Mass deportation of Irish to colonies due to potato famine

Could Britain as a result of the Irish potato famine deport evicted farmers and other various poor people in Ireland to colonies as a way of both solving the famine and filling the colonies

Would this reduce the deathtoll of famine

what would be the impact on Canada and Australia
 
It would be interesting to see if Gaeilge would be spoken in parts of Australia after mass Irish settlement. How Irish would an eventually independent Australia feel?
 
Could Britain as a result of the Irish potato famine deport evicted farmers and other various poor people in Ireland to colonies as a way of both solving the famine and filling the colonies

Would this reduce the deathtoll of famine

what would be the impact on Canada and Australia

What in essence do you think happened in otl?
 
The British government under Peel tried to import some cornmeal (that you could get sick form if you didn't prepare properly) to sell as cheap food during the famine. When Peel was out, food depots were ordered to sell at market value instead of cost and since everyone was starving, the market value was very high. They also gave advice to starving people to ask their landlords to not charge them rent during the famine. I don't know of any landlords that actually allowed any tenants to continue to farm without paying rent (so it seems that advice was hogwash), but I do know that some paid their tenants tickets to Australia. Many Irish wanted to leave, but were too weak to actually go to the ports and had nothing to sell for the ticket money.
 
You'd need a POD, but maybe instead of subsidizing cornmeal during the Peel government, they pay the passage fare for any Irish that wanted to immigrate abroad, be it to the colonies or the USA
 
That could have disastrous long-term effects for the British Empire.
You would have a white population in the colonies that really didn't like the British with centuries of experience of getting around British rule and would cooperate with the natives against British.
 
I was actually just reading about this. Anyone who was able to leave Ireland did so. The British government did not have the will to alleviate the situation due to the prevailing ideas of laissez-faire and negative attitudes towards the Irish people. The perception at the time was that government controls, intervention, and the Irish people's supposed dependence on hand-outs were the root cause of the famine, so the British government's response was to remove market barriers and limit their intervention as much as possible. Parliament would never have agreed to a large-scale forced emigration because that would have required a vast amount of time and money.
 
Surely any British cabinet with that much appetite for expensive and wide-ranging government intervention is the sort of government under which the famine wouldn't be so crippling?
 
Considering the famine primarily got as bad as it did was due to Laissez-Faire and non-interventionist policies of the British government, I don’t see why they would put the massive expense into shipping what amounted to around 1 million people halfway across the world to its colonies. For Britain, this would just create an influx of destitute migrants in whatever colony they decided to send them to (like Australia) which wouldn’t really benefit them in any way.

If the British government decided to take a proactive approach to the famine and it’s aftermath, the solution would be to import subsidized food, not to randomly pack up hundreds of thousands of malnourished people into boats and ship them somewhere else. The only reason it happened IOTL was because the migrants secured their trips independently and went to a large variety of locations. The British government having to deal with this on their own just doesn’t seem likely or reasonable.

EDIT: Also, supposing they did get sent to Australia, I think we would see a Ned Kelly type situation only much worse. The rich squatters of Australia had enough to complain about due to the Irish famine driving new migrants in - sending a ton more could cause some very serious problems for the Australian authorities. An independent Australian Republic with Ned Kelly as it's first president?? Now there is a timeline I would read.
 
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Considering the famine primarily got as bad as it did was due to Laissez-Faire and non-interventionist policies of the British government, I don’t see why they would put the massive expense into shipping what amounted to around 1 million people halfway across the world to its colonies. For Britain, this would just create an influx of destitute migrants in whatever colony they decided to send them to (like Australia) which wouldn’t really benefit them in any way.

If the British government decided to take a proactive approach to the famine and it’s aftermath, the solution would be to import subsidized food, not to randomly pack up hundreds of thousands of malnourished people into boats and ship them somewhere else. The only reason it happened IOTL was because the migrants secured their trips independently and went to a large variety of locations. The British government having to deal with this on their own just doesn’t seem likely or reasonable.
By contrast, "transportation" or deportation to Australia evicted 162,000 convicts in total over decades.
 

Lusitania

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By contrast, "transportation" or deportation to Australia evicted 162,000 convicts in total over decades.
But this was to reduce British incarceration costs since it cost $ to keep convicts in prison. So the movement of convicts had the desired affect of reducing long term incarceration costs and freeing up space for other convicts thus reducing need to build additional jails and to settle a distant colony. As for the Irish there was no cost saving to transporting them since the government had almost no expenses in terms of supporting them.
 
But this was to reduce British incarceration costs since it cost $ to keep convicts in prison. So the movement of convicts had the desired affect of reducing long term incarceration costs and freeing up space for other convicts thus reducing need to build additional jails and to settle a distant colony. As for the Irish there was no cost saving to transporting them since the government had almost no expenses in terms of supporting them.
That is true. So it isn't fully comparable even then.

My point was that it would be hard to transport that many people across the ocean that fast. Additionally, it wouldn't be very politically or logistically feasible.
 
I don't know of any landlords that actually allowed any tenants to continue to farm without paying rent (so it seems that advice was hogwash)
Most landlords couldn't because they had debts of their own to service but over 50 families did. Many of the surviving Irish country houses are still with us due to the fact that the families who forgave rents during the famine were regarded with honour and affection and spared the house burnings of 1923 some 70 odd years later.
 
As far as Canada is concerned, let's have a look at this place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Isle,_Quebec

Often marketed to Americans as the Ellis Island of Canada (it really wasn't - that was Pier 21 in Halifax, NS), Grosse-Île was the place where many Irish immigrants fleeing the Famine ended up first before going into the rest of Canada. Conditions inside at its peak were absolutely horrific - pretty much take all the pop history regarding the workhouses and transport it across the Atlantic. A planned mass deportation would have seen the poor conditions amplified considerably, making it a total horror show. However, in the end many who survived Grosse-Île ended up assimilating into the French-Canadian community, and ITTL that would definitely be even more so the case. That large of an Irish influx into French Canada ITTL would certainly effect massive changes in French-Canadian society far beyond what happened IOTL - even more so with an ascendant clerical nationalism that found expression in its opposition to the 1840 Act of Union - so while Irish would probably not have a place in French-Canadian society except, like in the US, as an intermediate step towards full acquisition of the French language, not only did it have an impact on how English was spoken in Ireland but both directly and (via English) indirectly Irish could certainly exercise a big influence on how French would be spoken ITTL, not to mention the reinforcement (more so than IOTL) of the Celtic elements of French-Canadian culture already existent from prior waves of French settlement during the ancien régime. Thus what could happen would be that French Canada would be transformed so as, with obvious differences, it would just basically be a variation of what already existed in Ireland itself or even Irish America - just swap one Indo-European language for another.
 

CalBear

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Be cheaper to simply book them passage to North America, with an emphasis on Boston and New York. Many who died did so because they couldn't afford the ticket.
 
How many landlords were banking on a relative end to the blight? If so, they'd want those agricultural workers around to go back on the job.
 
Okay, wild crazy idea: if Britain won't, how about some OTHER state offers to ship the Irish to THEIR colonies/countries? Perhaps some Catholic settler colony that desires more of that specific kind of workforce. Thinking France, Spain or the Latin American countries here. Possibly protestant countries might do so as well.

Would the British ever allow that, you think?
 
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