In writing a biography of James McCarroll (1814-1892), I searched for reliable information on southern Ireland to account for why the McCarroll family chose to emigrate to Canada in 1831.

They were Protestants in a largely Catholic part of the country and Robert, James’s father, was a musician as well as a militia officer; thus, by religion and position the McCarrolls were increasingly at odds with their neighbours in County Leitrim.

Having few family records to draw on, I looked into extant newspapers and historical accounts to make sense of their uncomfortable situation. Nowhere did I find such a clear and evocative description of those turbulent, unsettled times in southern Ireland than is now available in Padraic X. Scanlan’s new and impressive study, “Rot”.

“Rot” is a detailed account and analysis of the infamous famine years and the many outbreaks of potato blight that occurred in 19th-century Ireland. The most intense years, labelled “The Great Hunger,” saw a catastrophic toll on Irish lives. Two of three people born in Ireland in the 1830s were either killed by the famine or were forced to emigrate to places like North America, Britain or Australia.

Writing in the Marxist historical tradition, Scanlan covers the years leading up to the devastating famines of the 1840s, the major famine years themselves (1846-49) and the overall effects of the crisis in subsequent decades. While attending closely to the British government’s negligent attitude to the problems of southern Ireland, he provides vivid accounts of the suffering and deaths experienced by the poor Irish and the British government’s mismanagement of the Irish economy.

Much of the underlying problem had to do with land ownership in Ireland and prevailing economic outlooks in the British government during the 19th century. At mid-century, fewer than 4,000 wealthy Protestants of English and Scottish descent owned nearly 80 per cent of Irish land, much of which had been expropriated from Catholic owners a century earlier. Those living on the land in southern Ireland had to make their home on rented and costly land. Though they were vulnerable to the wiles of their landlords, they endured as best they could during good times, especially on the bounty of the potato crops they grew on their rented lands.

By the 1820s, there were numerous signs that an economic crisis lay ahead, especially as isolated failures in potato crops occurred in southern Ireland. Slowly, the quiet and pastoral Irish countryside became more unstable. Outlaw violence grew more insistent as gangs like the Ribbonmen, Whiteboys and Rockites engaged in terrorist “outrages” across the southern counties.

Ireland, now seen increasingly as “a nation of landlords,” began to be viewed as a poor, feckless and backward country, a failed entity in sharp contrast to England’s booming economy and culture. The McCarrolls were among the many hundreds of Protestant families who chose to escape the increasing violence and the poverty that plagued southern Ireland in these years.

Scanlan’s use of the word “Imperial” in his subtitle is particularly important. He places the blame for the famine squarely upon Britain, noting its firm commitment to a laissez-faire approach to governance. England’s leaders were never able to identify and address Ireland’s economic problems. The long history of England’s relation to Ireland took an awful hit during the Cromwell interregnum of the mid-17th century and was very slow to recover. The formal creation of the Union of the British Empire in 1801 made the economic situation of southern Ireland still more vulnerable. 

Scanlan writes, “The Union was supposed to both cut off a pathway to a French invasion of Great Britain and to bring prosperity to Ireland.” While the French threat subsided, the Union failed utterly in its latter goal. With anti-Catholic feelings strongly at work in the English populace, it became a matter of Protestant pleasure to make fun of the Irish peasant as a violent, temperamental and unkempt Paddy figure (“Paddy” proved a particular bounty to the cartoonists of “Punch” magazine and its English readers).

Despite numerous well-meaning and troubling reports and various economic programs initiated by the government, the dire situation of the land-poor southern Irish peasantry grew far worse through the 1840s.

Increasingly dependent on the potato for sustenance, they had no buffer when the blight first devastated the potato crop in the winter of 1846-47. As Scanlan shows, their tripartite dependence on pigs, potatoes and peat failed them utterly, even as the British government failed to offer any substantive relief from their situation. The real problem, as the English saw it, was the moral backwardness of the Irish people, a people who were too contented with their easy, stress-free rural life to recognize their vulnerability. No one seemed able to anticipate the horrible suffering, starvation and death that lay ahead when the potato crop died in the ground.

When the full force of the famine came, the people could find no relief. “As food dwindled, disease surged … typhus and other diseases pauperized, when they did not kill.” The weakest and most vulnerable were left to sicken and die.

Scanlan writes, “It was a horrific time recorded in the archives in nightmarish impressions. Families fell apart. Children were abandoned. Bodies rotted on the ground, gnawed by dogs and rats that were hunted, in turn, for meat. In the last years of the blight, especially in 1848-49 … the utter destruction caused by famine was visible in the workhouses that became centres for organizing relief. In contrast, during Black ’47, the worst happened in “derelict cabins and … overgrown lanes, in places where the most vulnerable tended to live.”

In his concluding remarks, Scanlon argues that the Great Famine, “wasn’t even a singular event in the history of Ireland.” A century earlier, a famine had killed more people and there were, we know, wars and ecological catastrophes that “would also send waves of people around the world.”

“But the Great Famine was watershed in the history of Ireland and the history of the United Kingdom. It proved the hollowness of the Union, and proved that Ireland was still, in the eyes of most people making decisions, a half-civilized colony. The Great Famine also gave the British Empire a blueprint for digesting the ecological and human consequences of a burdensome and often destructive global system of agriculture and trade that benefited Britain at the expense of the empire.”

In a powerful final statement, Scanlan captured the limits of the prevailing British views that led to the Famine … “When the system functioned, it was civilization. When it broke down, it was Providence.”

In picturing the excitement in London that accompanied the great exhibition of the Crystal Palace in the immediate wake of the famine’s devastation, Scanlan emphasizes the paradoxically dark side of the much-lauded achievements of the Victorians. As he reminds us, there are many destructive consequences of capitalistic modernity: colonialism, exploitation, ecological disaster, sudden and panicked mass emigration, heedless destruction … all in the name of purifying market forces.

“Rot” offers an impressive and disturbing reading experience; it awakens us to a recognition of how much the Irish have achieved since those awful and disruptive times.

© Peterborough Examiner