Irish Potato Famine Reading Passage
Irish Potato Famine Reading Passage
Paragraph A
Over 750,000 Irish people perished in the ten years that followed the Irish potato famine of 1845, including many who tried to immigrate to nations like the United States and Canada. One of Ireland's primary issues before the potato disaster was overcrowding. The population of the nation was thought to be less than three million in the early 1500s, but by 1840 it had nearly tripled. The population increase was partly due to the abundant potato harvest, which includes practically all of the nutrients needed for human survival. However, the population of Ireland was cut in half within five years of the 1845 harvest failure. The dependency of the Irish on the potato crop, the British tenure system, and the insufficient English relief efforts were some of the factors that caused the population of the Irish to drastically decline.
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Although the specific circumstances surrounding the potato's first introduction to Europe are unknown, it is generally accepted that it did so on a Spanish ship sometime in the 1600s. The belief that potatoes belonged to a botanical family of a dangerous breed persisted among Europeans for more than a century. Potatoes didn't become a novelty item until Marie Antoinette had potato blossoms in her hair in the middle of the seventeenth century. When the potato's nutritional significance was recognised in the late 1700s, European monarchs commanded that the vegetable be widely grown.
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The vast majority of Irish people had grown to depend on the potato as their main food source by the year 1800. An Irish potato farmer would typically eat more than six pounds of potatoes every day. Families even fed their livestock potatoes that they had stockpiled for the winter. The unexpected potato blight of 1845 decimated the Irish because of this dependence. Researchers initially hypothesised that the blight was brought on by static electricity, railway smoke, or fumes from subsurface volcanoes; however, the real culprit was later identified as an airborne fungus that originated in Mexico. The disease not only wiped out the potato harvests but also affected all of the potatoes that were being stored at the time. Famine was killing their families, but the exhausted farmers had little left of their farming expertise to gather other crops. Those who succeeded in cultivating oats, wheat, and barley relied on the money earned from these exported crops to pay their rent in their rented residences.
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Irish people experienced widespread famine as a result of the potato blight, but the British tenure system kept them in their predicament. The English had focused on their colonial land holdings after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. British landowners understood that the easiest way to make money off of their properties was to extract the resources, export them, and charge high rents and taxes to anyone who wanted to live there. 95% of the Irish land, which was divided into five-acre allotments for people to live and farm on, was owned by Protestant landlords under the tenure system. However, the plots were continually divided into smaller parts as Ireland's population increased. Living circumstances drastically deteriorated, forcing families to relocate to less productive terrain where essentially nothing but potatoes would grow.
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Throughout the same colonisation era. The Penal Laws were also established to break the spirit of the Irish people. Irish peasants were denied fundamental human rights under the Penal Laws, including the freedom to speak their own native language, pursue particular economic opportunities, practise their religion, get an education, and possess land. Despite the famine that was wreaking havoc on Ireland, landlords did nothing to help tenants who were unable to pay their rent. Between 1845 and 1847, landowners evicted almost 500,000 Irish tenants. Many of these individuals also had homefires and were imprisoned for unpaid rent.
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The laissez-faire doctrine, which backed a strategy of nonintervention in the condition of the Irish, was endorsed by the majority of British officials in the 1840s. Sir Robert Peel, the former prime minister, was an outlier. He moved to remove the Corn Laws, which had been placed in place to shield British grain producers from competition in foreign markets, out of compassion for the Irish. Peel was swiftly compelled to retire as a result of his rash decision, which cost him the favour of the British people. Lord John Russell, the new prime minister, gave full command of all relief operations in Ireland to Charles Trevelyan, his assistant. Trevelyan thought that Providence should be allowed to handle the Irish crisis. He even took action to shut down food depots that were selling maise and to reroute shipments of grain that were already headed to Ireland on the justification that it would be dangerous to allow the Irish to grow dependent on other nations. A few relief initiatives, like soup kitchens and workhouses, were finally put into place; nevertheless, these were badly operated institutions that contributed to the spread of disease, tore families apart, and provided insufficient food supplies in light of the severity of Ireland's food shortages.
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The Irish potato famine still has many aftereffects that are visible today. There are people all over the world who are descended from those who left Ireland in the 1840s. In the Irish hills, a few of the houses that were removed by absentee landlords now stand empty. Many Irish dependents still harbour resentment toward the British for prioritising politics over people. Irish people are still plagued by the potato blight itself during specific planting seasons when the climate is conducive to the fungus's growth.
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