the blight might be a form we don't have now...

Interesting that there are enough samples of the potato plants for this sort of thing to be tested.

[purplecat]

That's very interesting. I'm beginning to tend towards a theory that there wasn't much/any blight in 1850 and the pressure on the poor relief reduced significantly after that any no one has ever analysed in detail what factors actually contributed to the end of the crisis.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

...I'm sure I've come across original sources for this period talking about people starving in the snow. Snow in Ireland suggests colder than usual to me - though I believe the 19th century is supposed to have been generally colder than the 20th/21st...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The first rule of Irish History always seems to be 'It was the fault of the feckin' English baastuds', so possibly the feckin' English baastuds decided to stop blighting the potato crop...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

To be fair, this is also the first rule of Welsh History, Scottish History, Indian history, American History...

[foradan.livejournal.com]

I have gathered that the relaxation of the 'Corn Laws' was instrumental in providing alternative food sources to the Irish population.

Possibly a year off from growing potatoes, and then not growing them as intensively as previously (due to reduced population) will have reduced the hold of the blight.

Given that it wasn't the entire population of Ireland that depended on potatoes (those on the coast ate fish, and the richer farmers in the east grew other crops), and the very large population decrease, I expect that the number left of the potato dependent population segment was actually very small.

[purplecat]

The whole Irish Famine/Corn thing makes my head hurt. As far as I can tell Ireland was both importing and exporting corn throughout the crisis - in one of those exciting unexpected effects of economics. But overall it seems to have been net importer.

A switch to a diet less reliant on the potato would certainly be one explanation and, come to think of it, the widespread evictions and "rationalisation" of farming practices caused by the famine could easily have led to an agrarian landscape much more similar to that in the rest of Britain.

My general puzzlement partly stems from the apparent lack of even hypothesizing out there on why it ended.

[foradan.livejournal.com]

We learned about the famine in school, I thought we learned about the end as well, but it was a long time ago. My memory of the Irish history course was that it was very concentrated on the violent and peaceful resistance to English rule, to the exclusion of any other events*, but it didn't go as far as blaming the English for causing the famine.

* ie the English Army was always seen as the people putting down the rebellions, it was never mentioned that a large number of the soldiers who fought in India and in the Peninsular War were Irish. And never mentioned that the Duke of Wellington was born in Ireland (Dublin obviously didn't really count as Ireland).

[purplecat]

The book I have says the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 as a response to the famine but doesn't bother to discuss the effect of that - e.g., whether it took four years for the effect to percolate sufficiently through the system to make a difference.

My book is written by someone who would really like to thoroughly blame the British but can't quite find the evidence to do so. I shall look into the Corn Laws further, I think.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

NMP, but I understand there is a view that the repeal of the corn laws didn't help much because the people in Ireland who had been living off potatoes had no income at all, so even cheap corn was not much help, as they had no money to buy it with.

That said, if British political moves such as the repeal of the corn laws, relief aid, workhouses, and the various work creation schemes actually did have any effect, then you may find that people are a bit reluctant to write about that. It might be a bit politically charged.

[(Anonymous)]

"Corn" can refer to any grain back in those terrible times

[bunn.livejournal.com]

...? Yes, I know corn referred to a mix of grains. In fact, in the UK, where I and the other people posting on this thread live, 'corn' is still a generic word for grain.

I believe that it is largely in the USA that the word 'corn' is used to mean maize, and maize only? We say 'maize' in general food manufacture, or as flour, or 'sweet corn' for the tinned stuff or fresh cobs.

Of course none of that helped the Irish. They had no money at all, and no potatoes, so it didn't help that much that the repeal of the Corn Laws applied to lots of different grains!

[(Anonymous)]

'God brought the blight but the English brought the famine': John Mitchell
'Just because I was born in a stable doesn't make me a horse' Duke of Wellington on being called an Irishman

[purplecat]

According to my book on the subject there is widespread conviction in the Irish diaspora that the inadequacy of the official relief response from about mid 1846 onwards was the result of a deliberate policy of genocide on the part of the British. A view not helped by idiots writing smug comments in The Times such as "In a few years more a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as is the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan."

I think there is, indeed, a subset within that community that believe the blight was caused by the British.

I'm wondering the same thing

[tyler richard (from livejournal.com)]

Honestly, I'm curious as well. It seems that the Famine just ended! We need someone to tell us. PLEASE!!!!

Re: I'm wondering the same thing

[purplecat]

I'm beginning to think that maybe no one has ever studied it, though that is mysterious in itself.