Lesson 4: What Famine?
Soup Kitchens
What the British Government did instead was to play around with Relief schemes and depend to a large extent on charitable organisations to support the starving Irish . As has been said before , by 1847 ,The Society of Friends had helped in setting up Soup kitchens throughout the country and were also responsible for shipping in of $500,000 woth of food in a total of 118 ships over the years of the Famine. Localised efforts were also made by Father Matthew in Cork and the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Clare.
Now , in the third year of the continuing potato failure , all previous efforts to regulate Public Works were abandoned. The Temporary Relief of Destitute Persons Act was passed. This came to be known as the Soup Kitchen Act. The Relief Committees could now establish Soup Kitchens and distribute soup without any work having to be done to earn it.
Soup was always the preferred food to be delivered , as in earlier distributions , uncooked food portions were hoarded , swapped or sold for tobacco and alcohol. Cooked food had to be used immediately. Another reason for supplying cooked food was that ,most people had forgotten the rudimentary skills of ‘cooking’ anything other than boiling a pot of potatoes and few of the hovels had any cooking arrangements.
Tom Murphy , in the introduction to his play ‘ Famine’ , says , ‘A hungry and demoralised people becomes silent. (6)’
They also became passive but still maintained their dignity. Although starving , ‘It was seen as disgraceful to have to stand in line , carrying a pot or a bowl , to wait for your number to be called .’ – ‘ the widespread sense of humiliation meant that fewer people claimed it' ( the soup); (7)
The introduction of soup was greeted at first with enthusiasm. 'Good soup , if accompanied by a piece of bread or a meal-cake , was of value . – Much of the soup, however , was not so much soup for the poor as poor soup.' (8)
The Relief Committees went for quantity rather than quality and often their soup gave the recipients ‘ bowel complaints.’ Being far too liquid , it led in many cases to diarrhoea. A Commissariat Officer , Mr. Bishop in west Cork , wrote in a letter,
‘the soup runs through them without affording any nourishment’(9)
