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Many English people were more sympathetic to the Irish than the anti-Irish sentiments expressed by some officials and in newspapers such as The Times would lead one to believe. Father Kelleher, Catholic parish priest of Schull, distinguished between what he called the 'crimes and cruelties' of Irish landlords and English politicians, and 'those generous-hearted Britons who have made sacrifices to stay the steps of famine in our unhappy land'.

More than £2m was donated for famine relief, a huge sum in today's terms, but not enough to save thousands from dying.

Here is an extract from: An On-going Debate An article by Peter Gray - The Triumph of Dogma: The ideology of Famine Relief - discussing government policy during the Famine. It can be found in full at *www.historyireland.com/magazine/features/feat2.

Ireland is not the only country which would have been thrown off its balance by the attraction of 'public money' at discretion. This false principle eats like a canker into the moral health and physical prosperity of the people. All classes 'make a poor mouth' as it is expressively called in Ireland. They conceal their advantages, exaggerate their difficulties, and relax their exertions. The cottier does not sow his holding, the proprietor does not employ his poor in improving his estate, because by doing so they would disentitle themselves to their 'share of the relief.' The common wealth suffers both by the lavish consumption and the diminished production, and the bees of the hive, however they may redouble their exertions, must soon sink under its accumulated burden...
There is only one way in which the relief of the destitute ever has been, or ever will be, conducted consistently with the general welfare, and that is by making it a local charge. Those who know how to discriminate between the different claims for relief, then become actuated by a powerful motive to use that knowledge aright. They are spending their own money. At the same time, those who have the means of employing the people in reproductive works have the strongest inducement given them to do so.

The struggle now is to keep the poor off the rates, and if their labour only replaces the cost of their food, it is cheaper than having to maintain them in perfect idleness... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part, and that we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain, which will be the true consummation of their union!
The article concludes that there was 'not a policy of deliberate genocide, but a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended 'to encourage industry, to do battle with sloth and despair; to awake a manly feeling of inward confidence and reliance on the justice of Heaven' (in the words of Anthony Trollope), were based on false premises, and in the Irish conditions of the later 1840s 'amounted to a sentence of death on hundreds of thousands of people'.

Helen Litton ends her book The Irish Famine (Dublin, 1994) by pointing out that famine is still with us:

'It does happen now, and is happening still, and the old arguments are still trotted out about how famine aid is not appropriate, how it doesn't reach the right people, how it demoralises the ability of communities to look after themselves. Technological developments, the ease of modern transport and communications, all the advantages the 19th century didn't have, do not seem to have made any difference to the universal human ability to delay to confuse, to prevaricate, to discriminate, to excuse the inexcusable.'
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Creators: Aidan Lawes

 
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