A View of Pre-Famine Ireland - Term Paper Example

 Land And People: Historical Geographies Of Modern Ireland Societies & landscapes of Pre-famine Ireland: An Introduction This paper gives a view of Pre- Famine Ireland to shed light on how environmental change can result in susceptibility in human populations and how modern theories can provide insight into these types of situations. The social and economic and religious transformation in Ireland forced the Irish people to adjust to a situation where they had limited powers and had thus limited prospects to participate in mainstream of the country. Despite the fact that the entitlement framework illuminates some of the reasons why communities depend on ecological systems, it does not help to understand situations where ecological systems themselves are weak and might crash. Religion in pre-famine Ireland This was an important period for religious life in Ireland, when all churches confronted challenges to their spiritual authority, or their position. Against a backdrop of social and economic change, religious leaders tried to introduce reform, improve administration, and discipline their flocks. The churches were under growing pressure from the secular world and from its ideas, its education and its cultural activities. In the face of all this there was an increase in religious passion. In Protestant churches much of this can be explained by evangelicalism and its emphasis on a more ‘enthusiastic’ style of religious expression. The Irish scholar Kevin Whelan claimed that “the provision of Catholic education in Ireland by the indigenous teaching orders became a main motivation of Irish Catholicism between 1770 and 1830, and it was “an essential component of the artillery of the revised Tridentine Church” which developed in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s and began to develop in Newfoundland Catholicism in the 1850s and 1860s”. Yet progress was slow in the pre-Famine era. On the other hand, some important building work was begun and a new generation of reforming bishops brought their influence to bear on the lower clergy through regular conferences, retreats, and visitations. At the same time as priests were encouraged to improve their preaching and pastoral work, regulations were introduced to address personal standards of behavior. Whilst discipline was tightened as a result of these measures, the rapid rate of population increase made any improvement in the ratio of priests to people impossible. The years 1826-7 saw the beginning of a more rigorous evangelical challenge to Catholicism. The so-called ‘Second Reformation’ began in Co. Cavan with reports of the conversion of several tenants of the evangelical landlord, Lord Farnham. Accusations of proselytism quickly followed and were furiously refuted. Nevertheless, the weakness of the tenantry and the widespread influence of the Farnhams were clearly major factors. A challenge to the popularity of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, the Second Reformation movement also demonstrated the evangelical belief in religious solutions to political problems. As with the teaching and bible societies, the primary motivation was the view that the only way of solving Ireland’s problems was through conversion of the majority of the population to Protestantism, not concession to their political demands. By October 1827 it was reported that there were 783 converts in Co. Cavan, but the ‘Reformation’ had little direct impact on other areas. Protestant evangelicals again came under attack in 1831, when famine on Achill Island inspired the Irish-speaker, the Reverend Edward Nangle, to establish a Protestant settlement there, aiming at the teaching and conversion of the Catholic population. He had a school, which attracted 420 children within a year and a printing press dedicated to publishing attacks on ‘the idolatry of the Roman Mass’. This made Nangle’s settlement a focal point for evangelical visitors and, during the Famine of the 1840s, a target for accusations of ‘souperism’, the use of food as bribery to win converts. Division of Ireland & Land Reforms The division of Ireland is termed as a ‘first-order’ division into major regional units, with no study of the complex webs of smaller-scale territorial structures, informal and formal, which co-exist across the country (Smyth, 165-175). The division involves the recognition of what are here called ‘lifestyle regions’ identifying major geographical contrasts that can be associated with access to ‘opportunity’, social and economic organization and— less tangibly— attitudes of mind. In addition, tensions spread through inter-community relationships within Ireland, and between north and south and in some parts of Ireland like Derry/ Londonderry and in north and west Belfast. Major population movements have further strengthened established spatial and mental divisions. Regional and spatial issues have moved close to the political center stage with a warmth not evident since the days of the ‘Buchanan Report’ in the 1960s— they have been recognized in the Republic in a national plan which proposes the formulation of a ‘national spatial strategy’ (Buchanan, 84-98) The relationship between landlords and tenants in pre-famine Ireland was a non-contractual one, whether landlords chose to recognize it as such or not. The Landlord and Tenant Law Amendment Act of 1860, which had sought to place the relation of landlord and tenant on a basis of contract between the parties and not upon tenure or service, had been a failure. If landlords intended to fulfill policies of estate improvement as the London companies were doing, it was in their own interest to recognize the non-contractual nature of landlord and tenant relations and make every effort to promote goodwill between the two. The companies' estate improvement policies essentially involved a significant measure of co-operation from the tenants, and failure on the part of tile companies, as landlords to gain and maintain the tenants' co-operation would have unavoidably increased the cost of developing estates. The yield on the companies' investment in land improvement in county Londonderry in the nineteenth century must have been improved by the efforts of a generally co-operative occupying tenantry prepared to supply their labor and steadily acquire a knowledge of improved agricultural techniques. Despite the fact that the operation of tenant right on the estates of improving landlords in the circumstances of nineteenth-century Ireland perhaps enabled the occupying tenants to infringe on the value of the landlords' interest in improvement, just as in conditions of land shortage they were able to cash in on the scarcity of land by giving up mere possession of farms, the very fact that the tenants' improvements or potential improvements were protected, ensured a measure of protection for the landlords' improvements. By attempting to implement rigid control of tenant right the London companies were more likely to extinguish than sustain their increasing interest in the improved value of their property. Restriction of tenant right would almost certainly have destroyed the tenants' willingness to maintain existing improvements or participate in any future development. Tenant right afforded the occupying tenants protection for any improvements they had done or might do, and once landlords sought to interfere with the custom they simultaneously endangered the value of existing improvements and made future progress more difficult and more costly. There was no proof that restriction of tenant right on the Ironmongers' and Salters' estates led to any major improvements in the condition of tenants' farms, or that the landlords' burden of estate improvement was reduced. Anyhow, in the first four decades of the 1800s, the Irish population grew fast and there was a demand for land. Poorer people moved to poorer land, but even poor land could support the potato. It grew everywhere; it was easy to cultivate, and it had a high yield per plant. Although the Irish diet did include milk and milk products, oatmeal and fish, generally herring, the Irish relied chiefly on the potato. They ate large amounts of potatoes. In their three meals per day, adult males ate 12 to 14 pounds of potatoes per day! Women and children over the age of 10 ate about 11 pounds of potatoes each day; younger children ate about five pounds of potatoes per day. If there were milk, or butter or cabbage or fish, the people would mix them into the potatoes, however boiled potatoes were the main source of food. Ireland of the 1840s was a country of deep and extensive rural poverty.   “Seventy-two percent of the Irish people were uneducated, and thirty-seven percent lived in mud houses with a single room” (Donnelly, 2).  Per capita income in Ireland in the early 1840s was only about 60% of the level in Britain.    Poverty was particularly prevalent in rural areas.   About two-thirds of the Irish population depended on agriculture for their sustenance, and “40% of these were landless laborers” (Donnelly, 9) Much of the land in the Irish countryside was owned in large tracts by landlords.   Landless laborers got plots of land from the landlord and in return either worked in the landlord’s fields or paid a rent to the landlord.   A social structure that trapped Irish labor in the agricultural sector caused labor productivity in that sector to be about half that of British agricultural workers (Donnelly, 9).    In this setting of poverty, a third of Irish families depended almost solely on potatoes for food.   Potatoes have a number of advantages as a low cost food source in Ireland.  They can be grown in comparatively poor soil.  They yield a high number of calories per acre.  They are rich in protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.   A diet of potatoes and buttermilk provides better nutrition than a diet consisting primarily of wheat or maize.       On account of the potato-based diet, and in spite of the widespread poverty, the Irish poor were amongst the tallest, healthiest and most fertile population in Europe.  The cheap and nutritious potato diet served as a foundation for low wage agriculture; cheap food exported from Ireland in turn caused the industrial revolution in Britain.  Besides, the low wage labor provided a pad protecting some landlords from the effects of their incompetent farming practices.    The potato blight – a fungus that causes potatoes to turn black and rotten as they grow in the ground had appeared in small areas prior to 1845.  However the blight hit about half the crop in 1845, and destroyed nearly the entire crop in 1846, 1848 and 1849.  Estimates of famine related deaths range from 290,000 to 1,250,000 compared to Ireland’s pre-famine population of about 8,000,000.      Conclusions This paper provides a brief review of the background prior to pre-famine Ireland. Many developments like socio-ecological systems had deep impact on the Irish society. Thus the review helps in understanding the situation on pre-famine Ireland. Bibliography Buchanan, R.H. "Towns and Plantations 1500-1700" 1986:84-98, in William Nolan (ed) The Shaping of Ireland: The Geographical Perspective, Dublin and Cork: Mercier Press. Donnelly, James.  The Great Irish Potato Famine, 2001, Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire.  Smyth, W.J. The cultural geography of rural Ireland in the twentieth century, 1986:165-175, In: Nolan, W. (ed.) The shaping of Ireland, Cork: Mercier Press. Whelan, Kevin “The Regional Impact of Irish Catholicism, 1700-1850,” 1988:253-77, Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland, Eds. William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan, Cork. Read More