Blair and the potato famine
Comment by Martin McLaughlin
14 June 1997
Tony Blair's apology for British indifference during the potato
famine of the 1840s in Ireland is part of an international trend.
In just the past several months, the Japanese government apologised
to the "comfort women" brutalised during Japan's occupation
of the Korean peninsula, Australian Prime Minister John Howard
expressed regret for the treatment of the country's Aboriginal
population, and US President Clinton apologised to the victims
of the racist Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of black
men infected with syphilis were deliberately left untreated by
government doctors.
What is behind this seeming outbreak of pangs of conscience
on the part of the political servants of international capital?
All over the world, capitalist governments have repudiated
the policies of limited social reform which prevailed during the
post-World War Two boom, and embarked on the ruthless dismantling
of the welfare state. In place of even minimal efforts to alleviate
social problems, they substitute empty gestures aimed at giving
the appearance of humanitarian concern.
Bill Clinton is to some extent the pioneer and certainly the
master practitioner of this politics of hollow symbols. He specialises
in demonstrating empathy for precisely those layers in society
whom his policies hurt the most. "I feel your pain"
is his mantra, even as he increases it. In this, as in many things,
Blair only apes the present occupant of the American White House.
For such symbolic and meaningless gestures, of course, the
more distant the outrage the better. There are no apologies for
crimes whose perpetrators are still at large. No American government
will express regrets for the genocidal bombing of Vietnam or Iraq,
nor will 10 Downing Street issue an apology for the Argentine
soldiers and sailors killed in the Falklands War or the victims
of British imperialist atrocities in Greece, Kenya, Malaya or
a dozen other former colonial countries.
Blair's statement on the potato famine is especially hollow
and cynical because he has embraced the very policies which were
the basis of the British response in the 1840s: the worship of
the unfettered capitalist market. His rise to power has been the
vehicle for reshaping the Labour Party along strict free market
lines. Only two days after his statement on the famine, Blair
made his speech denouncing the "workless class" -- by
which he meant the unemployed poor, not the House of Windsor --
and demanded that single parents on the dole be forced to register
for work.
The attitude of the British government to the potato famine
of the 1840s was not dictated simply by a racist or genocidal
desire to exterminate as many of the Irish people as possible.
When the first reports of the failure of the potato crop in 1845
reached London, the government of Sir Robert Peel reacted with
typical Tory paternalism. There was a subscription drive among
the aristocracy which raised substantial sums for Irish relief,
and widespread famine was averted in the first year of the potato
blight.
Two events in 1846 transformed suffering into catastrophe --
a second and more general failure of the potato crop, and the
election of a Whig (Liberal) majority government in Britain, committed
to a rigid enforcement of free trade and laissez-faire
policies.
In August 1846, the new Whig cabinet headed by Lord John Russell
approved the Labour Rate Act, which made Irish hunger relief the
financial responsibility of Irish local taxation. No funds from
Britain would be used to relieve distress in Ireland, Russell's
government decreed. So ruthlessly was this budgetary discipline
enforced that the Poor Law Unions in Ireland, the local bodies
which administered relief, improved their financial position significantly
in 1847, a year when half a million people died of starvation
and hunger-related diseases.
The guidelines established for the Irish Poor Law Commissioners
for employment on public works -- the equivalent of the "workfare"
schemes proposed today by Blair for dole recipients -- were the
following: "It should be as repulsive as possible consistent
with humanity, that is, that paupers would rather do the work
than `starve', but that they should rather employ themselves in
doing any other kind of work elsewhere, and that it would not
interfere with private enterprise or be a kind of work which otherwise
would necessarily be performed by independent labourers."
Charles Trevelyan, the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury
who supervised the relief programme, forbade the Irish authorities
to buy any significant quantities of food in overseas markets,
either in Europe or America. "We attach the highest public
importance to the strict observance of our pledge, not to send
orders abroad which would come into competition with our merchants
and upset all their calculations," he declared. At the height
of the famine he had copies of the works of Adam Smith and Edmund
Burke sent to relief officials in Ireland, and urged them to read
them in their spare time, instead of sending additional supplies
of food.
Full-blown catastrophe
Once the full-blown catastrophe had unfolded, with entire regions
in the west and southwest depopulated by death and emigration,
the landlord class in Ireland, of both Irish and English descent,
saw its opportunity to clear the land of unprofitable tenants
and shift from potato cultivation to more lucrative ventures.
Contrary to myths peddled later by Irish nationalists, it was
the Irish landlords who were the most aggressive in expelling
tenants and buying up the properties of smallholders: of the estate
purchases in the decade following the famine, 96% were by Irish
buyers. Though triggered by British policies, the famine became
a weapon of class warfare within Ireland.
In 1851, the official census found that the population of the
Irish domain of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, instead of rising
as expected to nine million, from eight million in 1841, had declined
to six million. The census commissioners took note, however, of
the growing prosperity of agriculture and commerce, concluding:
"we feel it will be gratifying to your Excellency to find
that although the population has been diminished in so remarkable
a manner by famine, disease and emigration between 1841 and 1851,
and has been since decreasing, the results of the Irish census
of 1851 are, on the whole, satisfactory, demonstrating as they
do the general advancement of the country."
The potato famine, the greatest demographic catastrophe in
Europe since the Black Death, was a product of British colonial
domination and the unwavering enforcement of free market principles.
The historical irony is that while formally apologising for British
policy towards the Irish poor in 1847, Blair is fervently embracing
the same policy towards the British poor in 1997.
[Historical quotations from the 1995 volume by Christine Kinealy,
This Great Calamity, The Irish Famine 1845-1852
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