THE Irish historical debate about the Great Famine of 1845-50 - in which one million Irish people died, despite the expenditure of millions of pounds of British aid - is a rather curious one. In particular, how should the role of the British government be viewed? Forty years ago R. Dudley Edwards and T.D. Williams of University College, Dublin in response to a proposal by Taoiseach Eamon De Valera -- edited the first academic history of the famine (The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, Dublin, 1956).
When the famine actually was a living memory it was a painful, ambiguous one for those who lived in Ireland. There were many who effectively denounced the British government from the start, but all the political implications were not so clearcut. In 1880, W.E. Forster was appointed Gladstone's Chief Secretary in Dublin. Forster struggled unavailingly with a new upsurge in nationalist agrarian radicalism; yet, as a young man, he had played a key role in the magnificent Quaker relief effort during the famine. In ironic contrast, the police records mutter darkly about prominent anti-government activists who benefited directly from the famine clearances or the post-famine transition to pasture in general.
From the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1858, almost up to the transformative and modernising Whitaker Report of 1958, Irish nationalism was afflicted by a central contradiction: officially the most successful political movements - the Fenians, the Land League, the United Irish League, Sinn Fein and then Fianna Fail - were committed to a policy of agrarian radicalism, `undoing the work of the famine'. This implied land redistribution and a more labour-intensive agriculture. Yet, although the Anglo-Irish landlords were defeated, this never happened on any significant scale, because too many Irish farmers had benefited from the post-famine transition to pasture.
With independence, the promised return to pre-famine levels of population did not happen. Indeed, 2.97 million citizens in 1926 dropped to 2.88 million in 1966; whilst the 1950s levels of emigration exceeded those of the last phase of British rule. The scholars who produced the Great Famine were for the most part products of this world, hence perhaps its 'dehydrated' quality - to employ the term used wryly in the diary of one of the editors. While there was no failure to criticise the simplistic, ruthless, even pseudo-moral adherence to market laws of the Whig government, there was a clear avoidance of presentation of harrowing scenes distressing material which is hard to avoid for anyone who does serious work on the famine.
Publication information: Article title: England's Willing Executioners?. Contributors: Bew, Paul - Author. Magazine title: The Spectator. Volume: 278. Issue: 8810 Publication date: June 7, 1997. Page number: 21+. © Spectator Mar 7, 2009. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.