Parnell and the landek used evictions as part of their rhetoric. Those who were more likely to die during the famine whor people who didn't go on any land. So there wasn't an issue of evicting them off their holdings. But one of the slogans of parnell and davit was, keep a firm grip of your homesteads. And that somehow, in the 18 eighties, it wrung. It was very effective, even though, like i say, para ically, the people who suffered most were, for all intents and purposes, landless in the first place.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why the potato crop failures in the 1840s had such a catastrophic impact in Ireland. It is estimated that one million people died from disease or starvation after the blight and another two million left the country within the decade. There had been famines before, but not on this scale. What was it about the laws, attitudes and responses that made this one so devastating?
The image above is from The Illustrated London News, Dec. 29, 1849, showing a scalp or shelter, "a hole, surrounded by pools, and three sides of the scalp were dripping with water, which ran in small streams over the floor and out by the entrance. The poor inhabitants said they would be thankful if the landlord would leave them there, and the Almighty would spare their lives. Its principal tenant is Margaret Vaughan."
With
Cormac O'Grada
Professor Emeritus in the School of Economics at University College Dublin
Niamh Gallagher
University Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge
And
Enda Delaney
Professor of Modern History and School Director of Research at the University of Edinburgh
Producer: Simon Tillotson