An Gorta Mor: The Great Irish Famine

I’ll begin my blog post by explaining that I have yet to be placed in a classroom this semester. I’ve been assured that this will be resolved, and shortly, so I am just imagining a lesson that I may try to use in my own classroom.

That being said, I’ll explain the virtue of teaching the Irish famine in either a European history course or American history course.

In terms of European history, the Irish famine represents one of the greatest demographic disasters of modern history. Between the years of 1845 and 1851, roughly half of the population of Ireland had died or emigrated. The ramifications were profound culturally, economically, and politically. Culturally, the Irish language was all but destroyed by the Famine. The Gaelic Irish poor of the western and southern counties were disproportionately affected. Most Irish tenant farmers relied solely on one crop alone: the potato. They were subsistence farmers. When their sole crop failed, the Irish poor failed. Interestingly, wheat was unaffected by the blight. The wheat crop, or “corn” as it was known, produced enough to feed the Irish. But it was shipped off to English ports, as the British government upheld capitalism as the utmost principle of UK economics. Does government have an obligation to aid the poor? Do we have similar situations in our world today?

Politically, the Famine all but cemented the eventual divorce of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Matters came to a head in 1914, when the Liberal Party pushed a Home Rule bill through parliament. Home Rule, which would grant Ireland its own territorial parliament but keep it under the rule of the Empire, was so contentious, the whole of the UK was at risk of Civil War. Many historians argue THIS was one of the primary reasons Britain was so keen to save the French and enter World War I. Niall Ferguson, a prominent (if not controversial) historian goes so far as to argue that if the British had stayed out of the war, Germany would have had an easy, resounding victory. That, in turn, would have saved the world from the bloody twentieth century, and a peaceful European order would have resulted.

In terms of studying the famine through the prism of American history, the Irish represented the first great wave of European immigrants. Thus, I probably would include a less detailed lesson that would be framed within a larger unit on European immigration to the US in the mid-nineteenth century. The Famine Irish weren’t the first Irish to cross the Atlantic, but they were the most profoundly different. Nativism began to rear its ugly head and the Irish became the “other” to the Anglo-Saxon American population in the North. Students would discuss the role of immigration in America today: did the nineteenth century immigrants assimilate or did they bring their own cultures with them and create a “melting pot”? Furthermore, we would discuss the parallels that Irish immigrants faced (Irish Need Not Apply etc) to the immigration crisis of today.