Subsidised Emigration During the Potato Famine?

Over in the Ireland Still in the UK thread one of the posters suggested the British simply kicking the Irish out which isn't really a sensible idea but it did remind me of a post by Rob Crauford from the old AHC: Large Scale British Relief During Irish Famine about some of the costs of the relief effort. I'll post it here

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.
It was mostly to do with the paragraph about how even a fairly benevolent landlord like Palmerston ended up having to ship roughly a couple of thousand of people out and it costing four to five times the gross rent generated to pay for relief supplies. So what effects do people think it might have created if the British government or a group of individuals came together and offered free one-way tickets to the US during the famine? I can't track down the source now that I found a year ago during the large scale relief thread but the one-off cost of a place on a ship was IIRC much less than that of relief for an individual so from a purely economic standpoint it was advantageous, as Scrooge put it "decreas[ing] the surplus population" would likely be looked on positively since it reduced unproductive mouths, and it could even be argued, whatever the actuality of the situation might be, that it was giving them a valuable opportunity.
 
Surely the best possible scheme would involve the colonies as well and shipping emigrants to places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand or even the Cape Colony.
 
One of the little-known chapters in the history of Irish emigration to North America is the large-scale immigration to Newfoundland, primarily along the southeast (i.e. the Avalon Peninsula, where at one point there were so many Irish speakers the Government had to get interpreters for court cases and the like). The reason? Unlike other areas of the New World, going to Newfoundland was cheaper because it was technically not a colony but a "fishery" in the eyes of the British. Because of that, any restrictions would be loose because permanent settlement was never anticipated (in fact, the fishermen had managed to survive based on avoiding directives, mainly from the Board of Trade, discouraging permanent settlement on The Rock (TM)) - yet here it was on a large scale. Adding more people to The Rock would be an interesting path to take.
 
NZ would be interesting, but the Potato Famine was slightly before NZ became properly settled by the British, it roughly tallies with the planning and construction of the first planned settlements at the very end of the 1840s.

So, it'd be new territory, so to speak. Would anyone be willing to pay for an Irish Catholic new settlement in NZ or Australia? Would the government in London sign off on this?
 
Surely the best possible scheme would involve the colonies as well and shipping emigrants to places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand or even the Cape Colony.

That would be interesting for the development of South Africa and Ireland. Who knows, maybe it leads to an english descended majority in Ireland and an Irish descended majority in South Africa? Britain gets the best of both worlds in that scenario, since there are more South African colonists and Ireland is more english. I'm sure later that problems would arise, specifically in South Africa, but in the short-term it would work. And we all know that they always plan for short-term.
 
Surely the best possible scheme would involve the colonies as well and shipping emigrants to places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand or even the Cape Colony.
A fair number of them did emigrate to Canada off their own bat in our timeline, the governments weren't all that keen though since the individuals involved were generally fairly poor and there was a fear that they were 'politically unreliable' as it were. Shipping them off to the US however took care of both of these issues since they were no longer within the Empire.


NZ would be interesting, but the Potato Famine was slightly before NZ became properly settled by the British, it roughly tallies with the planning and construction of the first planned settlements at the very end of the 1840s. So, it'd be new territory, so to speak. Would anyone be willing to pay for an Irish Catholic new settlement in NZ or Australia? Would the government in London sign off on this?
The main problem that I can see is the greater distance, and therefore cost, compared to North America since this was before the Suez canal opened. You've also got the consideration you raised about London signing off on the idea - do they really want a bunch of Irishmen cluttering up their nice new settler colony? Mass immigration could seriously skew the demographic makeup of it.


Who knows, maybe it leads to an English descended majority in Ireland...
I doubt they'd be able, either financially or logistically, or willing, to ship that many people abroad. You still need tenants to work the land after all, and it takes many more of them even at a minimum than the number Anglo-Irishmen.
 
One of the little-known chapters in the history of Irish emigration to North America is the large-scale immigration to Newfoundland, primarily along the southeast (i.e. the Avalon Peninsula, where at one point there were so many Irish speakers the Government had to get interpreters for court cases and the like). The reason? Unlike other areas of the New World, going to Newfoundland was cheaper because it was technically not a colony but a "fishery" in the eyes of the British.
I second the motion.
 
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