great shame

Could the Irish famine have been averted or ameliorated by government action?

"In November 1845 [Daniel ("The Liberator")] O'Connell, in receipt of awful intelligence from Repeal branches all over the country, went with a delegation to visit Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury in Dublin Castle. O'Connell pleaded for a suspension of the export of the annual approximately 1,600,000,000 pounds weight of Irish grain and provisions, and a prohibition on distilling and brewing from grain.

He also urged Heytesbury that the ports be opened to the free import of rice and Indian corn from British colonies. For Irish ports were not open now, but subject to the special provisions of the Corn Laws, laws designed to peg the price of local grain at the highest possible level and to keep out other, cheaper grain until the entire British crop had been sold at that artificially pegged price.

The Liberator also asked that paid labor be provided on public works for those whose staple food had rotted before their eyes.

If these things were not done, said O'Connell, millions would have nothing to eat throughout the winter except decomposed potatoes, seedling eyes cut out of the diseased tubers, and family pigs.

The Liberator wrote to Smith O'Brien of 'the frightful certainty of an approaching famine; and you know pestilence always follows famine, the prospect is really frightful.'"


Keneally, Thomas. The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World. New York: Nan A. Talese. 1998. 104-105.

Daniel O'Connell, M.P. ("The Liberator")
William Smith O'Brien, M.P.