BILL BRYSON’S TAKE ON THE GREAT FAMINE (1845-52) from the book “At Home”

The greatest part of the tragedy is that there was actually plenty of food in Ireland itself. The country produced great quantities of eggs, cereals and meats of every type, and brought in large hauls of food from the sea, but almost all went for export. So 1.5 million people needlessly starved. It was the greatest loss of life anywhere in Europe since the Black Death.

Many people [in Europe] considered the potato an unwholesome vegetable because its edible parts grew below ground rather than reaching nobly for the sun. Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato on the grounds that it nowhere appears in the Bible.

Only the Irish couldn’t afford to be so particular. For them the potato was a godsend because of its very high yields. A single acre of stony soil could support a family of six if they were prepared to eat a lot of potatoes, and the Irish, of necessity, were. By 1780, 90 per cent of people there were dependent for their survival exclusively or almost exclusively on potatoes. Unfortunately, the potato is also one of the most vulnerable of vegetables [and] failed harvests became regular. In the 120 years leading up to the great famine, the potato crop failed no fewer than twenty-four times. Three hundred thousand people died in a single failure in 1739. But that appalling total was made to seem insignificant by the scale of death and suffering in 1845-6.

It happened very quickly. The crops looked fine until August and then suddenly they drooped and shrivelled. The tubers when dug up were spongy and already putrefying. That year half the Irish crop was lost. The following year virtually all of it was wiped out. The culprit was a fungus called Phytophthora infestans, but people didn’t know that. Instead they blamed almost anything else they could think of – steam from steam trains, the electricity from telephone signals (…) It wasn’t only in Ireland the crops failed. They failed across Europe. It was just that the Irish were especially dependent on them.

Relief was famously slow to come. Months after the starvation had started, Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, was still urging caution. ‘There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable’, he wrote. In the worst year of the potato famine, London’s fish market, Billingsgate, sold 500 million oysters, one billion fish herrings, almost 100 million soles, 498 million shrimps, 304 million periwinkles, 33 million plaice, 23 million mackerel and other similarly massive amounts, and not one morsel of any of it made its way to Ireland to relieve the starving people there.