Recipes from Disaster - Part 1

1845 blight was a slow acting fungus, and had only destroyed potatoes after an incubation period. This had allowed allowing the British government of Sir Robert Peel time to take what appeared to be sensible and quite generous measures including an extended programme of road building, ditching and local public works largely funded by the government. But the resultant expenditure had exceeded all forecasts and alarmed the Treasury.

Unfortunately the man put in complete control of relief measures was Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary at the Treasury. Trevelyan's actions suggested that his priority was to save public money before lives. And the fact that Peel's government fell, and was replaced by the Whigs headed by the hard line Russell made matters worse. Trevelyan closed down Peel's public works programme, creating panic and disorder - the government's answer was to send in more troops. In future public works job creation or any other famine relief was supposed to be funded from local taxes. The fact that no money existed to pay the taxes was incomprehensible to Trevelyan, who had never set foot in Ireland, and along with the majority of British MPs imagined that rural Southern Ireland was like rural Southern England, with its harbours, villages, merchants and cornershops, communications and well established secure economic infrastructure.

Trevelyan and his like soundly believed that market forces always provided the ultimate solution to such problems. He refused point blank to sanction the distribution of free food in Ireland as this would deny the honest merchants their profits. He was paranoid about the routinely destitute, whose poverty was not directly related to the famine, cashing in on famine relief and insisted on systems of checks and balances which paralysed the programmes where government grants or loans might be sanctioned. As a result the situation had reached major disaster proportions by the beginning of 1847.

Although the government tried to play down the crisis as traditional Irish exaggeration, they could not muzzle the voluntary organisations. Chief amongst these was the British (Relief) Organisation which collected an impressive £470,000 by public subscription from the Queen down (she contributed £2000, not the £5 that folklore would have it, although Trevelyan's contribution was a paltry £25). Much of this money was employed in setting up soup kitchens and providing food in the worst hit areas. Like Live Aid in the 1980s, whilst this was doing nothing to solve the long term

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