\n<\/em>Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers<\/p>\n
What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? At the end of March last year, during what proved a marvellously sunny spring, a horticulturalist friend imparted the rudiments of potato cultivation. Granted, I wasn\u2019t a complete novice. I knew about chitting<\/a><\/span> (allowing seed potato to sprout in an egg box on a sunny windowsill) before planting, and banking (piling earth on a potato plant as it grows), but his instructions elevated my gardening to another level. An area knotted with grass and weeds would be transformed into neat potato hillocks \u2013 or \u2018lazy beds\u2019 \u2013 within a few hours, breaking that ground up for further cultivation in subsequent years.<\/p>\n First, my guide carefully measured the length and width of each bed, using string attached to an iron stake to mark the boundaries, thereby giving each plant space to thrive. Next, he layered a bag of manure along the length of each row, sprinkling potash on top, and placing chitted potatoes at even intervals atop.<\/p>\n Then began the real work, mainly using what he referred to as a Fermanagh spade with a long thin blade that lifted the sod on each side over the potatoes, sealing them off and creating a small ditch between each row. The cherry on top was a sprinkling of pine needles to cover the gaps and keep the weeds at bay.<\/p>\n Initially the effort required to lift and turn the sod defeated me. My height seemed an unshakable impediment until, after much grumbling, I grew accustomed to lowering the spade sufficiently to use a thigh to make the lift. After another lesson I was equipped to dig my own beds, allowing me to go forth and evangelise about how easy it is to grow the tuber.<\/p>\n Beyond occasionally removing nettles and thistles, I expended no further labour on the potato beds over the course of spring and summer. A potato\u2019s vigorous growth in Irish conditions easily outpaces any weed and requires no watering. Then, after just over three months, my \u2018earlies\u2019 were ready, and, as any grower will smugly volunteer, there\u2019s nothing quite like the taste of your own, not to mention the joy of letting everyone know about it.<\/p>\n In growing potatoes, it felt as if I was partaking of an ancient ritual. Yet the potato plant solanum tuberosum<\/a><\/em><\/span> is an exotic, native to the Americas, probably introduced to Ireland by Basque fishermen, rather than Sir Walter Raleigh, in the early seventeenth century. Potatoes are a very modern phenomenon in Ireland.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, it is a remarkably fecund crop in Irish conditions. Thus, before the Great Famine, an acre of potatoes could amply feed a family of six, as well as sustaining pigs and fowl. Indeed, prior to the famine half of all potatoes were fed to domestic animals, which were primarily used to pay the rent, with little meat consumed on their farms. At that time, an acre of grain was reported to produce about 4,200 pounds of saleable produce, while an acre of potatoes yielded as much as 72,100 pounds of food for subsistence.<\/p>\n Such abundance seems miraculous, but as Virgil\u2019s Georgics<\/em> warns us: \u2018The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not be smooth.\u2019 \u00a0Over-reliance on any subsistence crop brings great danger, and the dependence of the Irish poor on the potato was extreme. Indeed, an entire rural economy, benefitting a largely absentee landlord class, was built around it.<\/p>\n The wars of the seventeenth century led the Irish peasantry to take advantage of its unique nutritional profile \u2013 unlike wheat it contains all eight essential amino acids \u2013 and suitability for small scale storage, but not largescale export. In retrospect, Henry Hobhouse opined that \u2018of all the havoc wrought by [Oliver] Cromwell in Ireland, the by-product, the lazy bed, was in the end the most damaging.\u2019[i]<\/a> In the meantime it allowed the Irish population to scale heights in the mid-nineteenth that still haven\u2019t been returned to.<\/p>\n Modernity<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n In Rot: A History of the Irish Famine<\/a><\/em><\/span> Padraic X. Scanlan explores the modernity of Ireland\u2019s experience with potato cultivation, culminating in the arrival of the dreaded blight phytophthora infestans<\/a><\/em><\/span> in 1845. He details how \u2018[p]otatoes allowed landlords to hire cheap and plentiful labour to work large, export-orientated farms while also collecting rent from subdivided and subleased farms and potato grounds.\u2019<\/p>\n Ireland became the guinea pig for British colonialism of the late nineteenth century, aspects of which linger to this day. Scanlan asserts that \u2018[t]he staggering inequality, pervasive debt, outrageous rent-gouging, precarious employment, and vulnerability to changes in commodity prices that torment so many in the twenty-first century were rehearsed in the Irish countryside before the potato failed.\u2019<\/p>\n In their impoverishment, \u2018[t]he Irish poor made complex wagers on their rent and potato yields, hoping to find any marginal advantage. They knew that changes in a day\u2019s trading price of crops and livestock in London might ruin them.\u2019 Scanlon therefore argues that \u2018the Irish economy resembled the precarious future of capitalism more than its feudal past.\u2019 He suggests that Ireland\u2019s rural economy had many features of a squalid modern slum, where faith in luck, supernatural or otherwise, prevailed, just as \u2018pyramid schemes, lotteries, and other quasi-magical forms of wealth appropriation\u2019 are evident today.<\/p>\n An early nineteenth century German visitor to Ireland, Johann Kohl, had never seen anything like Irish poverty, wherein \u2018Irish labourers had no national dress, no institutions of peasant life that could contest the power of their landlords.\u2019 This was a society in terminal decline, stemming in particular from the departure of its remaining tribal leaders in the early seventeenth century Flight of the Earls. This permitted the seizure and plantation of the entire country, heralding a steep cultural decline, including the gradual loss of the native tongue.<\/p>\n The Great Famine would provide the coup de gr\u00e2ce<\/em> that shattered the bonds of social life and civility. That is not to say societal collapse was inevitable \u2013 the famine of 1741 actually had a higher proportionate death toll<\/span><\/a>, but its ill-effects did not linger in the same way. By 1845, however, a seemingly inexorably rising population was placing intense pressure on scarce land. Most of this remained in the possession of landlords, who cared little for their tenants and were often seeking to convert small, intensively cultivated plots into extensive pasture, in conjunction with a rising class of indigenous \u2018strong\u2019 farmers.<\/p>\n Ireland\u2019s social segregation, especially in the wake of the Act of Union \u2013 reflected in and reinforced by sectarian divisions \u2013 was the underlying cause of the country\u2019s vulnerability to famine. There was certainly sufficient food to feed the population \u2013 only in 1847 did grain imports exceed imports \u2013 but most produce was destined for the English market.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to imagine a disaster on a similar scale occurring in England at that time, or any major European country for that matter, where landowners maintained a more paternalistic relationship with their tenants. Notably, the proposal by the leading nationalist politician Daniel O\u2019Connell, himself a landlord, to embargo food exports for the duration of the Famine was greeted with derision in Westminster.<\/p>\n Signs of such scarcity in a more urbanised country would surely have caused a major political upheaval, as in the case of the French Revolution which has been described as an extended bread riot. Ireland did experience a Young Irelander rebellion in 1848, but the starving populace were unable to summon a coherent resistance.<\/p>\n The Blame Game<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n A colonial discourse had long been evident in English accounts of the Irish, going back at least to Giraldis Cambrensis<\/a><\/span> in the late twelfth century. These are akin to the \u2018Orientalist\u2019 stereotypes that emerged in Western accounts of the Islamic world, and depicted the Irish as lazy, dishonest, prone to violence and thus requiring civilising.<\/p>\n By the mid-nineteenth such stereotypes were joined by the discourse of political economy, positing that \u2018the market was as miraculously self-organising as the natural world.\u2019 Edmund Burke argued that God would not look kindly on \u2018breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature.\u2019<\/p>\n Irish reliance on the potato as their primary foodstuff was considered an affront to this spirit of capitalism. Many blamed the potato for Paddy\u2019s laziness, \u2018whereof the labour of one man can feed forty.\u2019 \u00a0The economist Robert Malthus maintained that until they starved, they would not learn.<\/p>\n The leading civil servant for Ireland over the course of the Famine, Charles Trevelyan considered the possibility that the blight was \u2018some great intervention of Providence to bring back the potato to its original use and intention as an adjunct, and not as a principle article of national food.\u2019<\/p>\n The sanctity of the market would have an important bearing on the nature of famine relief. Teaching the Irish to prefer wages to potatoes for subsistence, then Prime Minister Lord Russell said would impel them \u2018to study economy, cleanliness, and the value of time; to aim at improving the character of themselves and their children.\u2019 Extensive public work schemes therefore substituted for direct aid to the starving, who were forced to expend what little energy they possessed building roads to nowhere.<\/p>\n Most insidiously in 1847 an amendment to exclude anyone holding land of a quarter acre or more from eligibility for poor relief was introduced by William Henry Gregory (ironically the future husband of Lady Gregory the co-founder of the Abbey), an M.P. for Galway. The \u2018Gregory Clause\u2019 caused thousands to lose their land in order to avail of the meagre relief available, forcing many into emigration aboard coffin ships.<\/p>\n As a result of the failure of the crop and these cruel policies up to a million starved or died of disease, and another million emigrated. Unlike after the 1741 famine, the population would not increase, as often their land was converted to pasture, which by then had become more profitable than tillage.<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Charles Trevelyan<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/LazyBed3-225x300.jpeg\")
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