On This Day in History: September 9

The Irish Potato Famine

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In the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, John Travolta’s character does a report on “the Irish French fry phantom.” He meant the Irish Potato Famine, which is what those outside Ireland called it. For those who suffered and died, it was just the Famine, or the Great Hunger. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 9, 1845--

That Famine horseman is a fucking cock; he still kills about nine million people a year. The Great Famine in Ireland is believed to have begun on September 9, 1845, with the first newspaper reporting on it two days later saying the potatoes had “cholera.” It lasted for seven years, with 1847 being the worst. 

The entire island of Ireland was ruled by Britain from 1801 to 1922. Only Northern Ireland remained under British control after that, which everyone there is totally cheery about. Anyway, during the famine the population of all of Ireland dropped by 30%. That’s Black Death kinda percentages. Except they weren’t all from starvation. One million died from the famine, and another 1.5 million said fuck this place and mostly moved to America. 

What started it all? It’s kind of complicated, but it’s related to England being a fucking dick. Ireland was treated like a colony, which means they were treated like shit. England put its own people in charge and said Catholics, who were 80% of the population, can’t be landowners or even lease land or vote or hold office. Those laws were mostly repealed in 1829 but that doesn’t mean everything was suddenly peachy. Prior to 1845 most of the country was already out of work and on the edge of starvation, living in appalling conditions. Then this fucking potato bug. 

Introduced only a century earlier, potatoes had become a primary food source for the poor. But then a water mold infected the crops and destroyed half the potatoes in the first year of the famine, and nuked three-quarters of the crops in the ensuing seven years. And the British were all oh shit this is a major humanitarian disaster we must help them! I mean, if you consider “help” to be saying “You didn’t pay your rent get the fuck off my land you starving piece of shit.” Even more fucked up is that Ireland exported a shit-ton of food, such as livestock, butter, fish, peas, beans, and honey, to Britain during the famine. Irish nationalist author John Mitchel later wrote that the actions of the British were deliberate murder of the Irish, saying, “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”

A century and a half later British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yeah we’re sorry for being such dicks about that famine thing. Speaking of dicks, there were some Protestants who were dicks about it too, saying we’ll let your kid have a bowl of soup but only after they get Protestant religious instruction. 

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