Is there any way to avoid the Irish Potato Famine?

The Irish Potato Famine, more recent students of history have begun to realize, was but a facet of a broader European disaster hitting societies across Europe with peasantries dependent on the cultivation of the potato. Belgium seems to have been the worst hit per capita, with upwards of fifty thousand dead, but even that is a far cry from the catastrophe that hit Ireland.

Ireland escaping the potato blight altogether is unlikely so long as the potato blight exists. Is there any possibility of Ireland escaping as relatively lightly as Belgium?

Honestly, I'm not sure. As Joel Mokyr suggested in an examination of Irish living standards in a European context, Belgium avoided the demographic catastrophe that hit Ireland because Belgium had begun industrializing, creating stores of wealth which came in handy in the crunch. Irish living standards may have been no better than Belgian, but Ireland lacked this.

Equally, I would suggest that the political structure of Ireland was important. Belgium in particular was a self-governing country, with a government at least minimally responsive to the needs of the general population. The odds of the Belgian government allowing the general population to be devastated were accordingly low. Contrast that with the situation of Ireland, a minority region in a much larger country that happened to be mostly populated by people who were looked down upon and actively discriminated against on account of their ethnicity and religion.

To change the outcome of the potato blight in Ireland, would it be necessary to remedy both Ireland's lack of industrializatio and its lack of self-governance? Would self-governance alone be enough?
 

Ryan

Donor
a major problem was that Ireland was overpopulated and potatoes were the only crop capable of feeding the population with the available farmland. it's telling that Irelands population still hasn't reached pre-famine levels.

if you diversify crops to reduce the impact of the potato blight then there isn't enough food to sustain the population. industrializing Ireland and thus increasing transport connections will only go so far because whilst it would make it easier to get food to the Irish, there's only so much available to give to them given that everyone else is suffering at the time too.

I think the best way to reduce the impact of the potato famine is to reduce Irelands population, and the best way I can think of to do that it to encourage Irish migration to the colonies/new world nations.
 

Art

Monthly Donor
Indeed, but the fact that Anglo-Irish landlords, and Irish Protestants owned 85% of the most fertile land in Ireland did not help the situation. Neither did the Corn Laws.
 
Indeed, but the fact that Anglo-Irish landlords, and Irish Protestants owned 85% of the most fertile land in Ireland did not help the situation. Neither did the Corn Laws.
It's not so simply on either count. The land being owned by the Anglo-Irish was not materially different from most other places. Everywhere in the world apart from post revolutionary France peasants tended not own the land they farmed and in lots of places landlords and peasants spoke different languages* and in the British context great aristcrats like the Dukes of Devonshire who owned massive estates in both England and Ireland didn't treat their Irish estates any differently from their English ones if you look at proportional rent rates and levels of re-investment.

As for the Corn Laws they did not help at all but not necessarily for the reason you think. By protecting British Agriculture from foreign competition and keeping produce prices higher they acted to transfer wealth from urban areas to rural areas which in turn enabled pre-famine rural Ireland to have such massive population growth. In the absence of the Corn Laws rural Ireland would be even poorer, the birth rate probably lower and the emigration rate higher. All of which would lessen the imapct of the inevitable potato blight.

*The aristocracy of Flanders spoke French, the peasants Flemish, the Bohemian aristocracy was Germanised the peasants mostly spoke Crezch though there was a large German minority but it was mostly urban etc.
 
I know this is quite far from the thread itself, but I'll put @EvolvedSaurian's comment on my Stuart Ireland thread more thab a couple of years ago:
Here though, no Famine is a given. Catholic land-ownership would be much much greater, with Protestants being dispossessed, possibly even expelled (and certainly encouraged to move on). So, far fewer uneconomically tiny plots of land on which can only be grown potatoes. More grain, fruits and stock raising. More industry. More trade and some few colonies and settlement possibilities in Newfoundland. Think the Netherlands or Denmark, since Ireland doesn't have the coal to pull a Belgium.
 
You can actually diversify potatoes and tubers in Irish crofts by including another day length neutral variety of potato.

The main issue was the fact that the standard Irish potato called "lumper" ultimately derived from one day length variety ultimately derived from a singular mutant from Chiloe. Chiloe being farther away from the equator and a secondary zone of potato diversification created varieties that would and could tuberize without having to wait until daylengths shortened around fall. By say, using a variety that was mutated and was daylength neutral from another source that also had blight resistance you could avoid the famine altogether.

Realistically though a hybrid with resistance could arrive at the same time, by making it a less than abundant yielding variety you could make it secondary.

Another plant that I know quite a bit about is Mashua. The day length neutral variety "Ken Aslet" is extremely productive, upwards of ten pounds per plant. The same conditions for potatoes can cultivate them, the issue is that it can create goiter without access to iodine, it is a anaphrodisiac that will reduce serum testosterone levels up to 50% but sperm count won't lower. It is extremely resistant to disease, traditionally planted around potato fields to inhibit pests. The taste is intense, floral and peppery but with milk or cream it is more subtle.

Providing a day length neural oca could also be very helpful but I know people breeding them now with not much luck they are tuberizing earlier but not day length neutral. Luckily Ireland doesn't deal with much heavy frost so it can still yield well.

Wacho or the Irish "Lazy Bed" style of cultivation have shown to create a number of temperature microclimates that reduced blight infection by as much as half! Two agricultural reformers had decades earlier spoken against such traditional subsistence practices in favor of the plowed fields with imported guano we know today (Guano actually brought the blight to Japan and some believe that it is the reason why blight hit Ireland).

so yeah thats all I can think of right now, I don't have my notes and its super early but I hope this helped
 
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a major problem was that Ireland was overpopulated and potatoes were the only crop capable of feeding the population with the available farmland. it's telling that Irelands population still hasn't reached pre-famine levels.

Yeah that's mainly just due to the continued emigration post Famine rather than any natural limit, I mean the population is already at about 6.5 million combined and that's with millions having emigrated from 1922 alone.
 
Potatoes were grown on very small plots to feed the tenant farmers' families. The rest of their leased landholding was used to grow grains and maybe other crops to sell to pay the rent. They had no land to raise sheep.

It wasn't even that, they were also grown in areas where nothing else could grow, I mean there are famine villages in the Burren for example, you certainly weren't getting much crop growth there.
 
As earlier posts warn, Irish potatoes were a subsistence mono-culture. Precious few swedes, turnips, beet, onions, carrots or whatever, just potatoes for carbs, wheat for the rent...

You'd have to go back a generation or three, invent a visionary philanthropist, create a multi-generational benevolent institution, get the Church on-board, improve education, subsidise the learning curve...

Not impossible, just very, very difficult.

And, there's a seriously nasty gotcha. More, better food in the 'good' years will cause a population increase, maxing out the available food supply, leaving the 'peasantry' even more vulnerable to down-turns...

Disclaimer: My ancestors on that side *significantly* supplemented their diet and income by fishing & piloting in the Boyne estuary. Still, as late as the mid-1950s, their family plot between cottage and lane held wall-to-wall rows of potatoes...
 
If you get rid of the popery act which forced gavelkind inheritance on catholics or the ammendment that extended it to leaseholds you would have a lot larger plots of land. A lot of farm laboud was underutilised in the 19th century as farmers didnt have enough land.

You might have 3 million involved in rural life farming and providing services to farmers as opposed to the real life figure of 7.5 million and with a similar rate of food production (unless they choose to grow less potatoes and more of other stuff).

The thing is what does the rest of the population do? Emigrate or move to the cities and hope the industrial revolution picks up in Ireland.
 
Can I vote for a substitution of turnips for spuds as soon as the blight got noticed (and no more Irish food exports until they're out of danger from mass starvation)? I think with a few hundred priests as well as written and illustrated instructions, the populace may have been able to have been educated re a more reliable and nutritious food source.
 
Can I vote for a substitution of turnips for spuds as soon as the blight got noticed (and no more Irish food exports until they're out of danger from mass starvation)? I think with a few hundred priests as well as written and illustrated instructions, the populace may have been able to have been educated re a more reliable and nutritious food source.
Nope.

Turnips look good. A quick google suggests the nutrition and yield are roughly comparable. However, potatoes grow just about anywhere, and turnips (and rutabagas) need fertile soil, apparently.

Also. They HAD potatoes, and could (and did) plant next years' crop from a few potatoes kept over. Turnips grow from seed, and where are you going to get the tons of seed you'd need to distribute all over Ireland?
 
It wasn't even that, they were also grown in areas where nothing else could grow, I mean there are famine villages in the Burren for example, you certainly weren't getting much crop growth there.
Indeed so, though could the Burren and such areas be used for pasture? But that of course wouldn't feed the population living there anyway.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
I'd say that absentee landlordism perhaps created situations where there was less immediate adaptations to the conditions of the day and money was taken from the economy of Ireland without reinvestment, creating a liquidity shortfall that made poverty almost guaranteed for vast parts of the tenant class. This issue could have been fixed a bit with having more careful and attentive landlords restrained by government action from acting too badly to their tenants. Ulster Law of tenant compensation for improvements, if made on a whole island scale, would have helped.

The constant division of land created a monoculture, as we are aware, and that made the issue so deadly. Much like how the Highland Clan system by its end was so awful and impoverishing that mass emigration was almost assured even without the Rising, Ireland saw farms get too small for anything except subsistence farming for the tenant class.
Laws passed earlier before the blight that would limit how small a farm could get would drive emigration of the landless, helping with overpopulation, and maybe help to break up the monoculture.

Much of Ireland was used for cattle grazing. I don't know how much truth there is or how much sensationalism there is in the notion that the cattle were all being exported as beef while people were starving, but I suppose turning that vast cattle population into beef for domestic consumption, possibly aided by the UK government paying the landlords a premium price for the beef in exchange for them giving it to the local poor, would help. More radical actions like a food export ban, which had been used in a 1782 famine I believe, would have been great, but likely were politically impossible. Again, this is where having landlords nearby is helpful, as that act was passed by the Irish Parliament made of Anglicans only, but it was the right thing to do. The centralization of power through the Act of Union was not helpful at all.
 
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If you get rid of the popery act which forced gavelkind inheritance on catholics or the ammendment that extended it to leaseholds you would have a lot larger plots of land. A lot of farm laboud was underutilised in the 19th century as farmers didnt have enough land.

You might have 3 million involved in rural life farming and providing services to farmers as opposed to the real life figure of 7.5 million and with a similar rate of food production (unless they choose to grow less potatoes and more of other stuff).

The thing is what does the rest of the population do? Emigrate or move to the cities and hope the industrial revolution picks up in Ireland.
Emigration mostly I guess. I wonder if gavelkind was abandoned post-Famine because I think the late 19th century pattern was something like what you suggest. One son to keep the farm, one for the priesthood and one maybe learn a trade and move to urban areas. And a daughter to marry another farmer plus one for a convent. All the rest, which could be a lot, to emigrate*. Those who went to Britain might well move back of course if they could get a job later in Ireland.

* though obviously this is a stereotype and many families didn't experience it.
 
Of course, while the worst famine, the one of 1845-47 was not the only one. There was a major one in 1740 too, though mainly due to cold weather.

Perhaps that could be the POD, with efforts done then to diversify crops, and encourage migration to reduce the population?
 
Emigration mostly I guess. I wonder if gavelkind was abandoned post-Famine because I think the late 19th century pattern was something like what you suggest. One son to keep the farm, one for the priesthood and one maybe learn a trade and move to urban areas. And a daughter to marry another farmer plus one for a convent. All the rest, which could be a lot, to emigrate*. Those who went to Britain might well move back of course if they could get a job later in Ireland.

* though obviously this is a stereotype and many families didn't experience it.

At some point in the early 1850s the popery laws were repealed and in 1855 or so the first Irish seminary opened.
 
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