![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
How did the Irish Potato Famine end?
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?
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
* 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).
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-02-02 12:01 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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!
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-04-10 08:52 am (UTC)(link)'Just because I was born in a stable doesn't make me a horse' Duke of Wellington on being called an Irishman
no subject
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
Re: I'm wondering the same thing