General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Irish Build Memorial to Choctaws Who Helped in Famine 160 years ago (Today's good news) [View all]Fortinbras Armstrong
(4,473 posts)Ever hear of the Corn Laws? These were protective tariffs on the importation of grain, mostly wheat, into the UK. Although thousands were dying of starvation in Ireland in 1845, the tariff remained in place until 1846. Before continuing, I should define "corn". According to my Merriam-Webster Dictionary,"corn" means "the grain of a cereal grass that is the primary crop of a region (as wheat in Britain, oats in Scotland and Ireland and maize in the United States and Canada)".
Lord Peel, the Prime Minister at the time, arranged for importation of "corn" from the US into Ireland. He thought he was ordering wheat, but when the Americans read "corn" on the order, they assumed he wanted maize and that's what was sent. There were two problems, however:
The first shipments of maize did not reach Ireland until February 1846.
The Irish had no experience with maize, which was not grown in Ireland. So they did not know how to prepare it for consumption. I daresay if you are presented with dried maize and told to eat it, you wouldn't know what to do with it either. Do you know that it has to be ground twice? The Irish certainly didn't.
In May 1846, Peel's government fell, and Lord John Russell (Bertrand Russell's grandfather) became PM. He set up a public works program in Ireland, which had also had a couple of problems. The first was that it was woefully underfunded. The second was that it was administered by probably the worst man for the job, Sir Charles Trevelyan.
Trevelyan believed that "the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". The program was deliberately set up to make no improvements to Ireland. The men employed actually broke up existing roads and did not replace them.
I shall not go into the problems of land ownership and so on in Ireland.