IT is difficult to know how many men and women died in Ireland in the famine years between 1845 and 1852. Perhaps all that matters is the certainty that many, very many died. The Great Famine was not the first nor the last period of acute distress in Irish history. The Great Famine may be seen as but a period of greater misery in a prolonged age of suffering, but it has left an enduring mark on the folk memory because of its duration and severity. The famine is seen as the source of many woes, the symbol of the exploitation of a whole nation by its oppressors. If only because of its importance in the shaping of Irish national thought, the famine deserves examination. But it was much more than a mere symbol. The economic and social influences of the famine were considerable; many of the most persistent trends in modern Irish life emerge with the famine, while the years of distress also saw the end of a phase in the agitation for national self-government. In Irish social and political history the famine was very much of a watershed. The Ireland on the other side of those dark days is a difficult world for us to understand, the Ireland that emerged we recognise as one with problems akin to our own.
In the year 1848, Charles Gavan Duffy, the Young Irelander, full of anger and mortification could cry out that the famine was nothing less than, ‘a fearful murder committed on the mass of the people’. That indictment has come down to us alive and compelling in the writings of John Mitchel. This famine, which saw the destruction of the cottier class and forced some 3,000,000 people to live on charity in the year 1847, was something which went to the very basis of Irish society. It is easy to say, at a distance of a century, that men like Mitchel and Gavan Duffy wrote in an exaggerated way about the famine and that it was quite absurd for P. A. Sillard, the biographer of John Mitchel, to compare a respectable whig administrator, like Lord Clarendon, with the stern Elizabethan Lord Mountjoy, who destroyed the very crops of his enemies. These accusations may be exaggerated, but their influence on Irish thought and the sincerity with which they were made can hardly be doubted.
In the existing commentaries on the famine period, it is possible to detect two trends of thought related but yet distinct. On the one hand, we find that the more actively the writer wasinterested in political nationalism, the more determined he appeared to place full personal responsibility on the British government and its agents for what happened in Ireland. So it was with Gavan Duffy and later with Arthur Griffith, who could say that the British government deliberately used ‘the pretext of the failure of the potato crop to reduce the Celtic population by famine and exile’. In contrast to this approach, we find the heirs of Fintan Lalor less willing to see in the Great Famine a conscious conspiracy against the nation. For them the disaster has a more organic, less deliberate origin. It was the social system rather than government which was at fault. James Connolly, in his acute analysis of Irish society, could declare: ‘No man who accepts capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically
