The Great Famine of 1845-52 had resulted from phytophthora infestans, or potato blight, combined with a poor government response and a strict laissez faire interpretation of economics. Of the tenant farmers identified by the 1841 census, the great majority of these were entirely reliant on the potato crop, the cheapest and most easily produced food source. Many of these tenant farmers were dependent on Lumpers, a form of potato that was highly susceptible to disease. By 1845, the first reports of potato blight had been recorded, and the following year the harvest failed again. This triggered a tragedy of unprecedented proportions and while the people starved, other Irish produce was often shipped out to Britain and the imperial markets under armed guard.
While towns and villages throughout Ireland were damaged by the Famine, West Cork, where the O’Donovan’s lived, was particularly affected. James Mahony, a young artist who was touring West Cork for the Illustrated London News, was horrified by what he had seen. Mahony provided a vivid description for the readers of the newspaper, which drew on poverty, hunger and death, reporting that:
I started from Cork, by the mail, for Skibbereen and saw little until we came to Clonakilty, where the coach stopped for breakfast; and here, for the first time, the horrors of the poverty became visible, in the vast number of famished poor, who flocked around the coach to beg alms: amongst them was a woman carrying in her arms the corpse of a fine child, and making the most distressing appeal to the passengers for aid to enable her to purchase a coffin and bury her dear little baby. This horrible spectacle induced me to make some inquiry about her, when I learned from the people of the hotel that each day brings dozens of such applicants into the town.6
Similar to Mahony, a sailor from the HMS Tartarus, delivering food to Ballydehob, West Cork, claimed that: ‘The deaths here average forty to fifty daily; twenty were buried this morning and they were fortunate in getting buried at all.’7 Similar to many families in West Cork, the O’Donovans were horribly affected by the Famine. O’Donovan Rossa had experienced the horrific realities of famine life first hand and was inevitably affected by what the Illustrated London News reported as ‘the horrors of poverty’8 in West Cork. In 1845, at the onset of the Famine, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was 14-years-of-age. In his recollections, he recalled the almost apocalyptic scene of when his father had opened the family’s potato pit. With tension palpable and a growing sense of unease spreading throughout the country, he remembered the fear and horror his parents experienced:
The leaves had been blighted, and from being green, parts of them were turned black and brown, and when these parts were felt between the fingers they’d crumble into ashes. The air was laden with a sickly odour of decay, as if the hand of death had stricken the potato field, and that everything growing in it was rotting… The stalks withered away day by day. Yet the potatoes had grown to a fairly large size. But the seed of decay and death had been planted into them… By and by an alarming rumour ran through the country that the potatoes were rotting in the pits. Our pit was opened, and there, sure enough, were some of the biggest of the potatoes, half rotten.9
Representing the unfolding crisis as experienced throughout Ireland, each day Denis O’Donovan attended the family potato plot in the hope of seeing the crop flourish rather than diminish. On each occasion he was left disappointed as the potato stalks turned black and crumbled to dust as the crop rotted within the ground. Separating his rotten potatoes from good Lumpers, Denis O’Donovan carted them to a specially built chamber house on his land which he had padded with straw to keep the potatoes dry and maintain a proper temperature. To his great horror, the good potatoes were rotting here too. Specially constructing room for them above the family kitchen, in their loft, the family once again toiled to separate the good potatoes from the bad and stored them in the cool, dry loft. Again, every potato that was stored in the loft rotted.
To meet the crisis in Ireland, Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, initially acted promptly by clandestinely securing maize from America known as Indian corn to avert the hunger in Ireland and allowed the coast guard to open up seventy-six food depots along the west coast of Ireland, the worst area affected by the Famine. Peel was replaced by Sir John Russell of the Whigs, whose government adopted a more laissez faire attitude to famine relief in Ireland. Leaving much of the governmental response to the Famine in the hands of Charles Trevelyan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government moved to transfer the burden of famine relief from the central exchequer to the local tax rates. Peel had previously established a Board of Works to provide work for the starving poor and give them money to purchase food. In this view the government was of the opinion that the people did not require handouts; they required work to survive. This scheme was continued under the Russell administration. However, under Trevelyan, it was decided that while money for the Board of Works would be provided by the Central Government Fund, the money advanced by the British government was to be repaid from local rates over a ten-year period.
By 1847 some 700,000 people were employed by the board. These people were, however, grossly underpaid, receiving between 8d to one shilling per day. This money was not in keeping with the rising cost of living during Famine-stricken Ireland and was insufficient for survival considering the cost of food and the increasing problem of shopkeepers and food providers taking advantage of the peoples’ hunger. By 1847, the British government introduced a temporary Soup Kitchen Scheme, with three million people using the service by the summer. Relying on the Irish Poor Law System, the government also turned to workhouses as a means of Famine relief. The cost of the Poor Law System, however, fell upon landlords who, rather than aid the starving, set about a process of evicting tenants from their land so as to reduce their liability to Poor Law funding. Amending Irish Poor Law, an infamous clause was introduced into the British Parliament known both as the Gregory or Quarter Acre Clause, which ruled that tenant farmers would be denied Famine relief either inside or outside a workhouse if they were farming more than a quarter an acre of land. As thousands were evicted from their homes, they had little choices of life within workhouses, as a result, many wandered aimlessly throughout Ireland, turning to criminality or emigrating in search of a better life. The exact human cost of the Famine in Ireland can never be adequately examined, but most estimates suggest that the population went into free fall, with more than one million people choosing to leave Ireland in search of a better life, and some two million people dying. The 1841 census noted there were over eight million people living in Ireland that year. Every census since 1841 has been substantially lower.
The Famine placed an immense strain on the O’Donovans, and all resources were dried up to provide for the family. O’Donovan Rossa recalled that early on in the Famine all their money was lost to pay the rent for their tenant farm. He noted that the wheat from his parents’ farm came to £18.5s, but had been seized by the landlord who, fearing it would be used by the family rather than as a means of generating money for rent, employed men to watch over it so that it was threshed, bagged and taken to the mill by the family rather than be used for any other purpose. The problem for the O’Donovans was that their rent was also £18 and this money was promptly handed over to the landlord’s agent, Garrett Barry. Lamenting the horror of the Famine in his later years, he recalled how, as a boy, he did not know ‘how my father felt. I don’t know how my mother felt. I don’t know how I felt. There were four children of us there. The potato crop was gone; the wheat crop was gone.’10 By 1846, the second year of the Famine, there was further distress throughout the country as the blight struck again, but on this occasion the potato did not grow at all, and as fields became increasingly untended, the rural landscape was dotted with yellow ragwort – a worthless weed. Standing on a hill overlooking Roscarbery, O’Donovan Rossa saw over a mile of land covered in the weed; he recalled that despite the horror unfolding, it was a beautiful sight to see as it glistened in the sun. He realised that the beautiful scene, which he watched from upon high, was the baleful beauty of decay