The action of the English Government was thought by some to have been apathetic. Nothing was done to check the export of corn from Irish ports. Peel, who held the office of Irish Secretary in 1817, was probably actuated in this by the same constitutional and economic considerations which led him, as Prime Minister in 1845, to refuse O’Connell’s demand for a proclamation against the export of corn.
Carleton says that there were scattered over the country “vast numbers of strong farmers with bursting granaries and immense haggards,” and that long lines of provision carts on their way to the ports met or intermingled with the funerals on the roads, the sight of which exasperated the famishing people. Several carts were attacked and pillaged, some “strong farmers” were visited, and here or there a “miser” or meal-monger was obliged to be charitable with a bad grace; but on the whole there was little lawlessness, less indeed than in England in 1756 and 1766, or in Edinburgh in 1741. In September, 1817, Peel commissioned four Dublin physicians to visit the respective provinces and report on the causes and extent of the epidemic fever. On 22 April, 1818, Sir John Newport, member for Waterford, for whom Dr Harty had been collecting information, raised a debate on the epidemic in the House of Commons, and moved for a Select Committee. The debate, after the opening speech and a sensible brief reply by Peel, degenerated at once into irrelevant talk on the inadequacy of the fever hospital of London. The Select Committee was named, and quickly reported on the 8th of May.
A Bill embodying the recommendations of the Committee received the royal assent on 30th May. The Act provided for the extension of fever hospitals, the exemption of lodging-houses, under certain regulations, from the hearth-tax and the window-tax, and the formation of Boards of Health with powers to abate and remove nuisances. The Boards of Health were found unworkable, partly by reason of expense, partly of excessive powers. The epidemic having visited Waterford somewhat late in its progress, Sir John Newport again called attention to it on 6th April, 1819, and moved for the revival of last year’s Committee. Mr Charles Grant, afterwards Lord Glenelg, who was now Irish Secretary, gave much satisfaction to the patriotic members both by his sympathetic speech on the occasion and by his previous action at the Irish Office in the way of pecuniary help to the fever hospitals or Dispensary district officers. The Second Report of the Committee remarked that the rich absentee landlords had given nothing. Another Act, of June, 1819 (59 Geo. III. cap 41), defined the duties of officers of health, and contained an important clause (ix.) relating to the spread of contagion by vagrants. By that time the epidemic was over; nor can it be said that the action of the Government from first to last had made much difference to its progress.
Vagrancy was the principal direct cause; and behind the vagrancy were usages and traditions, with interests centuries old, which made the landlords resolute not to pay poor-rates on their rentals. It was not until twenty years after that the English Poor Law was applied to Ireland (in 1839), whereby the pauper class were dealt with as far as possible in their respective parishes. How far that measure was effective in checking the spread of contagion will appear when we come to the great famine and epidemic of dysentery and fever in 1846-49.
It will not be necessary to follow with equal minuteness the successive famines and epidemics of typhus, relapsing fever and dysentery in Ireland, to the great famine of 1846-49. After 1817 distress became chronic among the cottiers and small farmers. Leases had been entered into at high rents during the years of war prices, and in the struggle for holdings tenants at will offered the highest rate. When peace came and prices fell, rents were found to be excessive, not to say impossible. But in Ireland with a rapidly increasing population it was easier to put the rents up than to bring them down. Other things helped to embarrass the poor cottager: he paid twice over for his religion, tithes to the parson, dues to the priest; and he paid all the more of the tithe in that the graziers, who were mostly of the established Church and the occupiers of the fertile plains, had taken care to make potato land titheable (at what date this innovation arose is not stated) but had used their power in the Irish Parliament to resist the tithe on arable pastures. Again the cottiers or cottagers paid, in effect, the whole of the poor rate in the form of alms; for the dogs of the gentry kept all beggars from their gates.
Famine and Fever in the West of Ireland, 1821-22.
The next famine in 1821-22 is remarkable for two things besides its purely medical interest. Owing to the number of desperate evicted tenants, it gave occasion to an increased activity of the secret associations, especially the Whiteboys of Tipperary and Cork[479]; and it called forth the first great dole of English charity in the form of princely subscriptions to a Famine Fund. The English charity in 1822 was prompt and large-hearted, contrasting with the tardy help from the exchequer in the much more serious famine of 1817-18. The true explanation of it is, doubtless, that England on the second occasion had more money to spare. The trouble in 1821-22 came from the total loss of the potato crop in Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry, and from a partial loss of it in some other counties of the south and west. There was no corn famine, and no general dearth. Accordingly it affected the poorest class only, and the most remote districts chiefly. The planting season of 1821 had not been favourable, and the yield of potatoes had been poor. But the autumn was so wet in the west that the floods in some places washed away the soil with the potatoes in it, and in other places drowned the potatoes after they had been pitted. The flooded state of the basin of the Shannon was a natural calamity on the great scale that touched the imagination and loosened the purse-strings. A Committee was formed at the London Tavern, which sat through the spring of 1822, and quickly raised an immense sum. The great mercantile firms of the City and of Liverpool gave each a thousand pounds; a ball at the Opera House under the patronage of the king (George IV.) brought six thousand, and from all sources the Committee found themselves with three hundred thousand pounds at their disposal (forty-four thousand of it from Ireland), while a fund at the Dublin Mansion House amounted to thirty thousand more. Much of this was sent to Galway, Mayo, Clare and Kerry, in time to save many thousands of families from starvation[480]; it was, no doubt, wastefully given away, and there was a balance of sixty thousand pounds sterling unused. More tardily in June, 1822, Parliament voted one hundred thousand “for the employment of the poor in Ireland,” and in July two hundred thousand to meet contingencies of the famine. It was generally admitted that the Government grants were jobbed and misappropriated to a scandalous extent. The towns had to be made the centres of relief and the depôts of provisions; and yet the towns were not suffering from famine or fever but only from penury. The fever hospital at Ennis, the county town of Clare, was constantly filled by strangers, the townspeople remaining healthy. Kerry was one of the most afflicted counties, but Tralee and Killarney had no unusual sickness. Limerick town had hardly more fever than in an ordinary year. In Dublin the admissions for fever in 1822 were a good deal below the usual number. On the other hand, Sligo town had much fever, and Galway town had an altogether unique experience, the history of which, as related by Dr Graves, will be the best possible view of the peculiar circumstances of 1821-22[481].
In Connemara, where the distress was acute, there were no roads over which the provisions from England could be carted to the famished districts. Accordingly a great store was made in Galway, to which crowds flocked from the country in boats and on foot. Many died a few days after they arrived, from exhaustion or from the surfeit of food after long hunger. Galway, a crowded place at best, with narrow streets and lanes, contained thousands of strangers, who slept about the quays and the fish-market, or in the lanes and entries, or in crowded lodging-houses four or five in a bed. The fever began in May, and quickly spread so much that the priests were kept fully employed by calls to the dying. In June and July the sixty beds of the fever hospital were filled, principally with the fugitives from Connemara. Sixty more beds were added, and these by the middle of September were insufficient. The infection had now spread to many good houses. When Dr Graves and three other Dublin physicians arrived, on 26 September, they found ropes stretched across the streets to stop the wheel traffic. The shops of tradesmen were avoided. The town was like a place in the plague; people passing along the streets put their handkerchiefs to their noses when they came to a house with fever in it. Yet the number of cases was not remarkable; on 3 October, there were 404 sick in a population of 30,000, of whom 130 were in the fever hospital and 274 at their homes, the new cases occurring at the rate of 29 per diem. At length it was found practicable to set up depôts of provisions in country places, and the crowd of strangers left Galway. The fever was mild but tedious among the poor, more violent and fatal among the well-to-do. In many country places dysentery and choleraic diarrhœa were prevalent, as well as fever. In Erris, county Mayo, dysentery and dropsy were more common than fever, many of the cottiers having subsisted on weeds, shell-fish, or new potatoes dug six weeks after the seed was planted. In this famine the people ate the flesh of black cattle dead of disease. Excepting in Connemara the county of Galway was not so soon affected as some other parts of Ireland; but, as in 1818, the contagion of fever was spread abroad by vagrants. After Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry, the counties most affected were Roscommon and Sligo, and next to these Leitrim, Tipperary and Cork.