Last week I
had the opportunity to tour a group of college students around Ireland during
our spring break, helping them understand the complex history of this small
nation that so many Americans claim as part of our heritage. The country was in full pre-party mode, as we
saw signs of the coming celebrations of St. Patrick’s day throughout our time
in Galway, Cork, and Dublin. But despite
the generally celebratory air that pervaded Ireland last week, the hard lessons
of Irish history never seemed far from reach.
![]() |
Famine memorial in St. Stephen's Green in Dublin |
You can’t
dig very deeply into Ireland’s past without encountering the effects of the
potato famine that struck the island in 1845, and continued for several years
afterward. The Irish people had become
heavily dependent on the potato as their primary food source in the first half
of the 19th century; when a blight struck the potato crop,
destroying whole fields literally overnight, it had devastating
consequences. A million Irish people
died as a result of that famine; another million emigrated to England, Canada,
and the US. The Irish population peaked
at eight million on the eve of the famine; fifty years later, with the country
still reeling from the effects of starvation and emigration, the population had
dropped to four million.
More than
150 years later, the famine still lives very close to the surface of Irish
consciousness. We spent time with at
least a half-dozen tour guides at different sites throughout our stay, and
every single one of them discussed the way the famine has shaped Irish
political history, Irish music and literature, and even Irish awareness of
hunger and famine around the globe. We
saw famine memorials everywhere we turned: a plaque on a beach boulder in
Galway, a moving tribute near the small town of Lahinch, skeletal sculptures of
famine victims slouching along the river Liffey or crouched in the corner of
St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
St.
Patrick’s Day provides an opportunity for Americans, like the Irish, to
celebrate the many contributions that the Irish have made to our western
cultural heritage. But we should take
the time during this celebratory week, especially during a presidential
election season, to remember that the Irish potato famine was more than just an
unfortunate botanical event: it was a natural disaster that was deeply
intensified by a blind and unwavering commitment to unregulated, free-market
capitalism.
When the
famine struck, Ireland was in political union with England. England thus should have born the
responsibility for providing relief to its own citizens in the face of the
starvation that the Irish people experienced during the especially intense
famine years of 1845-1848. They had the
ability to do so, as many historians have pointed out. Ireland had plenty of food in the country
throughout the famine years, in the form of grains that were grown on large farms
and exported to other countries.
The English
government attempted famine relief in fits and starts, using a combination of
soup kitchens, public works programs, and imported maize to be sold to the
people at very low cost. More simple and
effective solutions to the starvation of millions of people would have been to
allow the Irish people to eat the grain they were farming for export or for the
English government to purchase food from abroad and distribute it to the
starving Irish peasants. England,
however, refused either of these courses of action—and we have ample evidence
for their reasons.
The English
politician who was in charge of the relief efforts, Charles Edward Trevelyan,
believed that giving out food to the Irish people would constitute an example
of unwise interference in the free market.
After the English government made some initial experiments with public
works programs and food donations, Trevelyan ordered those measures stopped in
late 1846, citing his fear that doing so would prevent free market innovation
from taking its course: “The only way to prevent the people from becoming
habitually dependent on government is to bring the operation to a close . . . these
things should be stopped now or we run the risk of paralysing all private
enterprise.”
![]() |
Plaque in Galway |
Trevelyan
believed that if the government gave away food to the Irish people, it would
unfairly punish the merchants who sold food.
Such interference in the free market, he argued, was never
warranted. When government officials in
Ireland sent to Trevelyan accounts of Irish children starving to death in the
streets, and asked him for food that they could dispense to the people,
Trevelyan responded by sending them copies of Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on Scarcity, an economic tract
that argued against a previous government scheme to provide an early version of
a minimum wage to agricultural workers.
Laced
throughout Trevelyan’s belief system was the judgment that providing government
assistance to people in economic distress would lead them to become dependent
upon government: “If the Irish once find out there are any circumstances in
which they can get free government grants, we shall have a system of mendacity
such as the world has never seen.”
Instead, Trevelyan believed, the government should encourage the Irish
people to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps and the problem would
solve itself.
And solve
itself it did, but not in the way they expected. While the English government sat back and
waited for free-market capitalism to rescue Ireland from its famine, a million
people died of starvation, typhus, cholera, and a host of related medical
problems. Families laid in their cabins
and died together, children in the arms of their parents. Landlords evicted
tenants who could not afford their rents, and left them to die in ditches. Dogs dined on corpses in the streets. The toll of suffering was indescribable.
The names of
Charles Edward Trevelyan and the other English politicians who allowed this
famine to occur live in infamy in Irish history. But I would contend that the real culprit in
the famine was less any single individual and instead a blind adherence to the
tenets of free-market capitalism—a shortsighted conviction that still infects
our political discourse today. Too many
Americans believe that the government should get out of the business of
interfering in markets or providing relief to its poorest and most vulnerable
citizens. Many of those Americans are
the same ones whose ancestors suffered through the famine years as the result
of those exact same sentiments.
The free
market has many blessings to bestow upon us. But when we treat it as an
untouchable idol, we lose sight of the fact that markets don’t care for
individuals; they have no obligation to help the most vulnerable among us. We also cannot count on private charity to
bear the burden of caring for those who live on the margins of the market. The
English government hoped that Irish landowners would step up to save their
fellow citizens with their charity; instead, those landowners took advantage of
the famine to clear starving tenants from their farms and make room for those
who could afford to pay their rents.
On this St.
Patrick’s Day, Irish-Americans owe it their heritage to remember the lessons
that their history has bequeathed to us.
When we hear politicians arguing that the government should get out of
the way of the markets, or that we should quit giving handouts to the poor and
let them fend for themselves, we should hear in those words the echoes of
Trevelyan and his contemporaries. We
should be careful, in our language and in our actions at the polls, not to
repeat the mistakes of the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment