When the potato crop failed across Europe in 1845, nowhere was more vulnerable than Ireland where two million people depending on the crop for survival. The situation was compounded by a second failure in 1846 and a third in 1848. It led to demographic collapse. By 1852 one million Irish people were dead while another million had emigrated, mainly to Britain and America. This was a gigantic failure of will on the part of the British government which ruled Ireland from London. American historian Leslie Williams’ Daniel O’Connell, the British Press and the Irish Famine explores one of the reasons for that failure: the British press’s poor view of Ireland in general and Daniel O’Connell in particular.
Ireland had been united with Britain for almost half a century, but it was an unequal union. Ireland’s Protestant-only parliament dissolved itself in 1800 but most power remained in the hands of a Protestant elite supported by Tory governments in London. Irish Catholics led by brilliant barrister Daniel O’Connell used the courts to challenge Protestant domination. He founding the Catholic Association in 1823 and achieved Catholic Emancipation six years later. In parliament O’Connell worked for further reforms in alliances with the British Whigs. That ended when the Tories returned to power in 1841. O’Connell began advocating repeal of the Act of Union. It wasn’t just the government he had to fight, the Times newspaper and editor John Delane also had a deep loathing of O’Connell. As O’Connell held mass meetings throughout the Repeal year 1843, the Times dismissed his movement as “agitation” and believed the “Repeal rent” was merely excuse to enlarge O’Connell’s personal fortune. This negativity descended into generalised racial attacks. The Times believed that Britain had bestowed “kindnesses” on Ireland which was met by distrust and ingratitude.
The weekly Punch also turned its famous political cartoons against the Liberator. It often showed the ogre O’Connell holding a bag labelled “rint” (the mispelt “rent” a signifier of inferior class and ethnicity) while he feasted on his ignorant “pisantry” (punning on worthless “pissants”). When Tory prime minister Robert Peel banned O’Connell’s Clontarf meeting in 1843 and subsequently arrested him, Punch portrayed O’Connell as “the Irish Frankenstein” losing control of the violent Repeal monster. The Times and Punch continued the attack on O’Connell during his trial, but the more sympathetic Illustrated London News drawings showed him as a dignified leader. An all-Protestant jury found O’Connell guilty but his jail sentence was overturned on appeal to the House of Lords. Punch portrayed him as a little boy crying “I will have Repale”.
Determined to weaken O’Connell’s hold on Ireland, Peel formed a royal commission headed by the Earl of Devon into the conditions of Irish land occupation. Though dominated by landlords, the Devon Commission took its job seriously, interviewing a thousand witnesses and publishing detailed findings in early 1845. The report avoided radical reform but criticised landlords for subdividing holdings at ever increasing rents while lessees had no security of tenure. Even this was too much for the Times which blamed the Irish for their impoverishment. The newspaper sent Thomas Campbell Foster to investigate, dubbing him its “Irish Commissioner” as if he was a corrective to the government body. His letters ran from August 1845 to January 1846 and though this was exactly when the potato blight made its first appearance, Campbell concentrated on “agrarian outrages”, attacks and murders of officials by desperate Irish peasants. While Forster (and the Devon Commission) correctly identified that peasants got no compensation for land improvements, he preferred to blame their “their own apathy and indifference” and believed the answer was an English-style grain industry. His letters home reflected British moral superiority.
By October 1845 many British and Irish papers were reporting the blight but Campbell focused on Irish violence. On November 1 he finally acknowledged “rotten potatoes” but was still critical that Limerick was holding an All Saints Day fair with “thousands of people idling in the street”. Campbell condemned Irish apathy saying “they will do nothing till starvation faces them.” With calls to keep Irish agricultural produce at home to compensate for potatoes, the Times worried there would be less supply to England and the grain price would rise. It believed the problem would be solved by the repeal of the Corn Laws, tariffs on foreign grains which kept food prices high. This was the policy of the opposition Whigs and anti-protectionist the Economist founded in 1843 to promote free trade. Protectionist newspapers preferred to downplay the famine, the Scotsman believing Irish distress was only a “repeal cry”. Neither side wanted English money to be spent on Irish relief and the closer Ireland came to catastrophe the more London papers focused on the impact to England.
Peel resigned in late 1845 but Whig leader Lord John Russell could not form a government. Peel resumed power and tried to implement Corn Law repeal. The Tories split between Peelists and protectionists as the government wobbled on for six months. When O’Connell voted with Whigs and Tory Protectionists to defeat an Irish Coercion Bill, Peel’s government was doomed. While O’Connell wanted another alliance with a Whig government, the Times warned the Whigs would soon tire of “unprofitable concessions and rejected advances”.
Punch preferred to delight in Irish political troubles thanks to a split in the Repeal organisation with the Young Ireland faction opposed to the Whig alliance. “A gentleman in difficulties” showed the farmer O’Connell unable to control his Young Ireland shoat while another cartoon showed a “monkey faced” Young Ireland leader and MP William Smith O’Brien selling bullets, blunderbusses and pistols to an equally simian “Paddy”.
Irish people were starting to die in numbers, but it was not bullets and blunderbusses killing them. The sympathetic Illustrated London News reported of men, women and children perishing in Galway “of diseases brought on by misery and destitution”. As a particularly cruel winter set in, deaths rose sharply. In December even the Times noted that in Skibbereen, Co. Cork entire families were dying “in every wretched hovel” with rats devouring the corpses. Yet the same paper in the same month claimed there was “grand national embezzlement” with a million Irish paupers “feeding and clothing themselves on the bounty of the British nation”. It said England must be “freed from the dragchain of Irish improvidence” and like prime minister Russell, believed Irish landlords should take responsibility for the crisis. Neither Russell nor the Times distinguished between sympathetic landlords who lived on their lands from absentee landlords who allowed unscrupulous middle men and agents a free hand in Ireland. Many senior Whigs were large property owners in Ireland including foreign minister Lord Palmerston and Lord of the Treasury Marquess of Lansdowne.
In January 1847 the government extended the Irish Poor Law to allow for outdoor relief in the form of soup kitchens but insisted the cost be borne from local rates. As Black ’47 took hold, the Times said Ireland’s normal state is destitution, describing the worst famine in a century as business as usual. When Tory protectionist leader George Bentinck proposed a famine relief scheme to build Irish railways, the Observer accused him of promoting Ireland “at the expense of John Bull’s pockets”. Only the Illustrated London News showed understanding. Its reports and drawings from West Cork in February showed scenes of growing horror with sparsely-attended funerals every hundred yards.
When Smith O’Brien demanded action in parliament, the government blamed Dublin Castle. Russell’s hands were tied by opponents to Irish aid within his government. In March he proposed a new Poor Law for Ireland to grant outdoor relief to able-bodied poor at landlords’ expense. He saw it as a transition from a land of indolent potato-growers to grain-fed day labourers reliant on seasonal wages from landholders. As Williams wrote, it would result in thousands pushed onto the roads and workhouses to die.
Yet the villain, according to Punch, remained Daniel O’Connell. Though the Liberator was dying in early 1847, Punch’s cartoons still saw him as a charlatan “rint” collector outwitted by Russell’s Irish policies. Ireland’s great statesman was demeaned as a fat old man in a ridiculous hat taking money from paupers. O’Connell’s final impassioned speech at Westminster was accorded little respect. Parliament, he said, was ignorant “of the real state of horror in which Ireland is plunged.” O’Connell died en route to Rome in May 1847, the Times blaming the Liberator for his own death for neglecting the advice of Paris doctors. While the world mourned a great statesman, the Times called him a “perfect demagogue” whom few Englishmen would “believe one single statement to be correct.”
As 1847 potato harvest approached, British papers claimed that Ireland was recovering. In Punch‘s cartoon “Consolation for the Million, a British breadloaf congratulated the Irish potato for looking so well. But while the blight receded in 1847 the government had refused to distribute seed potatoes. Only one seventh of the usual crop was planted, bringing a harvest far too small to feed starving millions. The death rate increased while many western Poor Law Unions went bankrupt. A famine financial appeal led by the Queen fell on deaf ears, the Economist said because Britain’s own poor were suffering and “the Irish do not deserve famine relief”. Newspapers turned their attention to agrarian crime and the murder of Major Denis Mahon in Roscommon overshadowed all other considerations. British reports portrayed Mahon as a sympathetic landlord though he had evicted 900 people that year. When a Catholic priest unwisely compared Mahon to Cromwell, papers suggested the Church was fomenting revolution. “The priest sends out his Thug upon a sacred mission,” the Times thundered.
Williams was among many modern historians who unfairly blamed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Trevelyan for Britain’s cold-hearted response. The Peel and Russell governments were responsible for the Irish situation. Trevelyan efficiently followed government policy at all times and was sympathetic to Ireland. Nevertheless he ran the day-to-day operation with a miserly iron hand. In early 1848 Trevelyan wrote about its “success” in the Whig journal Edinburgh Review. He believed the famine was over and the Irish would be transformed by the experience. Potatoes were too easy to grow, permitting too much leisure time, which offended Victorian moralism. Potato cultivation also disturbed the hierarchical relationship between classes and Irish smallholders were more akin to South Sea Islanders than “the great civilised communities”. Such independence, said Trevelyan, led only to “poverty, discontent and idleness.” The feeding of the Irish was less important than re-ordering their lives. The blight was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence” and now that it had exhausted itself, Irish peasants would become obedient bread-eating agricultural labourers, curing their indolence while serving their masters.
Not everyone was convinced by Trevelyan’s rosy view. The Irish Lord Lieutenant wrote privately they were “a long way from those halcyon days with which Trevelyan winds up his article.” After the third potato failure in 1848, landlord Monteagle suggested the Edinburgh Review ask Trevelyan to write another article called “The Relapse”. But even after the third failure, British newspapers were still blaming the Irish for their problems. The Times said the Irish were “sitting idle at home, wishing death to the Saxon, and laying everything that happens on the Saxon’s door.” Young Irelanders, already radicalised by Britain’s famine response, were encouraged by news of a successful uprising in France. By July even the moderate Smith O’Brien was threatening revolution. The government mobilised the army and removed habeas corpus in Ireland. Smith O’Brien’s rebellion came to a miserable end at Ballingarry, where his ragtag army were defeated by 50 well-armed policemen in a strong defensive position. Though the Times dismissed the rebellion as a “great sham”, it demanded participants be treated as “enemies and traitors”. The papers keenly followed the treason trials of Smith O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and O’Donohoe and it was not until they were sentenced to death (later commuted to transportation) that newspapers returned to the ongoing agony of the Famine.
On December 16, 1848, the Illustrated London News printed the powerful illustration “ejectment of Irish tenantry” where a woman begs a mounted landlord to spare her cabin while soldiers with fixed bayonets look on. A vast and necessary social change was taking place in Ireland, the ILN said, but it was accompanied by “an amount of human misery that is abundantly appalling.” While the soldiers were an uncomfortable reminder that social change in Ireland was being carried out at the barrel of a gun, the press continued to see Ireland’s debt-ridden landlords as the cause of the problem. Russell’s government passed an encumbered estates act in 1847 but sales were tied up in the Courts of Chancery. When Peel proposed an encumbered estates commission to bypass the courts, Punch pictured him as the new St Patrick “turning the reptiles out of Ireland”. The Times imagined a new plantation of Ireland, though ironically their own anti-Irish reporting turned off likely British investors.
Starvation continued in 1849, but like modern media, the press were absorbed by royalty when the Queen announced a visit to Ireland. Punch imagined Victoria as fashionably-attired Britannia paying “a morning call” at the ragged hut of Hibernia, who tells her, “Sure Sisther, it’s not what you’ve been accustomed to exactly, but anyhow you’re welcome”. Victoria’s tour of eastern cities steered well-clear of famine-affected areas, but the visit helped bring more knowledge of Ireland to English readers. When the royal yacht reached Waterford Harbour, Prince Albert took a steamer up the river to the city “so famous for butter and bacon and Young Irelandism“, a Times dig at Waterford-born Thomas Francis Meagher, then on his way to exile in Van Diemen’s Land. The paper believed that the royal visit was the “concluding chapter of the history of Irish rebellion”. As steam travel and railways reduced the tyranny of distance, the ILN even promoted Irish tourism such as “Excursion to Killarney” though it had to gloss over ruined and abandoned houses along the way, “the very picture of desolation”. At late as Christmas 1849, the paper was still offering “illustrations of the new Poor Law” showing starving shoeless women searching for potatoes in a field in the middle of winter while Kilrush “in-door paupers were obliged to go to bed without dinner”.
By 1850, said Williams, Ireland was completely transformed by “blight, bureaucracy and the press”. The British government failed to prioritise humanitarian concerns and evaluated relief efforts not on effectiveness but on “theoretical correctness, administrative convenience, economic ‘soundness’ and political acceptability”. The British press were unable to keep up with the long-running saga with its constantly shifting dynamics and failed to grasp the depth of the tragedy. Some courageous journalism from the ILN aside, Irish events were reported primarily for their impact on England. Distancing from the tragedy was inevitable and even today, most Western media consumers are spared the horrors of Third World famines. Compassion fatigue sets in and after a time, people dying day after day ceases to become “news”. It was easy to blame the Irish for their own problems because they were lazy, dirty, lying, improvident or violent. By unstated contrast, the British had the exact opposite traits: industrious, clean, truthful, thrifty and law-abiding. The “killing remarks” of Williams’ title were rooted in this subconscious concern for validating British values.
Woolly Days 
