The Great Irish Famine - documentary (1996)

[Applause] st. Patrick's Day New York 40 million Americans claim Irish descent this is their chance to celebrate their achievement as one of the largest and richest communities in the United States [Applause] they are so successful in fact that many other New Yorkers are also happy to be Irish for the day it's hard to believe that some of these people are the descendants of Irish immigrants who first came here a hundred and fifty years ago in misery and despair [Applause] [Music] this is the story of how the people of a green and fertile country came to starve and why the repeated failure of the potato crop led to the deaths of a million people and the emigration of perhaps a million more Oh No ah hee [Music] Mahe [Music] the dead on coffins naked funerals consisting only of the cart driver and someone to help them putting the bodies into the grave oh yeah [Music] as for the little children they seem to me to be all stunted in their growth and barring his closer resemblance as possible to unfledged births [Music] the same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining land which was observed shut for many days and two frozen corpses were found lying upon mud floor half devoured by rats [Music] Dublin is known today as the capital city of Ireland but in the first half of the 19th century Ireland was essentially a British colony and Dublin was one of the jewels in Britain's imperial crown Ireland had been left behind by the Industrial Revolution except for parts of the Northeast whatever well she had didn't come from Commerce and Industry but from agriculture and most of that wealth was controlled by the Anglo Irish descendants of early English settlers who had taken over the country 200 years before historian Ian Gibson is about to start a journey that will touch four countries and cross an ocean in search of the truth about the great Irish Famine in the times leading up to the famine about 3/4 of the Irish population was Roman Catholic despite their numbers they lived in a Protestant state and were not allowed to have their own churches at one time the priests were so persecuted they had to say Mass in secret gave the cop to his disciples and said take this all of you and Drain from us this is the cup of My Blood the blood of the new and everlasting covenant it will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven do this in memory of me since the early 18th century a series of laws had severely penalized Irish Catholics they were forbidden to hold government office they couldn't go to school and they weren't even allowed to buy or sell land unless they turned Protestant in practice few of these laws were rigorously enforced and they were all revealed by 1829 but the very existence was an insult to Catholics who were made to feel like second-class citizens in their own land [Music] the established Church of Ireland was Protestant which meant it served the spiritual needs of only about 1/7 of the population Irish Catholics often hated the Church of Ireland because while they never entered its doors they had to pay tithes to support it and it was the religion of the ruling class at the time of the famine over 80% of the land and almost all the great houses like this one at strokes Town Park were owned by Anglo Irish gentry [Music] most of these landlords were descendants of English adventurers who had been granted lands by the kings of England in the 16th and 17th centuries they look down on the native Irish people and went to great lengths to avoid them here in the kitchen the lady of the house avoided contact with her lowly Irish servants by dropping the daily menu from the gallery above [Music] in the stable-yard a tunnel passes beneath the garden the servants had to use it to cross from one end of the building to the other so the ladies and gentlemen of the house wouldn't have to see them similarly the landlord had little contact with the poor people on his estate even though he presided over a ramshackle pyramid of tendencies and sub tendencies often the estate was hopelessly in debt so the land was rented to wealthy tenants on long leases tenants would then divide and sublet the land to less wealthy tenants and so on and so on down the economic scale in the remote Irish speaking districts of the south and west the poorest tenants would often subdivide their land into tiny plots which they parceled out to family members so you get a dualistic system where the better off farmers cannot subdivide and so the the inequality in the distribution of land over time is becoming greater farms that are of fifty or a hundred acres in say they are 1800 are still more or less like that in 1845 but firms of 10 acres many of them would have been divided into three or three acres or two or five acres or whatever another difference is that on the bigger farms people tend to marry later and where subdivision is occurring you get early marriage and more frequent marriage what you have is a society where there was in some areas quite a lot of vacant land available which was only under very loose control and basically access to land was relatively easy much easier for a young person without capital than in Britain or a lot of other parts of Northern Europe at the time and the importance of that is that first of all people could marry and such set up home as a relatively early age secondly the size of holdings could become quite small the result is that by the 1840s you have a lot of people in Ireland living on very very small holdings of land so you have a very strange picture in our underwear there's almost an inverse relationship between land fertility and population density in other words a lot of the smallest plots of land are in the worst quality soil in western island farmers had to contend with poor stony ground and with very heavy rainfall which reduced the fertility of the soil the climate was better suited for grazing cattle than for growing corn the only crop they could count on was potatoes the splendiferous spud one of nature's greatest inventions full of nutrition it's got carbohydrate it's got protein got lots of vitamins it's a bit weak on vitamin A so we put in some buttermilk or if there's some greens handy that will also do the job a man can live on potatoes perfectly easily in fact the potato transformed life in the remote countryside like here on the coast of mayo for almost 5000 years the Irish had lived mostly off the cattle and then around the early 18th century they discovered the growing potatoes helped them to raise far larger families on far smaller plots of land the people are gone but the land is still ribbed with lazy beds the ridges were they once grew their potatoes those regions would indicate tremendous pressure on the land because I think one has to be under great pressure to be up here at all tilling this land there's so much rock and there's so much stone it certainly isn't the best land for cultivation and yet there is intensive cultivation here all these plots of averages and the height of those ridges I think some of them are never devout there is an indication that crops were planted here and never gave any return but the interesting thing is that in grassland and in the pasture for defense that you've had 200 generations of that and then relatively recent in looking at the whole perspective of Irish agriculture you had this wonderful which came in from America the potato it allowed for a tremendous crops to be taken off tiny plots of the tiny plots of ridges it gave this tremendous crop it meant that you had a massive explosion of population but then disaster a hit and possibly what we're looking at is that moment of disaster when this Wonder crop showed that there was a negative side to it as well after what was a relatively short episode a period at the potato thanks to the success of the new crop by the 1840s 8 million people lived in Ireland almost half of them existing only on potatoes at this village sleeve more on Akal Island the people were rich enough to keep a few cattle as well most of the well-to-do families would have owned about six cows some would have had a pony others would have had a couple of donkeys the climate in Ireland actually is particularly the west of Ireland is very mild so they would have been kept in the fields around in what is called the outfield but in winter weather conditions were very bad some of them would have to be brought into the houses in a lot of the houses actually you had the opposing doorway which is a very ancient feature indeed it goes back to early medieval times and issues we surmised that this is to facilitate the cattle being brought in the front door here milked and then brought out the back or West door so that the cattle wouldn't have to be turned round in the house seaweed was very important as fertilizer for the potato crop many poor people lived as close to the sea as possible those who didn't would carry the seaweed on the backs of donkeys or on their own backs as much as 15 miles inland [Music] here in County Sligo this is what the spring planting might have looked like in the middle of the 19th century [Music] first the men would spread a mixture of seaweed and manure or sometimes seaweed alone along the line of each Ridge with a spade or this tool called alloy they cut underneath the turf and turned over the seaweed to make a kind of fertilizer sandwich between two layers of turf [Music] [Applause] they then planted seed potatoes using a tool which in Sligo they called a spud [Music] we only grew well in the East of Ireland but some Western farmers managed to raise a small crop of oats or barley to help pay the rent while the family lived almost entirely on potatoes a quarter of the population over two million people had no land at all and they would trade their labor for a small potato patch on someone else's land they also had access to ancient bogs where they could cut the peat or the turf that provided them with building material for their homes and fuel for the fire which kept them warm throughout the winter and so with the potatoes and the turf they managed to raise large families and keep them in good health but it was always a hand-to-mouth existence there was one problem with the potato potatoes can only be stored for six to nine months between May when the last harvest was exhausted and October when the new potatoes came in the Irish starved the little every summer in the summer of 1845 that was a minor inconvenience heavy August rains promised an abundant potato crop this rural life was lampooned by the English as absurd the Irish were as foreign to the British as South Sea Islanders they were thought of as incapable of living a civilised existence English visitors were often horrified by the extent of Irish poverty a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury and their pig and their manure heap constitutes their only property in less than 50 years the population of Ireland had almost doubled in a country so dependent upon the land for sustenance this produced a crisis for the poor 130 work houses were built throughout Ireland poor people who sought refuge in them were known as paupers if they were accepted they had proved their destitute I owned no land no buildings etc they had to come in as a family unit mothers children they couldn't just come in as an individual once that she got into the workhouse they were then segregated very strictly according to gender some men and women were separated and then according to aged children under two were kept in a separate ward children aged 2 to 15 was separated from their parents so there was a process of separation within the workhouse and there's a strong disciplinary element as well poor people hated work houses and that was the way the British officials wanted it relief should be made so unattractive as to furnish no motive to ask for it except in the absence of every other means of subsistence rules were very strict and infringement swers aveer lee punished sometimes by flogging sometimes by solitary confinement there was little need for the workhouse as long as the potato harvest was good historically most crop failures had been limited to a few small areas and never lasted more than a season in September of 1845 farmers in many districts found signs of a new disease on the leaves of some potato plants no one knew it at the time but it was potato blight a fungus infection accidentally imported from America there was as yet no cause for alarm because when the crop was lifted that autumn most of the tubers looked sound it was an abundant harvest when the potatoes were placed in storage they quickly began to rot very soon people in many parts of Ireland were facing a winter without food the government set up a scientific commission to try to find a cure for the disease but scientific knowledge wasn't far enough advanced and it would be years before a way was found to prevent potato blight the immediate need was for an emergency food supply to replace the potato the answer was another import from America it was a grain known as maize or Indian corn in the fall of 1845 Sir Robert Peel the British Prime Minister imported Indian corn into Ireland on a vast scale surprisingly little of the corn was made available for hungry people the idea was never to provide a handout most of it was kept in government warehouses as an economic control over local grain merchants who would be forced to keep their own prices low in order to avoid being undercut by the sale of the government corn the local grain merchants complained bitterly about government interference in their markets the problem was poor people had no money to buy food at any price so the government instituted public works mostly Road building programs in the most destitute areas the projects were widely criticised as useless and in fact employment didn't always go to those who need it at most but when a man got work he could earn just about enough to buy meal and feed his family in the winter of 1845 46 many people went hungry but few actually starved they were holding on desperately believing that the next potato crop would make it possible for them to survive the following winter in London Prime Minister Peel was in political trouble over his control of the grain market with the imported American maize at the time farmers in England and in Ireland were virtually guaranteed a high price for the grain because of high tariffs on wheat imported from America Peel tried to reduce those tariffs in order to bring down the price of food he was bitterly opposed by English and Irish farmers who were already angered by his interference in their markets in June of 1846 Pele and his Tory party fell from power and replaced by the Liberal Party known as the Whigs the new Prime Minister Lord John Russell had little interest in Irish Affairs and past responsibility for famine relief to Sir Charles wood Chancellor of the Exchequer but it was a British civil servant who would soon have the power of life and death over famine victims Charles Trevelyan assistant secretary of the Treasury he didn't believe in government aid and his views were widely shared by Whig politicians I do not think the way to raise the condition of the people is to give relief from any public fund it is clear that the Irish pauper does not like work I object to the principle of taxing the people in this country to relieve the distress of Ireland in Ireland hungry people spent the summer watching their potato patches looking for signs of the harvest would be healthy and abundant in late July in the space of a few days their worst fears were realized on the 27th of last month's I passed from Cork to Dublin and his doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest returning on the third instant I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrifying vegetation [Music] [Music] [Music] a few potatoes seem to resist the disease and everywhere people scrambled in the soil desperate to rescue them in the past year of suffering most had exhausted what few resources they had now nothing was left and with dreadful rapidity they began to starve the new wig government was determined not to undercut the free market in corn and refused to bring fresh supplies to the government stores food prices soared and people went on fed these pictures of poor women and children searching for food were drawn at the time by an artist from the Illustrated London News they passed through three stages but first they face starvation manfully too proud to accept grudged help then they were mad with despair [Music] then they were full of hopeless resignation The Hunger is honest which is the will of God the will of God be done [Music] they went under short and every Iraq and every every place the door was turned over but looking for limpets and Winton's they had everything and then they started eating the seaweed choppin it up and boil it and they died with dysentery and black fever and starting fever and yellow fever they were day and every day later eating raw shellfish and seaweed cause dysentery the people may have known that raw shellfish could be dangerous but they were too desperate to care they no longer had the strength to cut turf to cook their food the weather that winter was the worst on record it was described as one continuous storm it takes great strength and agility to launch these West Coast fishing boats through the breakers weakened by hunger many fishermen drowned that winter the others pawned their nets and used the money to buy food in huge numbers starving people turn to the public works often laboring on useless projects building roads to nowhere the system as it operated in some places tended to benefit the strong and those who could work at the expense of those who couldn't and in that sense it was an inefficient way of providing relief again it involved people working out in the open in bad clothes in bad weather and so on and that is not an ideal way of dealing with people who are on the brink of dying there was no other form of relief available that winter so the Board of Public Works began to hire women children even old people it gave them a wage but at the same time it didn't ensure that they had access to food and the wage in fact was a starvation wage it wasn't enough to buy food in 1846 food prices soared within Ireland but what the government had done was promised the corn merchants that it wouldn't import corn into the East of Ireland in 1846 and I think that is perhaps the government's greatest mistake grain exports from Ireland to England were less than half what they had been the previous year but many people were angered to see any grain at all leaving the country at a time of such desperate need again the government refused to intervene there had been crop failures throughout Europe but other governments Belgium Russia Alexandria were importing food they were closing their ports to export and they were actually providing bounties for food imported into their countries the British government refused to do that and it very much left Ireland to free market forces in many places public markets offered food in plain sight of the people but even the cheapest food available had tripled in price since the previous year and the poor laboring on public works could no longer make enough to pay for it in the spring of 1847 the Public Works program was shut down brought to an abrupt halt by the British government the poor had no food and now they had no work this year will always be remembered by the Irish as black 47 weakened by hunger the people began to die our fever many survivors left their homes in a desperate search for relief taking sickness with them as they went [Music] [Applause] [Music] thousands crowded into work houses where fevers spread from one victim to another this book is a workhouse register which recorded what happened to each individual in the spring of 1847 the entries make monotonous reading died died died died died with the elimination of the Public Works the British government through the whole burden of famine relief on the Irish ratepayers and many landlords were already hopelessly in debt up to this point the government had borne much of the expense of famine relief from the autumn of 1847 onwards the entire burden was to fall on the Irish ratepayers the landlord's and the richer tenants the new legislation was called the poor law extension Act and it reflected the views of the Treasury secretary in charge of famine relief Charles Trevelyan in addition to requiring landlords to make the payment of rates or taxes to support work houses it also made it illegal for anyone to seek admission to the workhouse if they were in possession of more than a quarter of an acre of land so in order to qualify for relief many starving people had to give up their land and the new Act only made a bad situation worse such a tangled mass of poverty filth and disease as the applicants presented I have never seen numbers in all stages of fever and smallpox and all clamoring for admission the act really hit the landlords because it placed all the onus of famine relief on the shoulders of local rate payers as if there wasn't bad enough the landlord's had now to pay the rates of the pura tennis force were they to do it began to dawn on them and by evicting that tenants they could avoid the payments of rates tenens spent what little money they had on food not rent so it was easy for a landlord to get an eviction order against them [Music] entire villages were cleared the poor people who had been evicted weren't allowed to stay on the estate because if they did the landlord would still be liable for the taxes other tenants were forbidden to take them in on pain of eviction themselves homeless people lined the roadsides the ditch side the dripping rain and the cold sleet are the covering of the wretched outcast the moment the cabin is tumbled over him no country ravaged by a hostile army could have been reduced to a more deplorable condition it's difficult to understand how landlords in their agents could have been so callous but the effect of the Poor Law extension Act was to ensure that any landlord who didn't want to be ruined by the famine had almost no alternative but to evict as many people as possible [Music] towns like Skibbereen and County Cork with the relief centers for huge gatherings of starving people that winter which also made them centers for the transmission of disease Skibbereen was the site of the government food store and the local Relief Committee ran a soup kitchen for the poor any day that you would have come to this town in the winter of 1846 47 you would have seen approximately 8,000 people gathered here outside the soup kitchen which stands behind me now eight thousand people might in sound like much food today when eight thousand people go over there to the football pitch we say there's a huge codn't home here we talk about eight thousand starving people coming in for food furthermore the soup committee were sending out as many as 700 servings per day up to a distance of four miles out of tone to those who actually couldn't come in because they had indistinct private charities in local relief committees had been running soup kitchens for the poor in some districts almost since the famine began one of the most active charities involved in this work was the Society of Friends the Quakers who organized emergency food supplies in all of the most distressed areas of Ireland [Music] the men DISA T institutions dining room in Dublin still serves free meals to all comers with no questions asked just as it did at the time of the famine efforts like this finally prompted the British government into effective action in the spring of 1847 the government opened soup kitchens for the poor all over Ireland by the summer they were feeding 3 million people a day it was the biggest relief effort ever mounted by any government up to that time but had come too late for hundreds of thousands of people and for many Catholics soup kitchens had an evil reputation in some areas of Western Ireland the ugly words super and super ism were used even before the famine they referred to the practice of some protestant evangelical missions which had been trying to convert catholics by offering free food to children who attended their schools these Mission schools provoked furious opposition from Catholic priests according to one indignant prelate it would be better to cut your children's throats with a knife than to send them to such schools a Church of Ireland minister named Edward Nangal was passionately opposed to the Catholic faith which he attacked as superstitious idolatry Nangal built a Protestant colony a tackle island in County Mayo and said about converting local people with the help of a school a dispensary and his own printing press you'll have to turn the President to get any of Nangal soup he came late on a difficult mission to establish a Protestant community among the Catholic community the people who are dying with the hunger and he headed ship load of Indian militant and they'd been to calm me down there and divert even at the height of the famine Catholic priests worked hard to prevent people from taking Nangal soup when you hear what Nangal wrote in his weekly newspaper it's easy to understand why to the Roman Catholics of Ireland in general and of Acula in particular surely God is angry with this land the potatoes would not have rotted unless he sent his rot into them God is good and because he is he never sends a scourge and his creatures unless they deserve it your priests stand as powerless before the divine judgment as did the magicians before the plagues with which God visited the land of Egypt add two more in County Cork the Reverend William Fisher was an evangelist who converted as many Catholics as he could to the Protestant faith his converts were accused of taking the soup trading their faith for food if true it was a bitter choice for starving people taking a super seen as treachery and by the Catholics it was in Irish what was called cool akin it was they were bending their own people as much as her faith yes it is hard for us to understand it I know there was a certain amount of persecution of the people who became conference they were called supers and that nickname super is still used around the country as an insult I would say that at the same time that there were very few person clergymen who would deny food into a Catholic unless he became Protestant I think that is a myth I think that would have happened very very seldom if at all in the little town of skull there was a Church of Ireland vicar at the time of the famine who had very different attitudes from the proselytizers his name was Robert Trail and by all accounts he's one of the heroes of the famine as well as feeding the people he visited the sick an artist from the Illustrated London News made a sketch of him doing this a few weeks before trails own death from famine fever times of great struggle often reveal the strengths or weaknesses of a person on either side of a religious divide and not all Catholics displayed their finest moments when famine was knocking at the door this rice Catholic and you know she sort of built a number of fire escapes give certain the amount of charity like it so that she would escape the to punishment I think in here but and we hope she did but she was a she was a sub agent that is she collected the rents for the landlord and of course she had a commission therefore the higher the rent the more she had herself she died in due course and was buried in the local graveyard inventory graveyard and there's a huge big gear lack things for lack stone not a stone but a slab on her graveyard and it was used as a dancing platform by number of people who had no particular love for her best rice when we hope she's in heaven with everybody else in spite of all that anglo-irish landlords also get much of the blame for the famine at Westport house the Marquess of Sligo tried to be different he did everything he could we believe under the circumstances to help in every way possible he brought in a ship at the key with grain on it for distribution he kept the workhouse going at his own expense in fact for quite a long time he traveled the 26 counties or 26 of the counties of Ireland consulting with all the appropriate people trying to see if something could be done about the famine and also they had a lot of guns and a lot of shot at that time when the famine began began itself and they went off over the hills over the Deer Park and they shot all the birds in the deer that they could shoot and they brought them down into the great big enormous famine thoughts which they boiled up great soups with and they had lines of people that they gave out the soup to despite his good intentions the Marques began to evict his tenants in 1848 he had received no rent for three years he borrowed money to pay his taxes and now had to choose between personal ruin or evicting his tenants it was a choice which many landlords had to make all over Ireland some landlords were callous and uncaring others behaved quite well the best-behaved were those who could afford it the Earl of Rosse had a great estate in Parsons town now Burr in County Offaly during the famine the Earl built miles of stone walls around his property providing employment for hundreds of impoverished men [Music] in the gardens the Earl and his wife enlarged the lake and began a series of new building works all over the grounds which improved their property while providing employment for the labouring classes but the Rosses could afford it the Earl had the good sense to marry money a few years before he took as his wife the rich and clever daughter of a Yorkshire woolens magnate the countess designed many of the improvements herself and it was her money which was put to lavish use in carrying them out today's Earl of Rosse still resents government expectations that the landlord's pay for famine relief I don't think there was understanding of the cracks and core of the problem I think individuals did marvelously like the Quakers but I don't think the British government did what it ought to have done I think far too much was left to philanthropy as in fact is largely the case with even our government in her in Ireland today what ought to have done in your opinion I think one of the first things they ought to have done will be to provide relief from the rating structure so that the states like this did not have to pay rates and had to subsidize the the economy of Britain as a whole particularly after it became clear that the tenants were no longer in a position to pay the rents out of which the rates had previously been paid and this I think contributed towards the impoverishment if not bankruptcy of a considerable number of estates and once the estate went to the wall there was of course no employment there for anyone and the tenders were far worse off than they had been before ultimately many landlords became victims of the famine just like their tenants to blame landlords for the famine is a great oversimplification it's just it will not wash some landlords did what they could and and crashed lost all they had and others behaved very cruelly the ones who behave badly of course get written up like Lord Lucan Vandalur and Kailash Lord Sligo and Lord Leitrim gets gets mentioned as well but the trouble is that about one-fifth or one-quarter of landed property changed hands because of people going bankrupt and had landlord spent every penny they had there still would have been a problem so the putting the burden on Irish landed property in 1847 was not a feasible way of dealing with famine relief the fact is that halfway through the famine the British government washed its hands of the whole ugly business Ireland was now left to what secretary of the Treasury Lord Rebellion described as the operation of natural causes he believed the famine was quite literally a heaven-sent opportunity to modernize Ireland he would later be knighted for his services to the country at the time he saw the famine as a visitation of God as a way of solving a very serious overpopulation problem and he believed that by and large the government shouldn't intervene very much because in the long run that would make things even worse if the Irish weren't taught a lesson or didn't learn a lesson in the late 1840s then who knows in the 1850s or the 1860s the same was going to happen again and they would have to go through perhaps even a worse catastrophe now that was the way a Trevelyan thought critics argued that people who are starving needed food not lessons in what was known in those days as political economy Trevelyan was very well intentioned but not a very humane man and his attitudes were responsible for undoubtedly for lots of deaths you'd have to have a heart of stone not to feel compassion for the Irish peasants when the famine struck life was always very difficult for them the religion was reviled their native language and culture despised there was always the possibility of eviction and then came the potato blight it looked like the end of the road but for some of the lucky ones there was one last resort emigration the great Irish Famine will continue in a moment here on A&E [Music] Ireland was filled with the sick and the starving as famine continued there were but two ways to escape the suffering or immigration the London Times wrote they are going they are going with the vengeance the Celts are going pretty soon a Celt on the streets of Dublin will be as rare as an Indian on the streets of Manhattan richer farmers were often the first to go their own tenants were no longer paying them any rent they themselves owed rent and were overwhelmed by British taxes poorer people soon followed Saro at leaving home came second to the need to survive despite the pain of separation and fears of life in a strange land emigration seemed the only means of escape for those who could only scrape together a few pens for the fair it was possible to take one of the new steam vessels across the Irish Sea to ports in England Scotland and Wales 300,000 people crossed to mainland Britain in 1847 alone the most popular destination for those fleeing the famine was the port of Liverpool the first immigrants who came perhaps were the better off ones but increasingly as the famine the emigrants were poorer a lot of them were ridden had fever and they were obviously not welcome because they were a burden on the local taxpayers and unfortunately 1847 there was a recession in England so it's actually coincided with a period of high unemployment in Britain and who are these Papa's coming from Ireland expecting poor relief so the sympathy public sympathy turned very quickly to wanting to get rid of the problem it was seen as a problem and what is interesting the support authorities in Liverpool and Glasgow Cardiff elsewhere repeatedly asked the government to control the problem to introduce some sort of fever legislation to do something and the government said they could not intervene those with the strength to move on drifted toward other towns and cities joining earlier immigrants in overcrowded slums some died of fever but many survived within ten years of the famine there were half a million Irish born people in mainland Britain most would never return to the old country for many of the Irish people escaping to England was not enough emigration was not an option for the very poor unless their fares were paid by richer relatives passage of the United States cost about four pounds per person that was six months wages for a working man children under 14 travelled at half price fairs to Australia had 14 pounds made the United States looked cheap in comparison cheapest of all was Canada and in 1847 a hundred thousand people opted for British North America all passengers were supposed to undergo a health inspection to make sure that they were free of disease for the inspection was cursory and many infected people escaped detection the emigrants often had no idea what to expect many arrived at the boat dock with all sorts of baggage which they couldn't possibly take on board let alone use in their new homes few carried what they would really need extra food to supplement the sparse provision supplied by the shipping company the docks swarmed with cheats and thieves who often robbed them of their possessions before that even embarked a Quaker who witnessed peasants embarking for America rosin his diary there was nothing but joy at their escape as if from a doomed they didn't know what horrors awaited them once they set sail the departure itself was often jubilant with people thronging the decks to say goodbye [Music] even the congested hold must have seemed exciting at first but within a short time the terrible overcrowding must have seemed a continuation of the hell they left behind hundreds of poor people men women and children of all ages from the driveling idiot of ninety to the babe just born huddled together without light without air wallowing in filth and breathing of fetid atmosphere sick and body de spirited in heart living without food or medicine except as administered by the hand of casual charity dying without spiritual consolation [Music] [Applause] the journey could take anywhere from six weeks to three months many passengers died on the way and were buried at sea others were near death when they arrived at the opposite shore the worst of the boats became known as the coffin ships but even on the best of boats there was death and fever he said treaters we were all seasick nunim three we were all confined under and Oh buddy boy [Music] no father kind normal dear too lift up my head it was which made think more Bubble señor hurry [Music] the first landfall for ships bound for Canada was gross sealer this was the quarantine station for Quebec were all vessels carrying sick people were required to stop there was no deepwater pier in 1847 so sick passengers had to be ferried to the shore in small boats one eyewitness reported that many of the sick were flung on the beach left amid the mud and the stones to crawl on the dry land as best they could another described them dying like fish out of water main causes the death crush with the disease and you had good captain's you had bad captain's you had good ships you had bad ships and you had ships that provided good food and some that provided - not so good food but basically if the if the immigrants were healthy when they boarded the ships they could survive and it was so the the the high death rates came of course on ships where you had fever breaking out and of course the fever was the main cause of death if they'd managed to avoid fever on board they were likely to catch it here in 1847 the pretty island was completely overwhelmed Buchanan the immigration agent in Quebec knew the 28,000 people were amassing in Liverpool and the doctor Jorge MELAS Douglas who was the medical supervisor here he figured that with the 200 hospital beds and space for 800 healthy people that he'd be able to handle of whatever passengers came up the river but very soon by the end of by the end of May 17,000 people were in the ships and the passage here waiting to be landed so the island very soon couldn't handle the thousands who were being landed this building behind us apparently there were there were double-decker bunks and one can picture the various accidents that occur when you're sick and the poor people in the lower bunk suffering from somebody's misery above so there's there are conditions the the overcrowding the numbers of people it's bad enough one person is or one family is enduring misery and sickness and the death but when you're surrounded by by it the doctors and those in who still had the priests who still had some elements of of strength and and health about them they themselves must have suffered from watching the terrible conditions under which people existed Douglas at one point says that the things are so bad that he has to put two in a bed and that he quotes at one point these people are so indifferent to life that they'll even lie alongside a corpse without without any emotion or without without showing any any signs of fear or revulsion there they've been reduced to such a terrible condition 5,400 people are said to be buried in the mass graves on Graciela some historians believe there are many more [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] despite the terrible death toll over 90% of the immigrants continued on their journey many of them were infected with fever and took it with them as they fled up the rivers the st. John River is navigable all the way up to Grand Falls close to where it meets with the United States from here stronger survivors could slip across the border some of the new arrivals settled in the Canadian countryside often joining friends or relatives who'd come over before them many more settled in towns like st. John a seaport on the coast of New Brunswick the dockside district known as York Point quickly degenerated into an Irish slum where poor immigrants struggled for survival the quarantine station for st. John was Partridge Island almost 17,000 Irish people passed through here in 1847 and over 2,000 of them died the immigration authorities reckoned that one in seven of all famine immigrants died before that completed their journey and those who survived were often in poor health local people objected to being used as a dumping ground for the Irish poor large number the st. Gianna's I would say were outraged at the large number of sick Irish immigrants coming this summer you know the they were impoverished they were bringing the illness a variety of diseases that did spread into the city those of course who were of Irish ancestry were just you know just the opposite they wanted to to help the countrymen Common Council is that sometimes they did their best to help but there's a one particular case the vessel a olace had made two voyages to Saint John in 1847 part approximately thousand immigrants in total a large number of them were ill and several hundred died from those two voyages and I suppose the the bubble burst for st. John on that second voyage at the end of the immigrant season in November when Common Council actually passed a resolution asking for the government to basically send all these Irish back to Ireland we don't want them we don't need them we can't afford them so let's get rid of them and send them back to the government's credit of course that didn't happen and they weren't sent back since then the Irish have become a strong presence in what was once British North America the Chatham Festival is an annual Irish Canadian celebration it attracts people of Irish descent from a wide area of New Brunswick and beyond [Music] a few of these families are descended from those who came here at the time of the famine but most of her Merliah generations of immigrants both Catholics and Protestants all of the major to celebrate any and all aspects of their Irish roots [Music] 75% of the Irish emigrants who fled the famine came to the United States and most of them arrived in New York America was the great dream the land of freedom and hope and New York was the mecca most Irish who came probably didn't know very much about America but they knew that the Americans had gotten rid of the British and that must have been a great comfort the main point of entry for famine immigrants was south street wharf on Manhattan Island there's never been anything like it in American history before this the whole idea of us as an immigrant nation begins in this place really with the Irish immigrants who come through they're not just immigrants they're essentially foreign to the people while living here in New York many of them don't speak English and they are perceived as essentially foreign the great debate in the United States so that the reception of foreigners begins here when I get off these boats and come down onto the ground they find people waiting for them who poses people willing to help them they will pull runners and they were taking their luggage they would bring them to rooming houses and the idea was to fleece them of everything they had before they got a hundred yards into Manhattan there were almost no government control of immigration at that time so that they will they thought the end of their journey was was here in many ways this was the beginning of it [Music] this is a sanitized version of 19th century New York you would have to imagine you have the horse droppings in the street you'd have privies over running you'd have four houses you have taverns you'd have hotels for sailors jammed with people a crowded noisy dirty player and what sort of prejudices and exclusions did they find here well they find that the whole country begins to organize their immigration is in such a volume and they're in such a disastrous condition many of them when they come here that there's a hole it's called a nativist movement in America to stop the Irish immigration in the United States the largest third party political movement in American history is the know-nothing party which is organized specifically to stop the Irish immigration in the United States this feeling that with the countries being overwhelmed with this alien group that will never be assimilated assimilation took many years for at least a generation the Catholic Irish were regarded by Protestant Americans as good-for-nothing drunkards unfit for proper employment they lived in poverty and were notorious for drinking and fighting they were often evicting for failure to pay rent with even less ceremony than back home in Ireland for many years they were regarded as inherently dishonest the most likely candidates for prison or the lunatic asylum the American Civil War began the process of acceptance Irish soldiers fought bravely on both sides they had been excluded from power by the English ruling class now they seemed destined to become Patriots [Music] the pattern of emigration set up by the famine continued as Irish immigrants went on pouring into the United States throughout the second half of the nineteenth century [Music] the later arrivals were in search of a better life and they found a far warmer welcome than the famine immigrants in Ireland they had been a rural people but in America they were City people and in their close-knit neighborhoods they began to see that freedom and democracy were a real possibility and the key that would open America's door was politics [Music] the one thing that they had going for them when they came in this great mass into the United States was the vote they were enfranchised as white male then they made their votes count and as they got into politics they got jobs you know America it likes to think of itself a place that welcomes immigrants in reality was happened as most immigrant groups have to force their way in that's what kept the Irish together you know they were in these cities forcing their way into America using their votes sticking together at a sense of self-protection out of a sense of self survival out of a sense of this is how we come into America have to force your way [Music] the Irish never forgot the old country nor did they forget their resentments against the British Patty Reynolds remains as Irish as ever after fifty years in America he grew up hearing stories of the famine and remains angry at the way his ancestors were treated by the British government I think that contributed to the deaths of about four and a half million Irish men women and children for that you should be whatever way that is possible that did contribute to it and it didn't have to pay to keep it going Mary Holt more a former Grand Master of New York st. Patrick's Day Parade believes the famine would have been avoided if the Irish had been self-governing [Music] if a native government had been in charge in Ireland the people would not have starved but the absentee landlords who want the land for cattle grazing wanted to get rid of the people on the land England didn't care as long as her people were covered and so the Irish it didn't matter and I think it was terrible and it's something that I believe England can never turn its back on she cannot say she doesn't know it happened because John Stuart Mill's the greatest economist of his era antonie Englishman said there was enough food in Ireland to feed 20 million people and the Irish died with their teeth stained green in their their hands in agony green by the roadside wild ship after ship after ship with Irish grain wheat pegs sheep cattle left 13 seaports back and forth back and forth and the Irish dying because all they had was the rotted potatoes [Music] nothing generates more rage in controversy over the famine than the fact that Irish farmers continued to export food not just beef but bacon butter cheese and many other products to England throughout the years of hunger even though their own people were starving at the time cattle shipments actually increased during the famine and this export in food trade is often portrayed as an act of calculated genocide by the British government but was it there was nothing to stop that food staying in Ireland and it would have stayed in iron presumably if the farmers in question have got a higher price on the local markets than they got shot on the export market and nobody forced the food to leave the country it didn't have to leave the country to pay rent so either and there was a common currency between the two countries the rent could've been paid by food sold and Dublin just as well buy food sort in Liverpool and the reason the food didn't stay in Ireland is because the people who were starving didn't have the wherewithal to buy this food now the alternative would have been for the government to compulsorily buy the food in the market especially that would have caused a similar process of objection by the people selling it who were mostly Irish who were mostly Catholic who were by and large not the landlord's they were the farmers they were the middling ranks in our society and they obviously wanted to get the maximum market price for what they were selling if the government had paid maximum market prices it would have been a massive indifference to them there was also long-established grain trade with England and the government refused to interfere with the free market some nationalists have always maintained that the famine was artificial that island had plenty of grain but it was all exported to England while the people starved one of the the stock folk images of the famine is catalogs and barge loads of grain moving east and of course a grain continued to be exported during the famine but far more grain was imported mainly the balance of trade in grain was adverse and very markedly so during the famine period but of course the grain imported was of low quality it tended to be Indian meal or maize whereas what was exported was oats and wheat but the only period in which there would have been an excess of exports over imports would have been at the very beginning in late 46 and early 47 and that is because of course the maize talk of oil to arrive from distant shores [Music] during the final year of the famine 18-49 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland invited Queen Victoria on a state visit to Dublin Cork and Belfast famine mythology always says that the Queen gave a five pound note to help the poor in fact she gave over two thousand pounds and her visit was surprisingly well received by the Irish people she drove everywhere in an open carriage through cheering crowds history suggests that throughout the famine most Irish people got on with their lives as best it was the worst tragedy in Irish history why did it happen you're watching an eating special the great Irish Famine only on A&E us came to be in the 1890s the government finally recognized that the land tenure system was the root of Ireland's unrest it embarked on a series of land reforms breaking up the greatest states and redistributing the land among the small farmers the slow demise of the Anglo Irish landlords which began the Great Famine was completed by a final land reform act in 1903 today the Irish countryside is still littered with the abandoned houses of the Anglo Irish Gentry who had once seemed all-powerful [Music] the Church of Ireland the Church of the ruling class went into decline after the famine there was a wave of revulsion against it eventually the congregation's dwindled and the beautiful old buildings went into decay the Roman Catholic Church on the other hand went from strength to strength after the famine [Music] the church came out with the advantage that the proportion of clerics nuns as well as priests to the population increased greatly I think it was one to about a thousand to the population after the famine where it had been one to maybe four thousand would be before those are rough figures but it was that kind of it was in the order of that kind of change the great triumphalist age of church a building had in a sense begun before the famine but like those other changes I mentioned accelerates to enormous qualitatively different state of things after the famine by and large though the Catholic Church does establish a kind of social control I think in the mid to late 19th century that it didn't necessarily have in the early to mid nineteenth century and it may also have if you like profited from the sense of trauma and desolation which certainly affected Irish life in the generation after the famine where the consolations of religion probably what people turn to [Music] but still the Irish suffered a great cultural and spiritual loss the people who once lived in great numbers in these remote areas were extremely traditional they spoke the Irish language and practice their own ancient Celtic customs the famine cleared them from great tracts of land some people have seen this near extinction of an entire community as a kind of martyrdom in many parts of the country the people are holding commemorations to honor those who suffered 150 years ago most of them take place in the south and west like this one on the coast of mayo where suffering was most severe on this occasion the committee has invited the grandson of the great Indian leader Gandhi as a guest of honor [Music] the celebrations are uplifting and mildly patriotic time to show community solidarity in County Limerick a group of workers has begun to rebuild some of the abandoned cabins the Ngoc Fiona group have no special agenda other than to try to better understand the people who once lived here they know the people were poor they know they suffered terribly in the famine but they also suspect that the old inhabitants enjoyed the stories the music and a rich cultural life that's now hard to find in rural Ireland there are other kinds of famine commemoration this local drama group from Lewisburg and County Mayo is reenacting a local legend according to that story 600 starving people set out from the town in a desperate search for food McGraw there might be some hope [Applause] their journey crossed a raging torrent where some were swept away and drowned mercifully the river didn't quite play its part on this occasion we're Christmas according to the legend the starving people were on their way to Delfy a fishing lodge some 10 miles away where the poor law guardians were said to be holding a meeting after a long and miserable journey the sad procession at last arrived at the Delfy fishing lodge according to the story the guardians were stuffing themselves with lunch when the poor people arrived and begged for food [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] school [Applause] [Music] rejected by the uncaring guardians the starving people started back from Lewisburg as they staggered homewards a severe storm blew up while they made their way along the shores of Duloc the Black Lake they're a tremendous gust of wind swept four hundred of them into the lake where they were drowned in fact six people died here in a tragic accident in 18-49 but the story preserves the memory of a time when people struggled hopelessly against an overpowering act of nature with ology can be a potent ingredient in motivating people and shaping events this is an annual walk organized by a free an Irish charity devoted to helping poor people in the third-world bike the actors in the previous story the walkers retraced the route which the starving people took across a great bog and along the shores of Duloc they see the Duloc story is a symbol of the neglect and betrayal of the poor Irish people at the time of the Great Famine and they use the myth to focus attention on present-day needs and suffering of poor people in the world today Alfre was funded to support small poverty projects in the third world mainly in India and I suppose it could have been characterized in its early days as a black baby organization just simply giving money to help these poor people but one thing we've realized is that what the poor needs more than charity is justice and we can see extraordinary parallels between what happened in our history and what's happening today and I suppose what we're trying to do in terms of this great famine project is to ensure that it's not just about looking back at the past and just remembering the pain of the past that if we believe what happened to our people in the past was wrong then it's equally wrong if it's happening to any other human being and of course it is and so I think that we've got to then look at what are our responsibilities as Irish people in relation to the poor and the hungry throughout Asia Africa and Latin America today Ireland's President Mary Robinson was the only Western leader to make a personal visit to Somalia to see for herself the sufferings of the people and the efforts made by Irish charities to relieve them president Robinson also attended the opening of the new Irish Famine Museum at strokes town park in the summer of 1994 the old Anglo Irish estate mansion has now assumed a new and meaningful function in an Ireland that is completely different than the one that originally produced it we stand at the heart of Irish history this is not only what happened to us it is what we are president Robinson is patron of the family museum because she believes that it holds important lessons for the Irish people today the president contends that Ireland's history gives her a sympathetic understanding of the problems faced by poor countries throughout the world today and I think that Ireland does have quite a unique position as a member of the European Union geographically located in Western Europe and you know the Richman's Club for a lot of the world's perception and we are a reasonably prosperous country but our experience has been that of a colony striving for independence and of a country devastated by appalling family Ireland was forever changed by the Great Famine among the Irish who came to America most would never return to their native Shore but each generation has heard the stories [Music] it is noteworthy that most of the frontline relief during the Irish Famine was done by private charities so it is today in the third world so much more is needed if we in the West don't do more to help the poor of the world we may one day find that history will judge us as harshly as it does the British government at the time of the great Irish Famine [Music] now you can own the Great Famine Ireland's potato famine the companion book to the television series written by John Percival for only twenty four ninety five plus shipping and handling call 1-800 four two three one two one two Oh No keep your eyes peeled as biography explodes on the scene with Hollywood hotshots all next week at eight eastern nine Pacific now put a little laughter in your late night with some standout standup a nice evening at the improv

Channel: Vintage Broadcasting System

Views: 641,738

Rating: 4.7698708 out of 5

Keywords: great, irish, famine, ireland, 1996, documentary, migration, potato

Id: 0DK-GoVkRjw

Length: 85min 34sec (5134 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020