Before and After the Great Famine: The Irish of Atlantic Canada

Event

1995-03-18

01:34:12

Cyril Byrne gives a lecture at the B.I.S Irish Heritage Lecture Series titled “Before and After the Great Famine: The Irish of Atlantic Canada”. Cyril Byrne talks about the famine in two periods- immediately before and after the famine. Changes were drastic in Ireland’s socio-economic and political structure. He speaks about the Land system, penal laws and Migration as result of the famine.

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Held by Benevolent Irish Society

The recording starts while the speaker is explaining his connection to PEI. The speaker notes that over 80% of Irish immigrants came to Atlantic Canada prior to the beginning of the Great Famine in 1845. The speaker will focus on the periods immediately before the Famine and immediately after the Famine in Ireland. The speaker explains that the early relationship between Ireland and England was due to the English considering Ireland as a threat to the British national security. So, by the 1690s the bulk of the Irish aristocracy were displaced or had lost their lands and immigrated to Europe. Those remaining in Ireland eventually became tenants. The speaker gives examples of these “land thefts” including one involving the Irish ancestors of Charles De Gaulle. The speaker also explains how some Catholic landowners were able to maintain ownership of their land.
The speaker talks about the system of land tenure in Ireland that involved several thousand landowners with 30 or 40 huge landowners. Many of these owners were given the land taken away from the Irish. This change in ownership can be seen in Petty’s Survey of Ireland. The bulk of the Irish population then held these lands as tenants.
The speaker illustrates with several examples including an anecdote about Willian Gladstone and his friend an Irish Monsignor how important land ownership is to the Irish.
The tenant-landlord issue persisted into the end of the 19th century with fewer and fewer Irish Catholics owning land. The speaker explains how the Penal Laws of England and the Penal Laws of Ireland created this situation as well as how Catholic families sometimes managed to maintain ownership of their land.
During the 18th century, there was a gradual return of Irish Catholics to Ireland because they could engage in trades and some of them became very wealthy. There were even rural Irish tenants who were wealthier than their landlords. The speaker highlights this idea with Edward Byrne, a Catholic sugar merchant in Dublin.
Eventually Catholics were perceived as less of a threat and so their land leases were longer. The speaker uses the O’Callaghan, Marrs and McCarthy families in Tipperary as examples of how Catholics could gradually acquire huge land holdings and subsequent wealth from them. The speaker also notes their children often became money lenders.
For the most part, the Catholic ancestors of PEI Irish were not part of the wealthy of Ireland but were more likely to be part of the cotter class. The speaker explains how the cotter class constituted an ever-increasing percentage of the population as Ireland’s population grew during the 18th century. This growth was due to Ireland’s productive land providing a level of good level of nutrition for the population. As Ireland’s population starts to grow, the situation that would develop during the Famine can be seen.
By the 19th century, economical problems started to emerge in Ireland. The speaker uses examples of families from the different levels of Ireland’s social hierarchy to explain why the cotters at the lowest level and the even lower class of labourers were so dependent on the potato for subsistence.
The speaker explains that by the 1820’s the population of Ireland was six million when the country could only reasonably sustain about four and a half million. By the time of the Famine the population was nearly nine million. Due to the great pressure on the land, there were periodic famines every five to six years by the 1830’s. These periodic famines caused more misery than death and resulted in immigration. For example, many Irish immigrated to Newfoundland following the famine of 1816 - 1817. These immigrants subsequently settled in other Maritime provinces including PEI. A short break in the tape.
After the Napolean wars, there was an economic depression in Europe. The speaker notes that in Ireland the depression coincided with the return of Irish soldiers, periodic famines, potato crop failures and cholera outbreaks. In 1845, the British Government brought sufficient relief to Ireland to reduce the number of deaths due to starvation, but still the suffering was considerable.
In 1846 the potato blight was more serious and at the same time the ruling Whigs supported the absolute ownership of land. The speaker tells that in addition providing relief to the Irish encountered numerous roadblocks. So, the Irish landowners were made responsible to support the peasants of which some did, and others did not. By the end of the famine the number of small landowners was greatly reduced due to bankruptcies.
Between 1845 and 1851, the population of Ireland dropped by at least 3 million partly due to the growing number of people leaving Ireland. Another change for Ireland after the Great Famine Ireland was the greatly reduced number of speakers of Irish who replaced their Language with English mostly in response to the economical situation.
The speaker explains due to bankruptcies during the famine, large tracts of land were sold between 1851 and 1861 to the Irish middle class Catholics. For the tenants, conditions worsened resulting in more immigration as well as an increased pressure to change the land tenure system. This change resulted in most of Ireland once again being owned by ancestrally Irish people by the end of the 19th century. To keep the land within the family, the Irish started marrying older and having smaller families.
More greed and middle-class values started surfacing in the farmer class between 1861 and 1900. They develop a more Victorian way of looking at life. The church became an important part of people’s life. The speaker explains how the British Government worked to gain control of the Catholic priests to exert control of the Irish people. This coupled with the British efforts to exclude a large portion of the Irish from voting caused Ireland to seek independence from Britian.
Darcy McGee and Gavan Duffy, members of Young Irelanders, were convinced the only way to get independence from Britain was by violent revolution. The foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood laid on St. Patrick’s Day of 1866 in the USA aimed to achieve Ireland’s independence by force. The defeat of the many Home Rule bills brought forward by Parnell in the 1870’s added to the idea of independence via violence. Thus, the use of the gun to gain Ireland’s independence was largely determined by the outcome of the Great Famine.
The speaker answers questions from the audience