Free Three Famines by Thomas Keneally

more compassionate treatment. If their behaviour did not improve, they were subject to physical attack, sometimes being ambushed and killed.The secret societies of peasants guilty of these assaults were called Ribbon Societies, and their members Ribbonmen, on the basis of their having early in their history worn ribbons during their assaults. These primitive acts of rebellion were seen as merely an index of the intractability, the unteachability, the malice of the Irish, rather than as an outfall from the grievous land situation under which most inhabitants of that fateful island lived.
     
    A clinical psychologist, Deborah Peck, identifies the mental tendencies of those in power over the mass of the starving. The powerful perceive themselves to be loyal citizens, virtuous, industrious and thrifty, while the victims are disloyal, disreputable, lazy and improvident. The powerful, in their view, behave with sexual appropriateness; the victims are sexually profligate and, in their lust, breed recklessly. The powerful have rational religious beliefs. The victims’ brains are perverted with multifarious superstitions. Trevelyan and others in power in Britain certainly accepted as givens these distinctions between themselves and the Irish.
    In terms of sexual inappropriateness, the general belief had it that the Irish were guilty of early marriage and headlong child-begetting, and this perception was partially fuelled by the fact that the Irish considered they would always be able to feed themselves with potatoes and thus had no inhibitions about founding a family. Yet, as twentieth-century research would show, the average age for marriage among males in Ireland in 1840 was nearly 28 years (Trevelyan married, in England, at27 years) and for women, 24.4 years – well above the averages for many other parts of Europe.
    Trevelyan also blamed Irish landlords for their laziness and its influence on the backwardness of Irish society and agriculture. The Devon Commission, appointed to inquire into the state of law and the practice of land-holding in Ireland, having published its report in February 1845, just before the famine, attributed the apparent apathy of Irish proprietors to their lack of ready money. Many Irish landlords had inherited ‘encumbered estates’, estates on which their forebears had borrowed large sums in the golden days of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when prices for agricultural goods were high – in part because Britain was at war with the French and, from 1812, with the Americans.
    Trevelyan took up the theme of landlord incompetence and venality full-scale, blaming both landlords who lived on their estates and those who were absentees in England or the Continent for their major share of Irish backwardness.
    The religiously devout Trevelyan considered murder a great wrong. It is sobering, then, to think that the deployment of convinced, virtuous intent – a belief in the most elevated philosophic principles of the day – and an intense belief in a providential deity, could be almost as destructive as the malignity of a dictator such as Mengistu Haile Mariam.
    In the spring of 1848, following his declaration that the famine was finished – although it still had several years to run its course – Charles Trevelyan was granted a knighthood by Prime Minister Russell, a government sanction of all he had done, and a sign of the gulf between Irish and British perceptions of what was still happening. Indeed, hisultimate reputation would be that of reformer of the British civil service, as governor of Madras at the time of the Indian Mutiny, and as minister of finance in the British government of India. He devoted his later years to charity and work on army reform, and died in 1886.
     
    The British prime minister at the time of the famine’s birth, Sir Robert Peel, bears only a fraction of the scale of blame attached to Trevelyan’s name.
    When the potato blight had first struck in the