Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

j. patrick coolican:

Coolican: Lessons for Las Vegas in Ireland’s 1845 potato famine

J. Patrick Coolican

J. Patrick Coolican

As the feast day of my patron saint nears, indulge me as I explore a bit of Irish history, although I promise I will connect it to Las Vegas.

Any discussion of Irish history will of course be sad and pathetic, but let’s turn to the worst event of all — the potato famine that began in 1845.

The wrenching tale is told with dry restraint by Cecil Woodham-Smith in “The Great Hunger.”

How bad was it? In 1841 the population recorded by census was 8.18 million. At normal Irish birthrates, the population should have increased to 9 million by 1851. Instead, by 1851 it had plummeted to 6.55 million.

The Ireland of 1845 was not a modern country in any real sense. It suffered under the yoke of British subjugation, and yet lacked even the rudiments of the market economy that had begun to develop in England and America.

The Irish relied almost entirely on potatoes, which, although cheap and plentiful, were at the time particularly susceptible to disease.

“Distress was the normal condition of a great mass of the Irish people,” Woodham-Smith writes, with 2.4 million in a state of “semi-starvation.”

You might say Ireland at the time was at the top of the bad lists and the bottom of the good lists.

Landowners, meanwhile, were desperate to collect rents from destitute farmers because they were insolvent because of the “extravagance of their predecessors, the building of over-large mansions, reckless expenditures on horses, hounds and conviviality, followed by equally reckless borrowing ...”

Phytophthora infestans, a fungus that spread easily with a little moisture and wind, destroyed much of the 1845 crop.

Charles Edward Trevelyan was the head of the Treasury, a formidable bureaucrat in the British tradition, although one whose ideological dogmatism, moral obtuseness and various miscalculations cost innumerable lives.

At the beginning of the famine, the British refused the purchase of any food to avoid competition with private enterprise.

Among the many tragic paradoxes of the famine, one of the most outrageous is that large quantities of food, specifically grain, were exported from Ireland to England while the Irish starved. The Irish had planted and harvested it but used the proceeds to pay rent, for that was considered the priority, even before eating. Also, because they were so dependent on the potato, they had no way to mill grains into edible foodstuffs.

I told you it would be a pathetic story.

Trevelyan, a devoted servant of free trade and laissez-faire ideology, nearly always refused to intervene, believing that only free enterprise would save the Irish. He shut down relief depots and rejected a shipment of corn from America in July 1846, just before the entire potato crop failed.

As food prices spiked, Trevelyan considered it a “great blessing,” for he believed — as a student of classical economic theory — that it would lead American farmers to plant more. He apparently didn’t realize that corn planted in America in 1845 took a year to reach Ireland, so that even a bumper crop of American corn would offer no relief for months, by which time it was too late.

The British held the Irish in contempt, with newspapers depicting them as “cunning and bloodthirsty desperadoes.”

The real killer of the period was disease, specifically typhus and dysentery, which killed 10 times more than mere starvation. The conditions of mud hut homes, where families huddled together, encouraged the maladies to spread rapidly.

The Irish began to flee the island, usually for America.

As Thomas Colley Grattan wrote, “The Irishman looks on America as the refuge of his race, the home of his kindred, the heritage of his children and their children.”

The reality was something altogether less hopeful.

“Seldom can high hopes have dissolved into a more terrible reality,” Woodham-Smith wrote.

I find relevance in this terrible tragedy because it shows how fragile human life is, how near we are to wretchedness, how callous we can be to human suffering. This was, after all, only 150 years ago.

Moreover, although it would be tempting to call the famine an act of God, it wasn’t that. It was a failure of preparation, administration and compassion.

Similarly, we might like to convince ourselves that what has befallen Las Vegas in recent years was beyond our control. And to some extent that’s true. But our troubles are also our own making. We failed to see ahead, prepare for the worst and diversify our economy beyond construction and the Strip. We own that.

Coolican’s column runs Tuesdays and Fridays.

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