4 - Conclusion

Summary

Most traditional historiography, whether Malthusian or nationalist, implies that the Great Famine was part of Ireland's destiny. There is room, however, for an alternative view: that, taking fuller account of developments both in the domestic economy and further afield, in the end the Irish were desperately unlucky. Far from being inevitable, the series of massive and lasting fungus-induced crop failures that produced the Great Famine was utterly unpredictable. In the decades before 1845 the country had been learning how to cope with serious crop failures, not without hardship, though without massive excess mortality. But nothing quite as horrific as Phytophthera infestans had appeared before, in Ireland or anywhere else. Moreover, had the fungus arrived either some decades earlier or later, the damage inflicted would not have been so horrific. Earlier, reliance on the ‘accursed potato’ would have been less, the pressure on resources less, and governments (like that of 1822) less constrained by ideological scruples.

A postponed visitation would also have imposed less of a threat. A delay of four decades, and Phytophthera would have faced both Alexis Millardet's bluestone counter-remedy and a countryside more thinly peopled. Even by the 1860s the rising demand for labour in Britain and in the United States would have already absorbed hundreds of thousands of those most at risk, and thus population would have passed its peak. Government, too, would have been both better endowed and more generous. In sum the Great Famine of the 1840s, instead of being inevitable and inherent in the potato economy, was a tragic ecological accident.