(wind howling) (tense music) ♪ (narrator) Winter, 1847.
For two years, Ireland has been gripped by famine.
A blight has destroyed the potato crop.
Millions for whom the potato is their primary source of food face hunger, disease, and death.
(Charles) "People dying of hunger.
No work, misery, fever.
Trade stagnant.
Starvation in the land."
(somber music) (Suibhne) The famine was a period in which Irish society fractured along pre-existing fissures.
Fissures of class, fissures of culture.
People fought each other.
We weren't all on the one side.
(dramatic music) (narrator) The greatest fissure is that between the ruling Protestant landlords and their starving Catholic tenants who now struggle to pay their rents.
♪ Ireland's fragile economy begins to collapse.
Food prices soar.
Towns and cities are overwhelmed by refugees.
People turn their backs on those in need.
(Reilly) What did small farmers do, and large farmers?
What did the public, and what did the merchant and the shopkeeper do?
What did the church do?
♪ (narrator) For the millions at the bottom, the famine is a disaster.
(man) Death is finding every district.
Whole families lying down in fever.
Hovels turned into charnel-houses.
Entire villages prostrate in sickness or are almost hushed in the last sleep.
♪ (Lee) Words can't describe what the horrors must have been of knowing that inevitable death was coming through starvation.
It's really horrible.
It's not instant death.
♪ (narrator) People bury their dead as best they can.
Some use mass graves.
Others lay their dead on beaches, like Dogs Bay in Connemara, from where the tide pulls them away.
(dramatic music) ♪ As society breaks down, long-sacred mores are abandoned.
People riot.
People steal.
People murder.
(screaming) Landlords evicting people.
Gombeen men charging exorbitant prices for food, charging high interest rates.
The state lacking sympathy and empathy for people who are dying.
♪ (Murphy) We were a part of the United Kingdom, so the people that perished in the famine were British subjects.
This is a British famine as such.
♪ (Smyth) The scale of the famine, the scale of the tragedy.
One million dead.
Two and a half million emigrated within 10 years.
♪ Third of a million holdings disappear.
It's a massive chasm in Irish history.
(dramatic music) (soft music) ♪ ♪ (narrator) Since the famine began two years ago, authorities in the seat of British power in Ireland's Dublin Castle, and in London, have argued over how best to respond to the crisis.
Economic policy in Britain follows laissez-faire, free market ideology which states that governments should avoid interfering in the market.
♪ Famine relief to the Irish poor, therefore, has so far been provided most reluctantly.
♪ Corn has been imported and sold cheaply.
Infrastructure projects have provided the poor with work and money to buy bread.
Soup kitchens have doled out food for free.
♪ But each measure has been abruptly cancelled.
Those in charge debate policy while the poor are again left to starve.
♪ (Mark-FitzGerald) In Britain, people begin to resent the Irish for not being able to pull themselves up or to solve this problem, which seems, at the time, nearly interminable because there's so many years of subsequent famine and continuing crisis and devastation.
(narrator) Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, the man in charge of the purse strings, argues that the crisis could be a God-given opportunity to modernize Irish agriculture and society.
♪ Followers of the economist Robert Malthus go further.
They argue that the famine is nature's way of clearing Ireland's excess population of poor people from the country.
(wind howling) (energetic music) (Robert) "When the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce substance for man, premature death must visit the human race."
♪ (narrator) Some within the British Parliament have called on the government to do more to help the Irish.
(George) "They know the people have been dying by their thousands.
And I dare them to inquire what has been the number of those who have died through their mismanagement, by their principles of free trade.
Yes, free trade in the lives of Irish people!"
♪ (narrator) But the Chancellor's mind is set.
With Britain in recession and struggling to balance its budget, in the late summer of 1847, Wood announces that no more British taxpayers' money will be spent on famine relief in Ireland.
♪ The government now enacts a new law.
It states that any further famine relief measures in Ireland will be paid for by taxes raised in Ireland.
♪ (Gray) What's called the Poor Law Amendment Act is passed in 1847, and that means no more government grants and loans from London.
Everything is to be paid for out of a local taxation.
♪ (narrator) There is a belief in Britain that the Irish famine has been caused by landlord mismanagement.
(man) "The Irish landlords as a class have shown no capacity for the business of landlords."
(narrator) The Poor Law Amendment Act sets new rates on landlords and their tenants.
(grim music) ♪ (Gallagher) It's very difficult to see how elites at the time expected ratepayers to be able to fund this situation.
Some landlords were hugely indebted, and they are just not equipped to pay the costs of famine relief within Ireland.
(somber music) (narrator) One Irish landlord, William Gregory of County Galway, proposes an amendment to the act.
It states that tenants renting land larger than a quarter acre have to give it up if they want or need to receive famine relief.
♪ (Kinealy) People who'd survived having gone through unknown hardships, it really forced them, after 1847, to make that very difficult decision, if they wanted relief, to give up their land.
♪ (narrator) When the act is voted upon in Westminster, of the 29 Irish MPs present in the house, 26 vote in favor and only three against.
Most of those in favor have tenants on their lands in Ireland.
(indistinct chatter) ♪ (Gray) We have landowners, in a sense, being taxed, predominantly to pay for this Poor Law system, but then responding by clearing their estates to try and reduce their tax burden.
Whether it's intentional or not, the extended Poor Law acts as a stimulus for landowners to remove large numbers of people from their estates.
♪ (Lee) It's murder, basically.
♪ It's not murder in the sense of direct murder, but it's basically condemnation to starvation.
(solemn music) ♪ (narrator) In the seven years of the famine, more than half a million people are evicted from their homes.
♪ Photographs of evictions from later decades provide a glimpse of what takes place.
♪ (James) "Police reluctantly proceed, armed with bayonet and muskets, but the tenants make some show of resistance, for these hovels have been built by themselves or their forefathers."
(somber music) (Kinealy) And if people had locked themselves in the house or refused to come out, they would use the crowbar to tear down.
They would then set fire to the roof so that the people couldn't come back.
♪ (Reilly) The people that are actually tearing down houses, doing the dirty work, are local people themselves, and they know them.
♪ And that causes great animosity in local communities.
♪ (Kinealy) People take shelter on beaches, in ditches, anywhere, because they couldn't go to the property of any other landowner.
(Daniel) "No less than 33 families, numbering in all 145 human beings, stretched along ditches and hedges, many of them children and decrepit old parents, falling victims to cold and hunger and destitution."
(narrator) Some landlords acted more charitably towards their tenants, giving them food and forgiving their rents.
(Elizabeth) "I have made up my mind that the distress of the poor demands a large sacrifice on the part of the richer, and it must be our business to give up luxuries to meet this.
To feed the hungry is a duty that cannot be shirked."
♪ (grim music) (narrator) From Donegal to Tipperary, Waterford to Roscommon, Cork to Tyrone, evictions take place in most every part of the country.
From his estates in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, levels 300 cabins and evicts 2,000 people.
In County Clare, over 1,000 tenants are evicted by Crofton Moore Vandeleur.
♪ In County Kerry, the Lansdowne Estate clears 4,000 destitute tenants by funding an assisted emigration scheme.
♪ Owning 95 percent of Ireland, the gentry are responsible for most evictions.
But they are not the only ones to evict tenants.
(Reilly) In the decade before the famine, you find a lot of Irish merchants and shopkeepers purchasing small tracks of land around the towns and villages across the country.
There's an awful lot of people living on that land.
And when the pressure comes to bear then, they are amongst the first to evict.
(somber music) Merchants, shopkeepers, publicans, the clergy, Catholic and Church of Ireland, we find evicting people in the late 1840s.
♪ (James) "Alas, my fine holy people have been starved to death.
The landlords of all sects and creeds conspired for their extinction.
The Catholic landlords are the most cruelly disposed."
♪ (narrator) As people are forced to abandon their homes, entire villages and towns disappear.
(fire crackling) ♪ On assignment in the west of Ireland for the Illustrated London News, the artist James Mahoney sketches the abandoned village of Tullig in County Clare.
Today, no trace of the people's homes that he sketched remains.
♪ 30 miles from Tullig, Mahoney finds a young woman on this road with her two children.
(Bridget) "I lived on the lands of Gurranenatuoha.
We were put out last November."
(narrator) Before her eviction, two of Bridget O'Donnel's children died, one of them a newborn baby.
(Bridget) The whole family got the fever, and one boy, 13 years old, died with hunger while we were lying sick.
(narrator) When Mahoney finds her, Bridget O'Donnel and her children are living in a hole under a bridge, terrified they will be forced out.
It is not known if they survived, but Mahoney's sketch will become one of the best-known representations of the Irish famine.
(Mark-FitzGerald) There's no extraneous detail, there's no landscape.
There's nothing in it to sort of, I suppose, complicate the image.
And then, for those reasons, it becomes almost a universal image of famine, that image of a woman and her suffering children.
(soft, eerie music) ♪ (narrator) Now, for those needing relief, the only place left to turn is the workhouse.
♪ Though workhouses are also found in France, the Netherlands, and in America, only Britain uses them as an industrial-scale solution to deal with destitution.
Help is given only to those who agree to being locked up in the local workhouse.
♪ Since 1842, Irish Poor Law unions have built 130 workhouses across the country and in most cities and towns.
♪ Conditions within are intentionally harsh.
Families are separated.
Men, women, and children live apart and must not speak to each other.
All inmates work for their keep.
(Crowley) They were built to chastise the inmates out of their idle ways.
One of the inspectors called for a moral revolution in the habits of the people, that they should survive on their own industry rather than be dependent on the state.
(tense music) (narrator) The Irish workhouse system is designed to accommodate 100,000 people.
But with no state relief available elsewhere, one million come begging for help.
♪ (Joseph) "A most painful and heart-rending scene.
Poor wretches in last stages of famine imploring to be received into the house.
Women who had six children begging that even two or three might be taken in."
♪ (Crowley) They were built to deal with poverty in normal circumstances.
They were unable to cope with a tragedy on the scale of the famine.
♪ (Thomas) "1,000 or 2,000 great hulks of men lying piled up within brick walls.
Did a greater violence to the law of nature ever present itself before?"
(John) "The inmates are crowded together breathing a tainted atmosphere.
There's an insufficient supply of bedding and clothing.
The rain pours into the rooms.
I was disgusted at learning that the dormitories are not supplied with night buckets."
(somber music) (Geber) You can argue that it's quite a heartless system, but it's still a place that people did actually get some help.
They had medical offices who were really struggling to keep the disease from spreading and caring for people.
♪ And people were actually saved in the workhouse as well.
(soft music) ♪ (narrator) One in five deaths during the Irish Famine takes place inside a workhouse or fever hospital.
♪ Most are children under 15.
♪ (Lee) Now, there's a high mortality rate in the workhouses.
It's a passageway to the grave.
♪ (narrator) To die in a workhouse guarantees at least, in most cases, the dignity of a coffin burial.
But as the death toll mounts, soon some local graveyards are filled to overflowing.
♪ (Geber) You had the stench of the putrefying corpses sort of coming out of the ground, so, a massive health hazard.
(somber music) (narrator) When he excavated the workhouse in the city of Kilkenny, forensic archaeologist Jonny Gerber discovered mass graves.
♪ (Geber) Eventually, they had no other choice than to bury them within the boundary walls of the workhouse.
And these were mass burial pits, 63 pits in total.
In some situations, you had two individuals in one coffin.
And adults and then the remains of a child placed between the legs of that adult.
♪ (Crowley) They were really death traps.
By the end of the famine, over 200,000 people have perished in these workhouses.
(somber music) ♪ (Whelan) A mile from where I was born, there's a gate which is called Geata Na nDeor, the Gate of Tears.
and it's because that was where, when children were emigratin', and, remember, when children emigrated, you weren't gonna see them again.
They had to turn from their parents.
Imagine that turn there, and knowing they would never see their parents, never see that valley, never see that world again.
♪ And all they could bring with them was their desperation and their hunger to succeed, their hunger to make a new world.
♪ (soft music) ♪ (narrator) Desperate migrants do whatever they can to find the price of a ticket.
♪ 50,000 have their fares paid by landlords as compensation for their eviction, but most have to pay their own passage.
♪ Often, an older child is sent first to find work and save to buy a ticket for the next family member.
♪ (woman) "The emigrants of this year are not like those of formers ones.
They are now actually running away from fever and disease and hunger, with money scarcely sufficient to pay passage for and find food for the voyage."
♪ (Whelan) And they were very young.
The vast bulk of Irish immigrants in the second half of the 19th century were teenagers.
16, 17, 18.
♪ (Suibhne) The great Irish ports, Cobh, Derry, these are places from which there was a massive hemorrhage of people in the time of the famine.
♪ (narrator) The exodus is unprecedented, as cheaper steam and sail routes allow Irish refugees to travel far across the world.
♪ Over 10 years, almost one and a half million Irish migrants flee to America.
340,000 go to Canada.
♪ 50,000 go east to New Zealand and Australia.
♪ Among those who reach Australia are 4,000 orphan girls who have been transported from the workhouses.
Most work as domestic servants.
In time, they marry and settle to raise families.
(soft, dark music) 1847 alone sees Britain's western port of Liverpool overwhelmed as 300,000 Irish land on its quays.
(Gray) There is a real sense of the alarm on the part of the Liverpool authorities, and that they're going to be swamped by this, you know, ocean of poverty coming across the Irish Sea.
(man) "The anticipated invasion of Irish pauperism has commenced.
15,000 have already, within the last three months, landed in Liverpool and block up her thoroughfare with masses of misery."
(Gallagher) Many of these people were very sick.
They were malnourished, and infections spread.
Many of those who were on transit to North America or to Australia actually stayed in Liverpool.
Many people ran out of money, others fell sick, so they never made it any further.
♪ (narrator) Nearly a third of a million famine Irish settle in British cities.
Most are illiterate, Irish speakers who have never traveled before.
(Gallagher) The Irish who arrive in Britain do not tend to excel in terms of economy, in terms of moving up that social scale.
A lot of them become subsumed into that larger working class, they're part of that urban environment.
Those people who are working in factories, those people who are part of industrial Britain.
(somber music) ♪ (narrator) The preferred choice for most, if they can afford it, is to cross the Atlantic for Canada or the United States of America.
(Crowley) The Irish were the boat people of the day.
(Gray) Medical inspections are cursory.
People are bringing disease onto the ships with them.
The ships that cross to Canada in 1847 by far have the highest mortality rate.
These are the infamous coffin ships.
(narrator) 100,000 men, women, and children, 30 percent of all who try, die on the Canadian crossing or in quarantine after they land.
♪ The route to the United States is safer.
90 percent make it across alive.
♪ The survivors settle mostly in the eastern states of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, ♪ (Mark-FitzGerald) These migrants bring with them disease, so there's a number of epidemics which happen in different cities along the Atlantic seaboard in 1847 especially.
And so there's a great deal of resentment and hostility towards these new arrivals.
(John Hughes) "The poorest, most wretched population in the world.
The scattered debris of the Irish nation."
They brought very little with them, except their bodies and their willingness to work.
And they had to try and get a job as quickly as possible.
(Murphy) Trevelyan, he said that they were lazy, they didn't want to work.
Editorials in the London Times say the same thing.
They get to America and they have an opportunity to work.
They get to America and there is something for them to do.
(bright music) Of course they want to work.
♪ (Kelly) The work was invariably dangerous, noxious.
It was work that other Americans, if they could at all, wanted to avoid.
(Murphy) They're carters, they're stevedores, they were longshoremen, they worked on the railroad, and they're the guys that build the bridges.
(Kelly) The women?
They entered the needle trades if they could, but domestic servitude constituted the conduit, if you will, for the vast majority of Irish women who landed in these ports as famine immigrants.
♪ (Ó Gráda) Had America not been there, and Canada too, as a kind of a safety valve, the situation would have been much worse in Ireland itself and also in Britain, because had the people who left not been able to go, there would have been much more pressure on resources in Ireland.
So, I see emigration as a way of relieving disaster.
♪ (soft, dark music) (narrator) For those left in Ireland, there is little hope.
♪ 1848.
The blight rages through the land for yet another year.
♪ Deaths, evictions, and exodus continue, but the world has tired of the Irish famine.
♪ (Mark-FitzGerald) Famine fatigue refers to the phenomenon where people begin to lose compassion and people begin to lose interest in major catastrophes like famine.
♪ While you have this initial charitable response, which happens in 1846 and 1847, after a while, the funds essentially run out.
And much of the worst devastation and mortality happens from 1848 and onwards.
♪ (Gray) As if things couldn't get any worse, many landlords now either default or refuse to pay their rates.
So, many of the western unions start to go bankrupt.
♪ (narrator) Bankrupt workhouses are forced to close.
Others are so overcrowded, they turn away those in need.
♪ The destitute pass silently along Ireland's roads.
In towns and cities, they find doors firmly shut.
♪ (Suibhne) If you're in a society that's coming under pressure, as Irish society came during the famine, the people who are surviving, doing well, let us say the middle class, that class becomes harder and becomes colder simply by the denial of charity.
The charity that custom would have once demanded was denied frequently during the famine.
♪ (narrator) Some, of course, always act with great charity, generosity, and heroism.
♪ (Smyth) The mother striving might and main to protect children even though the food is so limited.
So there'd be lots of humanitarian gestures within the family which take place.
(Suibhne) What's a much more interesting way to think about the famine, is what did the poor do to and for themselves.
Those good things that they did, they helped each other.
They sought to assist each other, they rioted for food.
But they did bad things too.
(dark music) And among the bad things that they did was land grabbing, denying charity to people in need of charity, killing other poor people for food.
♪ (Geber) What happens during famines where people are starving is that is affects not just your physical body, it affects your mental health as well.
They were losing empathy towards other people.
They become selfish.
♪ (Reilly) The crime rate spirals.
Several murders a day being committed.
There's 20,000 reported crimes in 1848.
20 years later in 1868, that had fallen to about 2,000.
♪ (Michael) "Jimmy Finn found a knife in the house, and with that knife he killed both children.
He killed the girl first, and afterwards, the little boy.
He took two quarts of flour, as he was hungry."
(Reilly) The savageness of the murders as well.
We read of people's throats being cut from ear to ear with billhooks.
Women and then the elderly are seen as easy targets.
(Ó Gráda) You have instances of infanticide, of child desertion.
Women resorting to prostitution in order to survive.
(soft music) (Suibhne) One of the most shocking things about the Great Famine is what people are reduced to eating.
People are reduced to eating food that they don't regard as human food.
So they're reduced to eating a putrid pig.
They're reduced to eating the donkey.
They're reduced to eating dogs.
And to eat food that is subhuman is an index of how you have yourself been reduced.
But the ultimate is that you end up eating another human being.
(Ó Gráda) Survivor cannibalism, trying to live on the corpses of people who have predeceased you.
They might be related to you, and they might not.
(narrator) Though rare, several cases of cannibalism are witnessed and recorded.
(soft, dark music) (Peter) "In the village of Drimcaggy, four were dead together in a poor hut.
Brother, two sisters, and daughter.
The flesh was torn off the daughter's arm and mangled in the mouth of her poor dead mother."
(Suibhne) And there are documented cases of this in Cork, in Kerry, Galway, in Mayo, in 1847, in 1848, in 1849.
(Peter) "William Walsh of Mount Partree and his son were found dead together.
Their flesh was torn off their bodies.
Flesh was found in their mouths."
(eerie music) (Ó Gráda) If you don't believe that this happened or could happen, then you don't really understand what famine is about.
(grim music) ♪ (soft, energetic music) ♪ (Charles) "Posterity will trace to that famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation and acknowledge that supreme wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil."
(Whelan) The British, at that stage, were the richest, the most powerful, the most centralized state in the world.
They knew about the famine.
It wasn't that they didn't know.
Sometimes, you know, people can say, "Oh, well, they didn't know," or whatever.
God almighty, there's tons of paper in the National Archives just on the famine alone.
They knew.
(soft music) ♪ (narrator) The ruin of the potato and the sharp rise in food prices sparked political chaos across Europe in 1848, and with it, the rise of populism, protest, and revolution.
♪ (Lee) They were agitating, fighting, demonstrating for an idea, that rule would be by the people.
A nation state.
(tense music) (narrator) A wave of uprising spreads across Europe in 1848.
Monarchies are overthrown.
People demand nationhood.
Citizens look to take control.
(soft music) ♪ In April, a deputation from the Young Irelanders, a radical Irish revolutionary movement, travels to Paris to ask French rebel leader Alphonse de Lamartine to support a rebellion in Ireland.
Wary of Britain's wrath, Lamartine refuses.
(soft music) Though they have failed, the rebels return to Ireland, bringing for the first time the Irish tricolor flag and a determination to fight against British rule.
(bright music) ♪ (Lee) They were driven by two things.
One was the famine, obviously, itself, and the other was by the image of what was happening in Europe.
We are part of this wider European movement, and we should try to strike a blow.
♪ (narrator) On the 28th of July, the rebels gather near Ballingarry, County Tipperary.
(majestic music) (Lee) There was a hope that the masses would come out in support.
♪ But the masses were a starving peasantry.
And support them with what, their bare hands?
♪ (narrator) After a brief skirmish with police, British troops are mobilized and the rebels arrested.
(somber music) (Kinealy) Ireland's revolution lasts three hours.
Nobody is killed.
It's more a gesture.
♪ (narrator) The leaders are sentenced to death, but to avoid further protest, the executions are not carried out.
♪ As with most of the rebellions in Europe in 1848, the legacy of Ireland's uprising will only bear fruit in decades to come.
(soft, tense music) ♪ The attempted rebellion turns British public opinion further against the Irish.
The London government decides to wash its hands completely of the Irish Famine.
To underline their view that the Irish crisis is finished, Charles Trevelyan is given a knighthood and a year's salary as a bonus.
But the Irish Famine is nowhere near its end.
(somber music) ♪ 1849, the blight returns.
♪ By now, 923,000 people depend on the workhouses to survive.
Dublin city is a massive refugee camp.
40 percent of its residents are famine migrants.
(soft, energetic music) (soft music) As the people starve, in August, Britain's Queen Victoria sails to Ireland to mark a new beginning.
♪ (Kinealy) The British government really wants to make a gesture to show that Ireland is recovering.
And they felt as if Queen Victoria came to Ireland, it would be a sign that all was well.
♪ (Victoria) "The enthusiasm and excitement shown by the Irish people was extreme.
We feel so deeply touched at the affectionate loyalty of the poor Irish."
(narrator) Unimpressed, the locals compose a ditty in the Queen's honor.
(woman) "Arise Ye Dead of Skibbereen, and come to Cork to see the Queen."
(grim music) ♪ (Lee) You can't say that the famine ended in 1849.
It began to decline somewhat but by no means vanish.
'50, '51, and even in parts going into '52 were famine years.
♪ (narrator) By the time the food crisis finally ends in 1852, large swaths of the provinces of Munster and Connacht have lost as much as 50 percent of their people, a total of 700,000 dead.
♪ Ulster, too, has suffered.
175,000 mostly poor Protestants and Catholics have lost their lives.
♪ The population of almost every town and city is halved.
♪ A legacy from which it will take over a century to recover.
♪ Death, immigration, a fall in marriages, and a rise in infertility cause children to all but disappear from many parts of the west and southwest.
♪ 100,000 family farms vanish altogether.
♪ Before the famine, eight and a half million people lived in Ireland.
In all, one million lose their lives.
And over a decade, two million leave, never to return.
(Murphy) The fourth-class housing, and the people in 'em, are practically wiped off the face of the earth.
(somber music) Two to three million people, gone.
Complete destruction of a whole people.
♪ (Lee) The sense of destroying a whole class, it makes a greater impact than war.
♪ (narrator) The scale of death has led some to argue that the famine might be categorized as genocide.
♪ (O'Leary) Genocide is a modern legal concept.
We can characterize the management of the famine as partly intended to get rid of the cottier and landless poor of Ireland.
An entire social class who were regarded as an obstacle to productive agriculture.
(soft music) But they were not targeted because they were Irish Catholics and Gaelic speakers.
They were targeted because of their class characteristics.
So, they don't meet the genocide convention.
♪ And I think in terms of management of the famine, a charge of "genoslaughter" would be appropriate.
Neglect, indifference, cold-heartedness, insufficient humanitarian care for the Irish.
♪ (Suibhne) Writing 40 years after the famine, Hugh Dorian remembered how, in the '50s and the '60s, people would come together as they had done before the famine, but there wouldn't be the great keen interest in the happenings of the world around them.
He said the people would come together and that they would sit in silence.
And you have an image there of a traumatized people, that people had come through something horrendous.
(woman singing) (somber music) (dark music) ♪ (narrator) Deaths from famine in France, Belgium, Prussia, and the Netherlands amount to 100,000 people.
Though shocking, that figure is only 10 percent of the death rate in Ireland.
(soft music) The stark difference has been accredited to the effectiveness of the relief measures implemented by European authorities.
♪ (Ó Gráda) In Belgium, the authorities were less judgmental, and said, "Look, there's a problem there.
People are starving, and we've got to deal with that first and then worry later about other aspects."
♪ (narrator) The British Exchequer has spent eight million pounds on famine relief measures for the Irish, most of it in loans that are expected to be repaid.
(soft, energetic music) (Crowley) In the context of the overall United Kingdom tax intake of over 300 million during the famine years, the spend on the Irish famine of eight million was paltry.
♪ (Smyth) It may be worth noting that the totality of military and police costs was 14 million in Ireland at the same time.
In the end, policy is about maintaining control, law and order.
♪ (narrator) The British government's aim of modernizing Irish agriculture and clearing the land of the poor is realized as thousands of bankrupt landlords are forced to sell their lands by the Encumbered Estates' Court.
♪ (O'Leary) It's difficult to credit full intentionality, but some of the long-run preferences of British policy were met by the end of the famine.
The removal of the cottier and landed class meant that it was possible to rationalize agriculture.
♪ Instead of a landscape characterized by tillage, Ireland became a place of pasture.
(Suibhne) And the people who emerged as the middle class in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, included among them many people who had profited from other people's suffering.
(somber music) (Lee) They were those with an eye for their chance.
People were dying, land was being vacated, there was nobody strong enough left to actually resist.
"Let's grab what we can," you know?
"It's ours now."
They were gone.
♪ (Whelan) The big farms grew bigger, and they did it by absorbing their neighbors.
(cattle lowing) You walk around any big farm in Ireland, and the ghosts of the famine still walk there.
♪ (Suibhne) Hugh Dorian, when he wrote of the famine in 1890, he said, you know, it was terrible, but he also says that at least when it was over, it got rid of turbulent and indifferent characters who were only a disgrace to the good, to the honest, and to the well-doing.
(somber vocalizing) ♪ (narrator) The famine's tremors also transformed the Irish Catholic Church.
(Whelan) Prior to the famine, it was rooted in the seasons, in the landscape, like Holy Wells, the pilgrimages, the holy mountains like Croagh Patrick, but it was also very strongly in the Irish language and was really spiritual.
♪ (Crowley) The church does emerge after the famine as ultramontane.
It looks to build churches to control people, to bring them inside the church.
(Whelan) The church came in as an anchor in a very, very turbulent kind of world, a world of poverty, a world of emigration, a world of family disbursement and breakdown, and the church provided an anchor in that surgency of anxiety.
And we became a very pious, not spiritual, very pious people, you know, where respectability mattered.
Not so much having any real genuine sense of religion but being seen to practice religion.
What we used to call, in the old days, craw-thumpin', you know, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
(church bell chimes, chanting) (soft, tense music) (narrator) The Great Hunger marks the beginning of the end of British rule in most of the island of Ireland.
♪ (Lee) In terms of what you might call political wisdom, political noose, it's one of the biggest own-goals in English history.
The famine is a major psychological weapon in the hands of Irish republicans two generations, three generations on.
Leads ultimately to Irish nationalism, seeking independence.
(narrator) The radical Fenian revolutionary O'Donovan Rossa and the leader of the land rights movement, the Land League, Michael Davitt, had both watched as children as their families were evicted from their homes.
(somber music) (Smyth) During the Land League, the famine is an image which is used to say, "We're not going back there."
♪ (narrator) The ideal of an Ireland independent from Britain galvanizes Irish America.
Millions of dollars are raised to support the cause.
♪ (Kinealy) Those who left Ireland, especially those who went to America, their anger was politicized, and they blamed the British government for their exile.
(Murphy) The Irish Americans, in the late 19th century, they begin to interpret the famine as part of the rationale for an independent Ireland.
They let them starve, they let them die, they let them come to America on the coffin ships.
"This is the way the British treated us."
(dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) In Ireland, the last decades of the 19th century see the rise of a dynamic young generation of cultural nationalists determined to stop the decline of the Irish language and culture.
♪ (Whelan) In a sense, Ireland was culturally concussed, comatose, almost, silenced during the famine.
And then what we had to do as a country was to try to find a way of maintaining Irishness but in the English language.
♪ From the 1880s onwards, a generation suddenly kind of said, "Okay, we have to take responsibility for this."
♪ And because of that, you get this extraordinarily experimental culture, the Gaelic League, the Abbey Theatre, the Celtic Revival, and the huge effort to reimagine Ireland to stop ourselves being swallowed whole by a British project.
(narrator) The Gaelic Athletic Association grows to be an all-island organization that fosters indigenous culture in sports, including hurling, one of the fastest ballgames in the world.
(cheering) (Whelan) Michael Cusack, when he started the GAA, really wanted to kind of say, "Get up off your knees, stop being kind of crawling slaves.
You need to stand up."
That's the response to the famine.
(bright music) (narrator) Through a revolutionary struggle that lasts a decade, Irish Nationalists finally force Britain to withdraw from most of the island of Ireland 70 years after the famine ends.
(seagulls calling) Though six counties of Ulster, to be called Northern Ireland, remain within the United Kingdom, with a signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, the Irish Free State is established.
(dramatic music) Free at last to govern its own affairs.
(flag billowing) The famine has a broader legacy, also, as the millions of Irish who fled during the famine to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, and America, build new lives.
(soft music) In time, they become integral parts of the societies in which they make their homes.
(cheering) Many become leaders in the church, business, culture, and politics.
♪ Today, most of the 70 million strong global Irish diaspora claim roots to the desperate refugees who left Ireland in the darkness of the famine.
♪ (Lee) Given what they came from, it is, I think, one of the most remarkable achievements of any people in the world.
(soft, dark music) ♪ (O'Leary) The famine was a humanitarian catastrophe, and we know that the British state could have done better.
So the story will be a constant reminder for long periods ahead about what to do and what not to do about famines.
♪ (Geber) But the Irish famine tells us what happens in a society where you divide people into different groups, where you have an us-and-them society.
♪ The ultimate consequences in the Irish famine was that you had people not given access to resources because of the social class.
And that eventually led to their deaths.
(somber music) (Mark-FitzGerald) Many of the same difficulties and prejudices that were faced by Irish migrants who were fleeing in conditions of absolute deprivation and poverty are similar to some of the hostilities that we see happening in Europe today with the arrival of emigrants from the Middle East in particular.
♪ (Ó Gráda) We should never lose sight of the fact that those open borders into North America at that time was a great help, just as open borders in other places today would be a great help to poor people.
♪ (Kinealy) I think if we're to feel anything, it is never again.
Famines don't have to happen in the world now.
They didn't have to happen historically.
So if we take anything away, I don't think it should be anger.
I think it should be an understanding that it didn't need to happen then, it doesn't need to happen now.
(crying) ♪ (singing in foreign language) ♪
