The more things change, the more they remain the same. Some of the rhetoric of economists who support the current financial system sounds suspiciously familiar to my history-geek’s ear, and one prime example is the British government’s reaction to the crisis in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Great Hunger, as it was known in Ireland, seemed to the British government of the day a fairly minor affair; something the poor had undoubtedly brought on themselves by their improvident dependence on a single crop.

Never mind that it was about all they had time to grow as they laboured for the wealthy, who owned all the land and decided what should be grown there. Wheat crops were harvested and exported, using Irish labour. Those labourers couldn’t afford to buy what they’d grown for their masters, but instead planted potatoes in the small patch of land around their cottages. In 1845, half the potato crop failed in Ireland, but nobody died as a result, partly as a result of government relief efforts. The views of Sir Randolph Routh, the man running the relief programme, make chilly reading when we consider what followed.

The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

Blame the victim, much?

In 1846, almost the entire crop failed followed by one of the coldest winters on record. The new minority government reduced its relief efforts, and made relief largely dependent on participating in useless public works: roads that went nowhere, walls that surrounded nothing.

From the beginning of 1847, the Tory government came under attack from Disraeli’s Whigs. In response, they introduced soup kitchens, the only really effective response of the entire miserable affair, watery soup being better than nothing. But summer brought the third successive year of crop failures,. The government brought in a Poor Law Act mandating workhouses, but failed to stop the export of corn.

The debates of parliament make chilling reading, as one person after another reflected on the ill effects of helping the undeserving poor, and the need for the Irish to simply make more effort. I get a strong sense of deja vu when I read these remarks in the light of more modern public debates about food, refugee, and other crises where the rich are being asked to share their resources.

That year, Oscar Wilde’s mother had this poem published:

Weary men, what reap ye?
Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye?
Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.
They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?
Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread … We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure
bask ye in the world’s caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses,
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.

Despite urgent pleas from English officials and others, the government did nothing, many politicians continuing to blame the Irish poor for their own demise. In 1849, as the harvests began to recover in some parts of Ireland, in others the deaths continued. One official enquiry concluded:

Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilized age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.

The population of Ireland dropped by half in the fifty years following the start of the famine. Ireland took over a century to recover, and the descendants of those who failed to help when help was needed suffered the retribution of those scarred by the sufferings of their own ancestors. It would be nice to think that today’s politicians could learn from this and other similar tragedies, but I’m not holding my breath.