Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics

Enda Delaney, Breandán Mac Suibhne, Enda Delaney, Breandán Mac Suibhne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134758050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Irlande

Ireland's Great Famine of 1845–52 was among the most devastating food crises in modern history. A country of some eight-and-a-half-million people lost one million to hunger and disease and another million to emigration. According to land activist Michael Davitt, the starving made little or no effort to assert "the animal's right to existence, " passively accepting their fate. But the poor did resist. In word and deed, they defied landlords, merchants and agents of the state: they rioted for food, opposed rent and rate collection, challenged the decisions of those controlling relief works, and scorned clergymen who attributed their suffering to the Almighty. The essays collected here examine the full range of resistance in the Great Famine, and illuminate how the crisis itself transformed popular politics. Contributors include distinguished scholars of modern Ireland and emerging historians and critics. This book is essential reading for students of modern Ireland, and the global history of collective action.

1 ‘ ’Tis Hard to Argue Starvation into Quiet’

Protest and Resistance, 1846–47¹

John Cunningham

Toward the end of a life that began in County Mayo in the Great Famine, the Fenian and land activist Michael Davitt (1846–1906) wrote of his ‘measureless, unadulterated, sickening shame’ at the ‘wholesale cowardice of the men who saw food leave the country, and turned and saw their wives and little ones sicken and die…making no effort, combined or otherwise, to assert the animal’s right of existence—the right to live by the necessities of its nature’.² Davitt’s judgment was severe, but his impression of the impoverished people of Ireland during the Famine has been the predominant one. Passivity and submissive resignation remain the key motifs of monuments, and they are the staples of oratory at remembrance ceremonies, such as the National Famine Commemoration of 2012, when Taoiseach Enda Kenny referred to ‘mere hints of humans, carrying their most precious possession: their children, blue-black and bloated from hunger and fever’.³

If an alignment of ecological and ideological forces in the late 1840s denied the poorest three million of the Irish the means of survival, posterity has deprived the same people of agency. But not all of them were passive all of the time. Indeed, many participated in collective actions of protest and resistance. An illustration published in the Pictorial News of a demonstration in Dungarvan, County Waterford, in October 1846 provides a striking visual record of one such act of resistance; led by a man bearing a pole with a loaf of bread impaled upon it, the demonstrators were asserting that there was food in their community, but that high prices had pushed it beyond their reach, and they were appealing for it to be sold at fair prices. Here, the concern is to probe the intentions of the men and women involved in such protests, and to make an assessment of their impact.

‘They Consider it Just…’: September 1846

In the latter half of September 1846, a number of demonstrations took place in the Decies in the western part of County Waterford. Crowds of laborers, many hundreds in number, gathered outside the houses of farmers to demand refunds of rent that they had paid for their potato gardens.⁴ ‘The crop having failed’, explained the Dungarvan resident magistrate, ‘they consider it just to obtain their money’.⁵ Baron Stuart de Decies (previously Henry Villiers Stuart MP) advised Dublin Castle that an estimated two hundred people who had followed a ringleader to the door of Glenard House demanding ‘the repayment of conacre rent money’ was ‘only a portion of the crowd he led through the parish on the same day for the purpose of coercing in a similar manner the farmers of the district’.⁶ Police sub-inspectors at Ballinamult and at Cappoquin reported that crowds of fifteen hundred and five hundred, respectively, were ‘calling on farmers’ to demand reimbursement. Intimidated, many farmers ‘promised to pay up’.⁷ Around Dungarvan, laborers told farmers ‘that unless the money be refunded by a given day, they will come back and thrash as much corn…as will not alone pay the conacre tenant, but likewise compensate him for seed, labour, &c.’. Cognizant that ‘many such cases’ went unreported, a magistrate ordered the arrest of twelve ‘captains’—a term applied to leaders of factions and agrarian secret societies—but there were difficulties in identifying these men, because their modus operandi was to have ‘strangers’ convey their demands.⁸ Thomas Fitzgerald, who had found himself in a position to observe the movement, reported that they ‘appeared altogether strangers to this side of the country. They advanced with regularity and order…armed mostly with sticks. There was no appearance of intoxication among them’.⁹ Another witness detailed visits which the crowd paid to several farmers:

Darby Brien, Ballymacart, was attacked in a violent manner, dragged about, and compelled to pay back to…his workmen £1.5.0. They then visited David Hourigan. Having told them he had no money, they threw down part of a stack of corn and said they would take it in lieu of the money. They then marched him to the old chapel, and on his promising to have it on Tuesday next, he was allowed to return home. They next visited Darby Harty of Hacketstown, took the half-door of his house, and demanded that £2.8.0 be refunded his workmen. Harty saw his own workmen among them. They threatened if he did not pay it Monday next they would take away his corn and murder him…. They also called to Mary Fegan, Glenwilliam, assaulted her, and threatened to visit her again if she did not refund David Foley £6 before Sunday next.¹⁰

The nature of conacre laborers’ relationships with such farmers can be glimpsed in a number of pre-Famine parliamentary enquiries. For instance, evidence from twenty-three Waterford informants to the Poor Inquiry of 1836 indicates that the overwhelming majority of laborers were paid, either in full or more commonly in part, in conacre or ‘dairy ground’ on which to plant potatoes. According to William Villiers Stuart (brother of Stuart de Decies), ‘the conacre when taken by the labourer from the farmer employing him is generally charged against his labour; and…very little money passes between the parties’. A Protestant clergyman observed that laborers around Lismore were paid in provisions and conacre ‘much above the market price’, and that when the crop failed the only alternatives were ‘to beg or go to law’.¹¹ An equally indignant Waterford clergyman, giving evidence to the Devon Commission in 1844, judged ‘the treatment of the labourers by the farmers more severe than the treatment of the farmers by the landlords’. Other witnesses to the Commission further illuminated these relationships. An auctioneer advised that farmers paid between £2 and £3 for land that they sublet in conacre for £4 to £6, that the laborer paid ‘this off by his labour at 6d per day’, and that in ‘trying to clear off this charge he is constantly yoked to the farmer’s employment’. Similar figures for rent and wage rates were given by other witnesses, indicating that it would have taken a Waterford laborer approximately two hundred days’ labor to pay for an acre of ‘dairy ground’.¹²

Waterford, then, was not unlike north Leinster, where William O’Reilly, a landlord near Ardee, observed: ‘Every class in this country oppresses the class below it until you come to the most wretched class…. There are no exactions practiced on their superiors that they do not practice upon those below them’.¹³ Indeed, by the eve of the Famine, the position of laborers was worse than it had been a decade or so earlier, not least as they were increasingly being obliged to pay rent in advance. Land agent James Galwey of Carrick-on-Suir explained: ‘Formerly the tenants could distrain for the potatoes if they were not paid; now the people [conacre sub-tenants] must go to the usurers to get it, or pawn their clothes, to enable them to pay the money in hand for the half acre’.¹⁴

Such exploitative relationships had resulted in extensive and violent class-based conflict in east Munster. A secret society of laborers, the Caravats, had come into conflict with the Shanavests, representing the interests of better-off tenant farmers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, these factions were succeeded by Poleens and Gows.¹⁵ In considering the inheritors of the Caravat and Poleen tradition in September 1846, the Waterford Mail lamented that while the ‘mutineers are well-known to the farmers whom they visited’, no steps were being taken to prosecute them.¹⁶ The O’Connellite Waterford Freeman was more understanding:

We do not wish to defend the late disturbances in this and the adjoining counties; at the same time, we cannot speak harshly of them. ’Tis hard to argue starvation into quiet…. If we cannot meet their demand with a concession of food, we must not hastily deny their claims. Irritation to the feelings must not be added to the pressure on the stomach. The present time calls for a sacrifice of individual opinion—for the exercise of a boundless benevolence—for the promptings of a generous patriotism; it calls also for a lenient administration of the law.¹⁷

Sympathy for the cottiers was also expressed at a number of public meetings in Waterford. Moreover, it is clear that some concession with regard to conacre was being canvassed in the wider region as the wave of protest was building in September 1846. At a ‘numerous’ meeting attended by landlords, priests, farmers and laborers at Castlelyons, near Fermoy, County Cork, on 15 September, a Catholic priest asked that the predicament of laborers, in particular, be considered, and the meeting unanimously adopted the following resolution moved by a farmer named Towell: ‘That the conacre being the basis of the contract between the farmers and their labourers and the potato crop—the produce of the land—having entirely failed, a new arrangement of their relations is imperatively and immediately needed’. A resolution along the same lines was adopted by the Relief Committee of the Ballyhard district.¹⁸ In short, then, even a cursory analysis of the conacre laborers’ protests in Waterford must restore consciousness and agency to those now frequently remembered as ‘mere hints of human beings’, and their collective action may be numbered among those movements of protest characterized by Alain Badiou as ‘interesting failures’.¹⁹

A Moral Economy?

The wave of demonstrations by Waterford conacre laborers was but one of many different movements of protest in the course of the Great Famine. Indeed, there were protests too by people belonging to classes above the laboring poor. For instance, tenant farmers mobilized for forgiveness of rents and poor rates. In one remarkable demonstration in September 1846, a thousand Protestant farmers marched from Arva, County Cavan, to Ballinalee, County Longford, to support the demand for rent reductions made by a predominantly Catholic tenantry.²⁰ As for interventions by the laborer and cottier class intended to shift the attitude of local notables or the policy of governmental agencies, they were mainly in relation to ensuring a supply of food. However, there were also militant collective acts aimed at securing and retaining employment.

To the extent that they have discussed Famine protests, historians have tended to treat them as elemental ‘rebellions of the belly’—almost physiological responses to food deprivation—rather than as efforts to enforce justice.²¹ There have been exceptions, notably Andrés Eiríksson, whose research on Counties Clare and Limerick uncovered considerable evidence of social protest informed by a sense of ‘moral economy’ in the early stages of the Famine.²² This study, drawing principally on ‘outrage’ reports for late 1845 and all of 1846, concerns protests throughout the entire country, and broadly supports Eiríksson’s findings in this regard.

The concept of a moral economy, as elaborated by E. P. Thompson, has informed much of the historiography of popular protest.²³ Based on his analysis of the eighteenth-century English crowd, Thompson’s moral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Editors’ Introduction: ‘To Assert Even the Animal’s Right of Existence’
• 1 ‘ ’Tis Hard to Argue Starvation into Quiet’: Protest and Resistance, 1846–47
• 2 ‘The Tottering, Fluttering, Palpitating Mass’: Power and Hunger in Nineteenth-Century Literary Responses to the Great Famine
• 3 Soup and Providence: Varieties of Protestantism and the Great Famine
• 4 Walking Backward to Heaven?: Edmond Ronayne’s Pilgrimage in Famine Ireland and Gilded Age America
• 5 The Great Famine, Land and the Making of the Graziers
• 6 Aspects of Agency: John Ross Mahon, Accommodation and Resistance on the Strokestown Estate, 1845–51
• 7 ‘Bastard Ribbonism’: The Molly Maguires, the Uneven Failure of Entitlement and the Politics of Post-Famine Adjustment
• Contributors
• Index