Stephen Brown

The Irish famine was not caused by a potato blight. It was caused by a law passed in 1663, and the blight simply arrived to collect. Ships left Cork the whole time it was happening, carrying butter and bacon under armed guard, past people dying on the quayside. The version taught in schools is a fungus. Blight arrives, potatoes rot, tragedy. It leaves out why eight and a half million people were standing on one South American tuber to begin with, and that part is not weather. It has dates and it has signatures. Ireland had cattle before it had writing. The national epic is a war over a stolen bull. Wealth was counted in cows, rank was counted in cows, and for a thousand years the country ran on beef, milk and butter. Then in 1663 the English parliament taxed Irish cattle out of the English market, and in 1666 banned them outright, in an act that called the importing of them a common nuisance. Ireland was pushed into salt beef, hides and butter for the navy, the colonies and the slave plantations. Produced on Irish land, sold out of Irish ports, eaten somewhere else. The good ground was reorganised around what would survive a sea voyage. What was left for the people was the crop that feeds a family off a quarter of an acre of bad land. That is not a folk tradition. That is what you are reduced to when the field behind your house is producing somebody else's dinner. In 1845 the crop failed and the food kept leaving. Butter, bacon, ham and live cattle going out of Cork and Limerick and Waterford while the workhouses filled. The relief that existed came with the Gregory Clause: hold more than a quarter acre of land and you were entitled to nothing. Give up the ground or starve on it. Somebody sat down and drafted that. A million dead. A million gone. Eight and a half million down to six and a half in six years, and Ireland is the only country in Europe with fewer people in it now than in 1840. The lesson everyone takes is about the fragility of monocultures, which is a comfortable lesson, because it blames a plant. Nobody starves for want of food in a country that is exporting it. They starve because two centuries of decisions, taken by men who were never going to be hungry, left them one thing to eat and that thing could fail all at once. Ireland's cattle are now the subject of national emissions targets, and the argument is once again about what that land ought to be producing, conducted by people who will not be eating the outcome either way. The blight came in 1845. The reason it killed a million people was drafted in 1663.