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

[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