WI: The British help the Irish during the 1840s famines?

As in the title? What would happen if the British government or citizens helped relief the Irish during the famine? Would you have no Irish separatism?
 
It would depend heavily on the amount of aid. Simply sending a cargo ship full of food to Dublin once won't change very much, but a full-scale attempt to help the island would have many positive effects for Irish-British relations. In the latter case, a result similar to what Scotland has today could occur, or a much more peaceful independence attempt.

- BNC
 
The conflict between Britain and Ireland (and between the Irish and the Ulstermen) had it's roots long before the famine but I think British relief efforts could help to heal the wounds and improve relations. They'll still be a sizeable Irish separatist movement but they're more likely to focus upon Home Rule.
The trouble is that a relief effort would require a different British government. OTL there was none for two reasons :the government didn't really care about the Irish and they regarded government run relief efforts as an unacceptable imposition on the free market. I'm not sure what POD you'd need to change those attitudes.
 
The trouble is that a relief effort would require a different British government. OTL there was none for two reasons :the government didn't really care about the Irish and they regarded government run relief efforts as an unacceptable imposition on the free market. I'm not sure what POD you'd need to change those attitudes.
Remove Trevelyan?

At the very least, you'd get rid of the big proponent of free market forces on the matter.
 
At the very least, you'd get rid of the big proponent of free market forces on the matter.
Wouldn't that requires huge macro-historical changes tough? As long Britain leads financially and technologically the European economy, there's little to no incitative breaking with an providentialist-smithean concept of economy.
 
I was just reading an essay about how contrastingly well the scottish government responded to potato famines in the western isles, actually.
 
Wouldn't that requires huge macro-historical changes tough? As long Britain leads financially and technologically the European economy, there's little to no incitative breaking with an providentialist-smithean concept of economy.
Not really. he was the big proponent of the government not really regulating the food prices past the first year, and also exporting food from Ireland.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Here's the thing about the Irish famine - there was relief, it's just that that tended to be tied to losing your land - for entirely sensible reasons.

This is not because it was seen as a punishment for doing wrong, or anything like that. Nor is it because it was against free market ideology, nor because they just hated the Irish - this was a time of famine across the whole of Europe, it's just that Ireland was particularly hard hit, and the reason why is that it had (thanks to a combination of the potato and some good harvests) temporarily exceeded carrying capacity, often in the form of smallholders only farming a few acres of land (it's tied to Irish inheritance laws of the time, which had no primogeniture and used gavelkind instead). Under those circumstances, what you want to do as a rational govenment is to reduce the population density by shipping as many people as possible elsewhere.

The relief was not enough - but almost nothing would have been. Transporting large quantities of food to the interior of the island is significantly harder than transporting people to the coast - and it was expensive, too. Palmerston's estate is notable, because firstly he took extraordinary measures to add food stability and secondly because he had to ship 2,000 people overseas despite that... and thirdly because the cost of the relief efforts was several times his annual rent on the land.


The relief is the reason Ireland becomes a major net food importer (on top of the actual crop - the crop didn't completely collapse, it was reduced significantly but that doesn't mean the whole harvest failed. If it did the entire island would have died in the first year; this is what actual famines look like). It also resulted in some nasty knock-on effects, like the price of food halving - which caused further economic problems for small farmers as suddenly they couldn't sell their crop for the same value!




One of the tricky things when talking about the Irish famine is to pin down how many actually died. This is tricky because the normal way of accounting for the deaths caused by the famine is to take the predicted population as of 1851 (that is, to calculate by "natural increase" where trends were going) and then to ascribe much if not the entire shortfall to the famine. One of the reasons this is a problem is because the birth rate went down in the late 1830s - and, of course, that it means conflating a demographic hole with actual deaths.

The number actually recorded as dying of "starvation" is something like 21,000, with another ~400,000 dying of some kind of disease - some of this can certainly be blamed on famine, but we need to also see the 1841 census figures by cause of death to determine what the normal death rate should be in the country absent famine. While this doesn't count stillbirths, it's hard to see how it could underreport by a factor of two or more (and the mechanism for missing any remaining unaccounted for population is relatively simple - going between Britain and Ireland at this time was 'internal' movement and as such not nearly as reported upon.)
 
One of the tricky things when talking about the Irish famine is to pin down how many actually died. This is tricky because the normal way of accounting for the deaths caused by the famine is to take the predicted population as of 1851 (that is, to calculate by "natural increase" where trends were going) and then to ascribe much if not the entire shortfall to the famine. One of the reasons this is a problem is because the birth rate went down in the late 1830s - and, of course, that it means conflating a demographic hole with actual deaths.
Also because people had a habit of burying their dead in walls so when you got cash for a coffin, they could get a decent burial.

Here's the thing about the Irish famine - there was relief, it's just that that tended to be tied to losing your land - for entirely sensible reasons.
Sensible in the sense that if you owned anything over a half acre, you had to hand it over to qualify for aid, of course.

And then we have landlords who would hock you out the instant you ran out of cash, which naturally really didn't help matters.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Sensible in the sense that if you owned anything over a half acre, you had to hand it over to qualify for aid, of course.
I did just address that one. The island was over carrying capacity; under those circumstances, you need to decrease the population density as fast as possible, especially by getting people off marginal land.
The real primary blame is the baby-boom in the Irish population that doubled it in a generation, and which concluded in the late 1830s. That meant the population was much greater than had been sustainable in the absence of the potato - and when the potato became unreliable, the island could no longer support the population. Under those circumstances you set up permanent famine relief (a tricky thing to do given that it was the third most important line item on the budget after the army and the navy) or you depopulate the island by compulsive emigration, or you let the island depopulate itself by natural emigration, or you let people die until the situation has 'corrected' itself.

They chose the second, for the most part, by encouraging emigration for all those who were not in sustainable situations.
 
I did just address that one. The island was over carrying capacity; under those circumstances, you need to decrease the population density as fast as possible, especially by getting people off marginal land.
Huh, book I read pointed out it simplified the property issue, thereby allowing for plantation farming.

That was the big motivation.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Lots of people starving to death, makes 'em more desperate, is my guess.

Well, I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on why the British took a sensible policy to prevent Irish food woes being a permanent problem - either they were assholes who took what turned out to be the right choice out of short term greed, or they did something that alleviated the problem which also happened to involve them consolidating the land in profitable ways.
 
Wouldn't that requires huge macro-historical changes tough? As long Britain leads financially and technologically the European economy, there's little to no incitative breaking with an providentialist-smithean concept of economy.

Yes it would require significant historical change, but not quite in the way you explain I think. Or at least, more nuance is needed.

There was, as people have pointed out, relief available during the Famine, but it was not enough by any means. It is worth noting that the Famine came after a European famine. There simply weren't large piles of food lying around for the government to purchase quickly. Yes, Britain was exporting tons of food to Europe and the Americas during the famine, but action would have required compulsory purchase/seizure of stock held by merchants and farmers. This would have been very difficult to contemplate in the 1840s.

Britain was a nation wedded to free-trade, but it's more important than just that economic justification of 'free trade has made us the most powerful economy so it must be right and we need to stick to it' concept. Britain saw Free-Trade as part of its national consciousness, tied to fair dealing and the rule of law and democracy. It isn't as simple as Trevelyan being bullish about it - it would have been a HUGE step to undertake such a form of relief. Peel and others weren't being callous when they pushed for repeal of the corn law to help in Ireland, they genuinely thought that this would help.

We expect huge and dramatic things of Governments in the past with our modern-day hindsight, but for as many callous and indifferent Britons there were many others who believed what they were doing was right. Or simply couldn't summon up the strength of will to push through a truly radical solution. Think about the Migrant Crisis today. Largely, Western governments have failed when it comes to the most intense humanitarian crisis of the decade, whilst the few that took radical action, such as Angela Merkel in Germany, are now paying a political price for that step amongst those who see it as the wrong idea. Yes Britain could have done more, but it would have required deep and radical action and been a huge political risk.

To answer the OP's question about the consequences of relief:

Short Term:
*Buying up huge amounts of food, or stopping Irish food exports, or whatever interventionist steps are taken probably end up weakening Peel's Government even more than OTL.
*The Irish Poor Law, through which the relief would have been administered, is strengthened immeasurably. The Workhouse System, without administering the heavy burdens of funding emigration, continues to be the main system through which crisis and poverty is managed.

Mid Term:
*A higher population, and less buying up of absented freeholds by large landlords, changes the character of agrarian dissent in Ireland. The Irish Land War looks a little different, but I think that those rural smallholds that survive will still struggle in the 1870s downturn across Europe.
*Fewer Irish emigrate to America, with fewer pathways established by famine emigrants, but poverty and poor conditions in Ireland still push many into going.

Long Term:
*The Famine relief has little effect on the tensions over British Rule in Ireland. As OTL the majority of Ireland favours some form of Home Rule until the Easter Rising etc. Whether these events are slightly butterflied or not, I think its important to think about the long-term issues that shaped that difficult relationship rather than just find one POD.
*Famine relief will not change pre-existing ideas about the Irish in Britain [that they are feckless, lazy, and in need of charity] or Irish ideas about English rule [that it is overbearing, pauperizing, and patronizingly out of touch with the needs of Ireland more generally].
 
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