Lesson 4: What Famine?
Food Exports
What is most shocking is that the Irish were forced to rely on liquid , non –nutritional food , just because the potato crop had failed. Food continued to be shipped out of the country throughout the Famine years.
‘In 1845 ,over 25,000,000 bushels of corn were exported from Ireland to Britain That same year , 257,300 sheep were exported. The following year , 480, 827 swine and 186, 483 oxen were exported to Britain (13)
The exports continued while the British Government continued to tinker with relief schemes.
‘A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847 , including peas , beans , onions, rabbits , salmon , oysters , herring , lard, honey, tongues, and seed’
9,992 calves were exported
874,170 gallons of porter 278,658 gallons of Guinness 183,392 gallons of whiskey All grain –derived alcohol products , a total of 1,336,220 gallons were exported in the first nine months of “Black ‘47”
822,6811 Gallons of butter were exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of Famine.
4000 Vessels carried food from Ireland to Bristol , Glasgow , Liverpool and London during 1847 , when 400,000 Irish men , women and children died of starvation and disease.’
(14)
The Irish people had become used to almost starvation diets and had found ways of supplementing them any way they could .Oats were grown in parts of the country and particularly in the North , porridge was a common dish. Oats were also used in many other ways and gave birth to what now has become known as black pudding. The landlord’s Cattle were often bled under the cover of darkness and it was not uncommon for people to bleed a quart of blood to mix with oats for some nutritional value. Neither was it unheard of that an occasional sheep disappeared in the dead of night. The first year of the Great Hunger , the people survived as best they could even though they had lost almost 50% of their potato crop. Anything edible in the fields and hedgerows helped to fill the pot and stave off the pangs of hunger. Peel had had the foresight to buy a small amount of Indian Corn , about £100,000 worth , which in normal circumstances , may have helped tide the country over. Despite what many commentators have said , Indian Corn was not unknown in Ireland and had been brought in to tide over earlier localised crop shortages .
‘In the same year (1800) , John Hancock of Lisburn imported a consignment of 200 tons of Indian meal from Philadelphia to be sold to distressed families.' (15) and : Humphrey O’ Sullivan , a school-teacher in Callen , County Kilkenny , noted in his diary on 12th May 1827 that 'Indian meal has come in from America:many people like it well: it will keep down the cost of living for the poor.’ (16)
