The Forgotten Holocaust

Chapter Twenty-One

‘You are familiar with the potato, I presume?’ Brennan asked.

Ben heaved an inward sigh. His idea of travelling all the way out here to the island of Madeira hadn’t been to listen to a discourse on the topic of root vegetables. But he bit back his impatience. ‘As much as the next man,’ he replied.

Brennan leaned back in his chair, settling into lecture mode. ‘The Irish rural population of the 1840 — that is to say some six million out of the country’s overall population of eight million at the time — were very familiar with it indeed. It’s a highly versatile vegetable. It grows prodigiously, keeps well and is easy to cook. Eaten in sufficient quantities it’s a remarkable source of calories, protein and minerals, capable of maintaining health, preventing nutritional deficiencies like scurvy and supplying the energy needed for a hard day’s work in the fields.

‘There had always been plenty to go around in rural Ireland. Children would walk to school with their pockets filled with cold potatoes to eat at lunchtime. Labourers digging the fields would be allowed to roast as many of them as they could eat over an open fire. Fishermen’s wives would weave stocking bags in which their husbands could carry mashed potato to eat at sea. A traveller and observer named Arthur Young described what he found to be a typical scene in the rural Ireland of the time: “Mark the Irishman’s potato bowl placed on the floor, the whole family upon their hams around it, devouring a quantity incredible, the pig taking his share as easily as the wife, the cocks, hens, turkeys, geese, the cur, the cat, and perhaps the cow — all partaking of the same dish. No man can often have been a witness of it without being convinced of the plenty, and I will add the cheerfulness, that attends it.” He estimated that a barrel of around two hundred and fifty to three hundred potatoes could last a family of five, as well as the menagerie of livestock they often shared the same basic dwelling with, for a week. The father of the family would have taken the lion’s share, consuming something in the region of twelve to fourteen pounds a day in order to get the necessary nutrients for the very difficult work that was his livelihood. Not the most varied diet, to be sure, but Young was surprised how very well they appeared to do on it. He described them as “athletic in their form, as robust and as capable of enduring labour as any upon earth”, adding that “When I see people of a country, in spite of political oppression, with well-formed vigorous bodies, and their cottages swarming with children; when I see their men athletic and their women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on an unwholesome food.”’

‘Just one problem with that,’ Ben said. ‘Dependence on a single food source made them vulnerable, if anything happened to go wrong with it.’

‘Indeed it did,’ Brennan said, nodding. ‘An obvious risk, when you place all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. The potato harvest of 1846 was to have been the biggest ever. All of two million acres of land had been seeded across Ireland, and after the close shave they’d had the previous year with the blight that had narrowly missed devastating the crop, there was widespread optimism that this would be a year of plenty for all. And to begin with, it seemed as if all hopes would be fulfilled. Every planted field was teeming with the dark green leaves and purple blossoms of the thriving young plants.

‘Then in early June, the first signs of the disease began to appear in a few localised spots. Within just a few weeks, it was suddenly everywhere, spreading like gangrene. It was said that farmers who had gone to bed dreaming of their lush potato crop awoke the next morning to the stench of the rotting plants. From one end of the country to the other, a desperate race began to stem the disease by salvaging whatever might remain of the crop. Many believed that by ripping up the stalks, they might be able to prevent the “infection” from reaching the precious vegetables below ground, where the earth would protect them. But when they dug into the ground to check, all they found was the same putrid, liquefying mush of black rot. They had failed to understand that the disease wasn’t spreading downwards from the stalks. It was in the ground itself. A fortunate few who realised this fact in time were able to dig up a few surviving potatoes before the contagion hit them, saving a handful of their crop. But the vegetables that survived were small and soft, virtually inedible. All it did was to delay the inevitable.’

Brennan shook his head sadly and went on.

‘What began to unfold over the following weeks and months was a crisis completely unprecedented in the history of the western world. The sole food supply of millions of people turned to slime before their eyes. Soon the hungry were streaming through the countryside in their hundreds and thousands, searching for anything they could use to feed their children and themselves. To begin with, those with a little food generously shared it out, even to strangers, as is the Irish way. If they were lucky enough to catch a fish or shoot a rabbit, they would gladly divide it out between ten or even twenty people. But even the most warm-hearted of them couldn’t see their own families starve to death, and it wasn’t long before they started closing their doors to outsiders.’

Ben listened quietly. He was able to picture the scene all too clearly in his mind.

‘The weakest began to die. Some desperately tried to turn the black rot of their potatoes into something edible by drying it out into cakes. Others scoured the beaches, devouring seabirds’ eggs, shellfish and seaweed, often poisoning themselves in the process. Bodies littered the coastlines, the fields, the roadsides, many of them with their mouths stained green from the nettles and grasses they’d been forced to eat in their desire to stay alive. The first so-called “death carts” were seen on the country lanes, gathering up mounds of bodies to be taken and heaped in unmarked mass graves. Meanwhile, the towns were suddenly filled with gaunt beggars, wretched figures looking more like skeletons than human beings. No longer able to work or pay their rents, tens of thousands were turfed out of their homes by forced eviction, beaten to a pulp if they tried to resist. And it gets worse. Believe me, it gets a lot worse.’

‘Why didn’t they eat the chickens, or the pigs?’ Ben said.

‘Oh, they did, of course, especially now that there was nothing left to feed them. The situation was as much of a death sentence for the animals as it was for so many of the people. But for most, it was a cruel decision to slaughter such an important source of revenue. You have to remember that these people had no money to speak of. Livestock was often all they had in the way of currency, for barter, or to sell to pay the rent. By eating them, you were devouring your only savings. And they were a one-off source of food, not sustainable. Some people resorted to other ways. One son of a County Mayo farmer gave away his father’s last pig in return for an ounce of gunpowder, so that he could poach a few wild ducks. An ounce of powder wouldn’t have lasted long, either. In many cases the family pig was sold for oats, barley, or meal. When that quickly ran out, the Irish resorted to selling their furniture, their farming tools, their fishing rods, even their ragged old clothing if anyone would have it.’

Ben listened, his jaw set, as Brennan went on with the gruesome scenario.

‘Things became increasingly desperate. The starving would steal the swill from deserted pigsties. They’d seek out whatever was remotely edible in the offal bins of the fish markets. Those driven to crime often risked their lives to rustle sheep belonging to more affluent farmers, who protected them with rifles and often slept out on the hillsides to keep watch over their herds. Sometimes the poachers’ families devoured the mutton flesh raw so that the smell of roasting meat wouldn’t give away their crime. If they were caught, they were sometimes shot, sometimes beaten to death by the farmers’ men. Fearing that hordes of the starving would sweep across their land and bring ruin on them, some landowners dug out pits ten feet deep, concealed with grass and weeds, with spikes at the bottom to impale any hungry thief who might come in search of something to eat. Man turning against man. The fabric of the nation gone. The music, the dance, the poetry, all of it silenced, destroyed.’ Brennan gazed down at his lap, obviously deeply affected by the story he was telling.

‘It was a tragedy,’ Ben said. ‘Anyone can see that. If they hadn’t become so reliant on that single food source, things would have gone differently.’

Brennan looked sharply up at him. ‘I’m afraid you still don’t understand, do you? Have you ever considered the reason why the Irish diet was so limited to the potato? Do you think it was out of choice?’

‘I suppose I haven’t thought about it much,’ Ben admitted.

‘You and most other people,’ Brennan said. ‘Well, the fact is that the Irish peasant community, all six million of them, weren’t living just on potatoes for the pleasure of it. It was the only food allowed to them by the gentry.’

‘But why would that be?’

‘Pure economics. The potato was a uniquely efficient and cost-effective way of sustaining the three-quarters of the population who were of the least worth to the country’s rulers. For every poor peasant who might have been fed on wheat, you could keep three people alive, plus a pig and a small flock of chickens, on a potato diet — meaning that it would have taken three times the acreage to feed the same number of people. Even the type of potato allowed to them had been chosen for its growing efficiency. With so little land allocated to their needs, the rural Irish were forced to subsist on the most fertile, but also the worst-tasting, species, called the lumper.’

Ben remembered the ugly specimens he’d seen preserved in the famine museum in Glenfell. ‘Okay, I get it,’ he said, wanting Brennan to get to the point.

‘Do you? Then perhaps you begin to see why the slow, terrible deaths of as many as two million people didn’t result from some act of God. It was a disaster. But a famine, Mr Hope, a famine it was not. To use the term “famine” is to imply that the pathetic mounds of Irish bodies heaped like detritus upon the death carts and stacked twenty high in unconsecrated graves, often with their last breath still in their mouths, met such an end simply due to their foolish dependence on the vagaries of Mother Nature and a chance failing of the potato crop that they’d thoughtlessly relied on for all their needs. Well now, isn’t that a bit like saying that the half million Jews who starved to death in the Warsaw ghetto a century later somehow managed to do so spontaneously, or because they’d neglected to stock their larders? No, no. To refer to such events as a “famine” is to miss the point entirely, and to insult the memory of the millions of lives lost.’

‘So what would you call them?’ Ben said.

‘In the Irish language it was An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger,’ Brennan replied. ‘Personally, I’d tend to side with George Bernard Shaw, as he went one step further in his Man and Superman. You may have seen the play?’

‘I never was much of a theatre goer,’ Ben said.

‘“Me father died in Ireland in the black forty-seven”, says Malone,’ Brennan replied, affecting a thicker accent. ‘“The famine?” asks Violet. “No,” says Malone. “The starvation. When a country is full o’ food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.” And that’s exactly what it was.’

‘A starvation,’ Ben repeated. ‘Implying what? That it was done …?’

Brennan’s lips curled into a distorted smile. ‘Why of course, Mr Hope. That it was done on purpose. Their so-called “famine” was in fact wilful murder. One of the worst acts of genocide you never heard of.’