Irish Famine and Emigration All Irish historians, whether they are Social, Political or Economic commentators, are

united in the belief that the greatest catastrophe ever to befall Ireland, throughout its chequered history, is the 19th Century event, known as the Famine or the Great Hunger. To try and give this assertion some weight, maybe it is enough to quote the fact that over the course of three devastating years (1845-1848) the population of the country was halved, from 8 million to 4 million, as a consequence of death (due to diseases caused by hunger and starvation) and to widespread emigration. During the course of the lecture we will look at the causes of this traumatic happening, and how it acted as a catalyst to cause emigration, which up to then had been a trickle, to become an absolute flood. The Famine Even those with a mere superficial familiarity with Irish history know that the immediate cause of the Famine was the failure of the potato crop in 1845, due to disease or blight. The reasons for same we will deal with during the course of the talk. What made this bad situation develop into the major catastrophe it became was the background context in which it happened. This included the following. (i) Overpopulation. (i) The Land System. (i) The Governments Laissez Faire economic policies.
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(i) Too much dependence on one crop. (i.e. The potato). Each of these background causes will be developed during the talk. The Coffin Ships Nature abhors a vacuum, as the old maxim goes. Human nature unfortunately, never overlooks a situation to profit from the misfortune of others. Never was that more true of Ireland than during the famine. Such was the desperation of the starving Irish that unscrupulous ship-owners made ships, available at enormous cost (to the passengers) to transport them from their famine ravaged country to Britain and mainly America. Many of these ships were grossly inadequate and unseaworthy. Given the poor state of these vessels, it is no great surprise that many sank, complete with their wretched occupants. To embark on these ships for many, was a sentence of death, to remain in Ireland equally for many, was a sentence of death! Those who survived the hardships of the voyage, often died on reaching land from infectious diseases, such as typhus, contracted on board, due to the insanitary and unhygienic conditions endured by the miserable emigrants. Equally, many more died in transit, their bodies consigned to the deep ocean. For these reasons famine emigrant ships became known as Coffin Ships. While you are in Ireland you must take the opportunity to visit Cobh, one of the main ports of embarkation for these unfortunate and miserable emigrants. For anybody wishing to read descriptions of life on a Coffin ship, Star of the Sea by Joseph O Connor, published by Random House, is an excellent source. Even today we are not a 100% certain of the actual numbers of those who died and those who emigrated, but most historians

accept that the population in Ireland in 1840 was 8 million, and by 1850 it had dropped to 4 million.(census figures for this time were destroyed by fire in our civil war 1922-1923). There is also a consensus that the missing 4 million breakdown as follows, 2 million dead and 2 million emigrants. (Approx) It is a sad fact of Irish life that throughout our history we have never been able to create enough jobs to provide employment for all our people. This was true when we were part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (up to 1922) and it has been true up to the present day. (There are two exceptions to this fact, the periods 1960-1970 and 1995-2005, the reasons for which will be explained during the talk). Emigration has always acted and been seen by our various governments, as a safety valve against the discontent caused by large scale unemployment. Obviously the main cause of 19th Century emigration was the famine. Excluding that extraordinary event, there were many other factors also. For example, we never had the Industrial Revolution here, as happened in the rest of Britain. This was due to the fact that we didnt have iron-ore and coal, the twin pillars on which that Revolution was founded. Therefore we didnt have very much manufacturing industry here, to provide employment. We were regarded by Britain as an off-shore island, a food growing area for the majority of her population, who lived on the mainland. Accordingly manufacturing industry here was not seen by the government as an important economic imperative, and for that reason our economy was very much agricultural based. Therefore opportunities for employment, outside the agricultural sector, were very limited. Between 1870 and 1914 half of all the children born in Ireland emigrated, over two million people in all. The majority went to the United States but many others went to

Britain, Canada, Australia and other parts of the British Empire. Due to emigration, Ireland was the only country in Europe whose population declined between 1870 and 1914. One of the main legacies of this emigration was, it left an unbalanced society here in which a small working population had to support a larger than average number of elderly people and children. 20th Century Emigration Up to 1922 many people here blamed the British government, and its policies towards Ireland, as the main source of our economic ills, which had caused such widespread emigration. They were convinced that when we got our independence, things would be different. And they were right. They were different - Things got worse! Our first native government (1922-1932) which ran the country for ten years, instead of making things better for us economically, made things much worse. Before we try to analyse the reasons for this, we must explain that it wasnt all their fault. For example, almost all its ministers were people in their twenties, who had as little or as much life experience that any one in their twenties has! Most had no experience of managing anything. Here they were presented with the problem of governing a newly independent nation. Most, it is fair to say, were out of their depth, in terms of their (lack of) ability to do their jobs. This is also true of some of our current ministers! They were dealt a harsh hand of cards, however, because they had taken over the country after 2 years of war (our War of Independence against the British 1919-1921). Within six months of taking over, we had our Civil War, for reasons that will be explained during the talk. This lasted almost a year. It was the last thing that the newly independent country needed. A further blow was dealt to the country, in the civil war, when our Prime

Minister, Michael Collins was assassinated. He was 32 years old and was one of the few ministers in the government who was dynamic, with exceptional organisational skills, which he had demonstrated in orchestrating our war of independence against Britain. The government could have ill-afforded to have lost someone of his talents. The other handicap they laboured under was when Britain withdrew (on the 1st of January 1922) the money which she had poured in here to keep the country going ceased. Therefore we had to try to run the country from our own resources! All these factors must have exercised the thinking behind our governments policies. At least that is the charitable view, for some of the draconian economic policies they introduced! They were obsessed with balancing the books, i.e. you only spent on services what the country collected in taxes. Some economists today would say that this is not a bad way to run a country. Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s applied it. In doing so she decimated many of the services provided by government agencies which made her party the Conservatives, up to the present, (April 2010) unelectable! Our finance minister, Ernest Blythe, in 1929 to balance the books, cut the pensions of the old, the blind and the handicapped - the most vulnerable sections of our society. In spite of these drastic measures our society was poverty stricken. It was almost entirely agricultural based. It had little or no manufacturing. The country was characterised by, as one historian dubbed it, the terrible Threesome of poverty, unemployment and emigration. Most of those who were forced to emigrate had only been educated to the end of primary school i.e. to age 12/13. (Second level schools were fee paying and out of the reach of many Irish families). Therefore these emigrants, due to their lack of education, were forced to do the menial jobs in their new countries, the kind of jobs that the natives didnt want to do. So this was another way we let our people down - we forced

them to emigrate, and in doing so, we didnt furnish them with the education and skills to get decent and well paid employment. 1932-1959 From 1932 to 1959, with the exception of two small intervals, our government was led by Eamon de Valera. He was an American who is regarded as an icon here because he was one of the leaders in our struggle to get independence. As a prime minister he was a disaster, especially economically. He, within a few weeks of leading our new government, waged an economic war against Britain. For a poverty stricken country to wage an economic war against our main supplier of raw materials and the main export market for our finished products, doesnt sound very sensible. And it wasnt! It made our poverty stricken country even more poverty stricken! It caused even greater numbers of emigrants to flood out of the country; ironically most of them went to Britain. His biggest failure economically was, at no stage did his government see it as their role to stimulate the economy other than by protectionism. (Putting up tariffs against imports to protect what little industry was here). Given his almost Nelson Mandela like status here, it was difficult for the more pragmatic members of his government, who saw our economic deficiencies and the governments need to do something pro-active about it, to stand up against him and get policies to stimulate the economy. And still the emigrants flooded out of the country! Despite conceding that we were poor and that one of our main exports was people, de Valera insisted that we were Happy. He felt we were rich spiritually, a Catholic oasis cut off, by our geographical position, from the rest of materialistic Europe. He also claimed he knew what Irish people wanted. I look into my own heart and it tells me what Irish people want! He said. The most damning statistic associated with his time in charge of the country, in my opinion, is that between 1950 and 1960, 500,000 (half a million people) left the country, an average of 50,000 a year for that 10 year period.

1959 -2010 He was replaced as Prime Minister in 1959 by Sean Lemass, who is regarded by all historians as, the best prime minister we have ever had. He was a complete contrast to de Valera in the sense that he realised exactly what the country needed, economic stimulation. He summed up his philosophy with a famous metaphor. Job creation is the rising tide that floats all boats. For the first time in our history our government became pro-active in stimulating the economy. He got experts to draw up targets to be achieved in Agriculture, Manufacturing and Services. (A bit like Stalin did in the Soviet Union with his Five Year Plans in the 1930s). He borrowed money from the World Bank and used this as incentives to attract in foreign industrialists to locate their industries here, which in turn created employment for Irish workers, among these incentives or bribes were the following: (1) Provided a factory for the industrialist, free of charge. (1) Gave the industrialist 1/3 of the cost of the machinery or plant. (1) Allowed the industrialist to export for 10 years, tax free. As can be imagined, foreign industrialists flocked here to take advantage of these generous incentives. Large scale employment was created and, for the first time in our history, emigration almost ceased. The only people leaving Ireland between 1960 and 1970 were those who wanted to go, before this many people had to go, whether they wanted to or not. His government introduced free second level education in 1966 and for the first time in our history all sections of society had access to second level education, which in turn led many to go on to third level. He saw education as a major key to Ireland turning its economy around.

As part of his governments pro-active economic policy we joined the European Union in 1973. In spite of the great economic improvements we had made, we were still the poorest country in Western Europe. We benefited hugely from membership as Europe poured billions into our economy. Some of this money was spent on education, especially the Institutes of Education, third level colleges which took young Irish students and gave them skills and qualifications which made them very employable. Our economy began to thrive and consequently emigration was at an all time low. It was the oil crisis of 1979 and the fall out from same, that started the next major exodus of emigrants in the 1980s. The main difference this time was, due to the changes we had made in education, most of those leaving were highly qualified and had no difficulty finding highly desirable and well paid jobs, in their new country. As a result of Direct Foreign Investment, much of it American, brought about by our membership of the E.U., our economy began to boom again from about 1995 to 2008. Every year our economy was growing by an average of at least 4% on the previous year. Not only were people not emigrating but we had, for the first time in our history - full employment. In fact, we had a shortage of workers! To fill this deficit we had an influx of thousands of workers, most of whom came from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe such as Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania etc. which had recently become members of the E.U. By 2004 we were regarded as the second richest country in the World (percapita income). This heady economic time has been called the Celtic Tiger Economy. In 2008 all this came crashing down for reasons which are both internal and external. During the boom - our government - which is a two party coalition, with the main party mostly financed by

property developers - encouraged property development on a massive scale. They encouraged this by having very lax planning laws and allowing banks to lend recklessly. They had no real policing on the banks. They became intoxicated with the taxes that property development brought into the exchequer. Many economists were worried that the economy was overheating and too dependent on the property sector. When they pointed this out to the government, our esteemed rulers knew better! Prime Minister Bertie Ahern described these economists as prophets of doom. He went further with his classic remark that if he was as pessimistic as some of these doomsday economists, he would commit suicide! The collapse of the Western capitalist system of banking in October 2008 would have caused our banks to go into meltdown, had it not been for a guarantee given by our minister for finance that the country would cover all bank debts. Within a very short time, because of its over reliance on the property sector, our economy has been plunged into a recession. People have lost jobs. Our unemployment rate has rocketed from full employment i.e. 0% to 13% in less than 2 years. Emigration has started again. Last year 60,000 left the country and, according to our Central Statistics Office, at least another 40,000 will leave by the end of 2010. It appears we are back again to the bad old days where one of our biggest exports was people!