AHC: Large scale British relief during Irish Famine

Ok this is my first thread ever made here and it is a challenge one.

What would it take for the British government to act in a more humane way towards Ireland during the potato famine of 1845? What would be the basic outline of some of the butterflies? And what would be the biggest threats to this idea?
 
Ok this is my first thread ever made here and it is a challenge one.

What would it take for the British government to act in a more humane way towards Ireland during the potato famine of 1845? What would be the basic outline of some of the butterflies? And what would be the biggest threats to this idea?
1) there actually was large scale relief, just not nearly enough.
2) the government of the day in Britain was "Free trade", non-interventionist. Producing THAT scale of aid would require a rather different political philosophy. Since push for free trade had been under way for a generation or more, you need a PoD at least 20 years beforehand.
3) if they have a 'liberal' (US sense) enough mindset to provide enough relief to feed 8 million 'Poor Irish Papist breeding-like-rabbits peasants', they're going to have a very different attitude toward good Protestant factory workers and slum-dwellers. Which might well impact how successful and productive British Industry is (i.e. make it less competitive).

Feeding 8 million people on imported food is EXPENSIVE, especially as steamships are just coming into service and long distance trade is still quite expensive.

Besides. What are they going to do with all those Irish afterwards? Ireland really doesn't have the carrying capacity for all those people, and the English would really hesitate to set a precedent where they'd be expected to save ever increasing numbers of Irishmen from famine.

Could they have done better? Yes.
Should they have done better? Yes.
How much better could they have done, given the political philosophy of the time, that made Britain the world's great trading empire? Not very much.

Should food EXPORTS from Ireland have happened?
Yes. What was being exported was high price wheat from private farms. 1) to stop the export would involve nationalizing all farms in Ireland, essentially.
2) if you can export (to England) expensive wheat and buy twice as much cheaper grain, wouldn't that be appropriate?


Also. Infrastructure. Even if a sufficient amount of grain miraculously appeared in Irish ports, getting it inland to all the isolated tiny Irish farms was probably impossible.


Ireland simply can't support 8 million in a reality that has potato blight (short of modern fertilizers and crops). The best result possible would be to feed the population an inadequate subsistence diet long enough to ship millions of Irish overseas. OTL, 100s of thousands (I think) were fed, but not enough, and not long enough.

My TL, which, yes, I need to get back to, has a more developed Canada, slightly earlier steamships, and a more practical view of religion (as opposed to the moral hypocrisy of OTL's Victorian era), all of which make the Irish famine only a catastrophe instead of OTL's near extinction event.
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
Ok this is my first thread ever made here and it is a challenge one.

What would it take for the British government to act in a more humane way towards Ireland during the potato famine of 1845? What would be the basic outline of some of the butterflies? And what would be the biggest threats to this idea?

You need it to happen a century later, when people first enetertained the idea of famine relief, humaitarianism, charity etc. Religion probably does play a small part, but that said many of the victims were also protestants, and as far as I know no rich European Catholic nations sent out relief to Ireland. Britain was probably about as progressive as you can get in that era unfortunately. Maybe if some powerful figures had some serious investments in Ireland, perhaps large scale coalmines, factories, or some sort of valuable crops or livestock perhaps, then they'd have more motivation to provide some degree of support.
 
Maybe if some powerful figures had some serious investments in Ireland, perhaps large scale coalmines, factories, or some sort of valuable crops or livestock perhaps, then they'd have more motivation to provide some degree of support.
To be fair, some did. (Disclaimer: To those tempted to inform me how terrible most British landowners were, I'm not claiming that the example I'm about to give is typical.)

Lord Palmerston owned more than 10,000 acres in Sligo, which he first visited in 1808. He changed systems of landowning and tried to rationalise estates, constructed a series of roads, planted hundreds of acres of grass to stabilise the sand, established a plant nursery at Cliffoney (as well as two schools, a Catholic church and a dispensary) and built a harbour at Mullaghmore. He spent over £1,000 per year between 1830 and 1841 on improvements, against an income from the estate of c.£3,500 per year.

Despite all these improvements, exceptional in their nature, Palmerston has to pack almost 2,000 people off to America in 1847 when the famine hits. This keeps the mortality rate low, but it reinforces the point that the Irish population isn't sustainable. Either they go overseas, or they starve.

Feeding 8 million people on imported food is EXPENSIVE, especially as steamships are just coming into service and long distance trade is still quite expensive.
Just to add to this: Palmerston's agent calculated the cost of outdoor relief in March 1847: "more than three fourths of the amount will be payable by your Lordship... it cannot fall much short of £10,000 for the next 7 months". In other words, the cost of relief was four or five times as much as the gross rent Palmerston had made per year from the land.
 
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British science was somewhat advanced. If the British had made an effort to solve potato blight scientifically, this could have been their buy-in. Whether this worked or not, they may have then felt a sense of responsibility to help.
 
British science was somewhat advanced. If the British had made an effort to solve potato blight scientifically, this could have been their buy-in. Whether this worked or not, they may have then felt a sense of responsibility to help.

From memory, the strain that hit Ireland wasn't very common, so I doubt they would have been able to do much.

While I agree that GB couldn't have done much to stop the scale of the disaster (and it was more than just some Lords that tried), perhaps a greater action/involvement and post famine plans could have reduced the population reduction from 1850's onwards, stabilizing the population at 5-6+ million rather than the 4 million it had fallen to by 1871 and lower by 1901. Which would have had impacts for Ireland going forward.
 
If you want it to be the British government who pays for the relief, where do they get the money from? They'd probably have to re-introduce Income Tax (previously used during part of the Napoleonic Wars, but abolished after that) to cover the shortfall in funding... and there was a general election due to take place...
 
British science was somewhat advanced. If the British had made an effort to solve potato blight scientifically, this could have been their buy-in. Whether this worked or not, they may have then felt a sense of responsibility to help.
How on earth do they " solve potato blight scientifically"!?!?

Remember, this pre-Mendel, pre-Darwin and most especially, pre-Burbank.
 
From memory, the strain that hit Ireland wasn't very common, so I doubt they would have been able to do much.
Strain of what?

The potato blight hit all across Europe at the same time. It's just that in places like Prussia it caused hunger (lots of other crops), while in Ireland it caused famine because only in Ireland did the peasants live on almost nothing but potatoes.

And they lived almost entirely on potatoes because nothing else had the same productivity. If they'd switched to raising grain on the same land the peasants would have starved - because the population had risen to a point where they couldnt support it with grain production.

Note, too, that the potato blight hit because of a series of cold, damp years, which was ideal for the propagation of the blight. But the same cold damp weather meant that grain harvests all across Europe were lower, as well.
 
How on earth do they " solve potato blight scientifically"!?!?

Remember, this pre-Mendel, pre-Darwin and most especially, pre-Burbank.
I want them to try. And you might just get lucky and hit upon something. For example, a fertilizer which inhibits the blight.

Or, a different type of potato which is less vulnerable.

And potato blight is a type of fungus, right? Or a closely related thing, a 'rust' or whatever.
 
Plant Pathology, George Agrios, Academic Press, 1969, page 246:

http://books.google.com/books?id=xL...x, Fundy, Kennebec, Onaway, Plymouth"&f=false

" . . . Only the most resistant potato varieties available should be planted. Such varieties include Boone, Catoosa, Cherokee, Essex, Fundy, Kennebec, Onaway, Plymouth, etc. The blight fungus has a number of races or strain differing from each other in the potato varieties that they can attack. . . "
And yes, I freely acknowledge that it would take quite a bit of luck to hit upon one of these. This also talks about chemical fungicides. Again, quite a bit of luck.
 
All you need is political will to relieve the famine of which there were none in England.

Make an energency ammendment to the corn laws exempting Ireland during the famine.

Stop exports (as was done in the 1780´s)

Remove the stipend that you had to give up your tennancy to recive relief


The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.
 
If the British had made an effort to solve potato blight scientifically, this could have been their buy-in.
Wait, are you saying the British government should have done this? If so, I'm not sure you understand how science works in this period. It's not like the British government had teams of scientists at its beck and call: when they introduce a new breech-loading 12pdr gun in 1859, it's designed by a former lawyer who sketched the first version on a dinner-table napkin after hearing the news of the battle of Inkerman. Universities are geared up to deliver training in classics with a little bit of science tacked on, and the Royal Agricultural Society of England isn't chartered until 1840.

If you're saying that the British as a nation should have worked on a solution, then perhaps you're right. But then, why only the British and nobody else in the world?

Or, a different type of potato which is less vulnerable.
Leaving aside how long it would take to develop a blight-resistant potato via trial and error- given that blight can mutate just as quickly as, if not more quickly than, the potato- have you considered the mechanics of actually spreading this new variety of potato throughout the whole of Ireland before people starve? Or what happens if you prop up the population levels by introducing a new potato, only to have a new form of blight which attacks that variety evolve the next year?

And yes, I freely acknowledge that it would take quite a bit of luck to hit upon one of these.
Though you have acknowledged it would be quite a bit of luck to stumble upon these, I should point out for the disinterested observers that the varieties you list seem to have been introduced between 1941 and 1961. And, as I've suggested above, even if you jump in a time machine and take an example of this potato back, it would take (at my best guess, not being a gardener) decades to produce enough seed potatoes to restock the whole of Ireland. Provided you don't need to eat any of them in the meantime, of course.
 
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TFSmith121

Banned
Perhaps because the people starving were British subjects?

...why only the British and nobody else in the world?.

Perhaps because the people starving were British subjects? Eight million of them, in fact?

Also, please pass the message re BROS to your friend.

Thanks
 
All you need is political will to relieve the famine of which there were none in England.

Make an energency ammendment to the corn laws exempting Ireland during the famine.

Stop exports (as was done in the 1780´s)

Remove the stipend that you had to give up your tennancy to recive relief


The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.

1; England wasn't so reliant on single crop subsidence agriculture. The agricultural revolution had been very effective in England.

2: would be nice even if it wouldn't have done too much to help. For it to suddenly happen just like that though would be akin to the American republicans (today) suddenly campaigning for gun control

3: as dathi says that was mostly high value exports (beef the major one that I've read). Better to feed people the cheapest calories you can in this situation than give them steak dinners.
Also consider water borne transport was the way of things back then. It was just as much effort to transport goods between western England and eastern Ireland as between west and east Ireland.

4: but that helped stop future famines

5: no, no they didn't
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
Perhaps because the people starving were British subjects? Eight million of them, in fact?

I doubt many of the Irish saw themselves as British subjects, and sadly the reverse is probably true also: most British people probably thought of Ireland as a land of rebels and ingrates, so hardly saw the point of helping them out. I'm not condoning this, just saying that it's probably a factor at the time, one that Irish historians seem to agree upon. In fact some go so far as to call it a purposeful genocide. I wouldn't agree with that by any means, but I don't doubt if the extent of the conditions of the potato famine in Ireland were transferred to England or possibly Scotland, maybe you'd see a greater degree of relief efforts. But bear in mind at the time society had only really starting to acknowledge that slavery was immoral, they were still sending children to work in coalmines or dangerous factories, there very little in the way of healthcare or welfare (beyond some charitable religious organisations, which were often exclusive to their own particular sect) and disease, malnutrition, poverty and hunger were widespread enough within England that the Irish famine didn't stand out all that much as essentially being out of sight, out of mind. Not to mention that there were plenty other issues in other parts of the Empire at the time.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Understood; but given the realities of British governance,

I doubt many of the Irish saw themselves as British subjects, and sadly the reverse is probably true also: most British people probably thought of Ireland as a land of rebels and ingrates, so hardly saw the point of helping them out. I'm not condoning this, just saying that it's probably a factor at the time, one that Irish historians seem to agree upon. In fact some go so far as to call it a purposeful genocide. I wouldn't agree with that by any means, but I don't doubt if the extent of the conditions of the potato famine in Ireland were transferred to England or possibly Scotland, maybe you'd see a greater degree of relief efforts. But bear in mind at the time society had only really starting to acknowledge that slavery was immoral, they were still sending children to work in coalmines or dangerous factories, there very little in the way of healthcare or welfare (beyond some charitable religious organisations, which were often exclusive to their own particular sect) and disease, malnutrition, poverty and hunger were widespread enough within England that the Irish famine didn't stand out all that much as essentially being out of sight, out of mind. Not to mention that there were plenty other issues in other parts of the Empire at the time.

Understood; but given the realities of British governance, even in the 1840s, London was the capital of the United Kingdon of Great Britain and Ireland, the queen was the head of state, and I doubt Dublin Castle had much in the way of resources for famine relief that didn't come from legislation approved in Parliament ... constitutionally, Ireland was much or more a part of the nation and less of the empire as Cornwall or Man, true?

I mean, if the Irish were not subjects of the Queen, and entitled to treatment as such, than why the hell was the British Army encamped at the Curragh and why was it the Royal Irish Constabulary? Granted, they didn't get the "Royal" until 1867, but still - there were "royal" charters in Ireland going back centuries, the British had suppressed every attempt at independence since Cromwell's day, and I can only imagine the amount of crown land on the island in the 1840s was fairly significant - if the Irish didn't belong to "Britain," than I'm sure there were plenty of Wild Geese who would have enjoyed returning home...

And with all due respect, a 50 percent or more drop in Ireland's population would suggest that there was something more to the Famine than a couple of bad crop years...

It is a marginal source on the specific question, but Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Reason Why spends a dozen pages on the famine and George Bingham's response to it; her account makes for a compelling case one would expect his tenants to be rooting for the Russians in 1854-56 ... if Bingham was typical of his class, I'm surprised they weren't ALL simply put against a wall...

I can't imagine the enmity the response - official or otherwise - or lack thereof - created in Ireland; the following decades of blood presumably stemmed as much from those memories as anything else.

Best,
 
I want them to try. And you might just get lucky and hit upon something. For example, a fertilizer which inhibits the blight.

Or, a different type of potato which is less vulnerable.

Real life isn't the movies!! The odds of them just stumbling on the solution are probably literally lottery odds or worse. They didn't have a clue on how to stop the blight. Fertilizer in those days meant manure and I doubt it would have made a difference if they tried pig manure instead of cow.

Breed a new variety of potato? HOW? If the difference was easily observable they could have done it but disease resistance isn't easily spotted by eyesight. If you did find one it would take a huge amount of time to develop enough seed to use all over Ireland. By the time you have figured it out which variety is resistant (You need a lot of luck for that!) and have enough seed the famine is over.
 
If there were fourteen (?) types of potato in South America, rotated in use by the natives to avoid diseases, and only one type in Ireland, just importing shipload after shipload of South American potatoes, presumably of different kinds, might help end the blight, but that is just my less-informed layman's view.
 
If there were fourteen (?) types of potato in South America, rotated in use by the natives to avoid diseases, and only one type in Ireland, just importing shipload after shipload of South American potatoes, presumably of different kinds, might help end the blight, but that is just my less-informed layman's view.

Perhaps, but since they were pretty clueless back then about plant diseases do you think it is reasonable to expect them to think of it?
 
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