ThE FaMiNe – An GoRtA MóR 4. Political changes


Many people blamed the British government for the Famine. The British policy of laissez- faire and the continued exportation of food from a famine-stricken Ireland were greatly resented. Furthermore, many of the British upper-class did not care about Ireland’s difficulties and in some cases even seemed to feel it was deserved. Politicians such as Charles Edward Trevelyan believed that ‘the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated . . . The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people’. The bitter resentment felt by the Irish people would later be seen in the uprisings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.


Some Irish politicians were determined that the level of rural decline should never happen again. Although Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell were only born during the Famine, the results of it shaped their lives as they grew up and led to their campaigns to change land ownership in Ireland. These changes helped to improve living conditions in the Irish countryside in the late nineteenth century.


Event The Irish Famine


Compensation to slave-owners when slavery was abolished in 1830s The Crimean War of 1854–6 against the Russians


Source: The Irish Famine by Peter Grey (1995)


Total amount spent by the British Government


€7,900,000 €22,550,000 €79,000,000


Fig 12.12 The table compares the amount of money spent by the British government on different events.


12


321


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