Free Three Famines by Thomas Keneally Page A

autumn of 1845, destroying a considerable and often irreplaceable part of people’s food supply, the gifted Tory prime minister (called by the Irish ‘Orange Peel’ because of his initial opposition to Catholic emancipation – the granting of full civil rights to Catholics) was moved by pragmatism rather than by belief in steely and immutable principles.
    ‘There is such a tendency,’ said Prime Minister Peel, ‘to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable.’
    His basis for saying so was that he had served under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool as Irish chief secretary in 1811-17, residing in Dublin, and then as home secretary of Great Britain in 1822, and in both those years there were food shortages in Ireland because of poor potato crops. An equally poor grain harvest reduced the amount of flour milled and drove up its price beyond the reach of the poor. In Mayo in 1822, discarded fish heads from the east coast, the Irish Sea, had been shipped in, and the Mayo starving ate them and thebodies of occasional porpoises washed ashore. But Peel and his cabinet believed these conditions in the always-hungry west of Ireland were far from being a general famine.
    So, during late 1845, when the blight did not strike everywhere, Peel was wary, but at least he sought daily reports from the London-appointed executive who served under Ireland’s lord lieutenant, and he set up a scientific commission consisting of a Scots chemist, Dr Lyon Playfair, and an English botanist, Dr John Lindley, and sent them to Ireland to report on the situation. They toured stricken parts of what were normally the more prosperous eastern counties – Dublin, Westmeath to the near north, Louth to the coastal north of Dublin, Meath, which was north-west of the capital, and Kildare to the south-west. In a private letter to Peel, Dr Lindley said the situation was ‘melancholy’ and argued that reports of the situation were not exaggerated but understated. Yet Peel was still locked in his earlier experience and believed what he believed. Indeed, in all three of these famines, scepticism – willed or chosen – would prove fatal.
    In Ireland, the Irish political leader Daniel O’Connell had a more reliable view of what was happening. He was a Catholic landlord, member of the House of Commons in Westminster and leader of the Irish Party, whose object was the repeal of the union with Britain. He had received news of ‘the visitation’ – the blight – from repeal branches throughout the country. Hence, in late October 1845, he went with a delegation to visit Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury in Dublin Castle. (Later the following year O’Connell would say memorably that this was ‘a death-dealing famine’.) But for now, he pleaded for a suspension of the export of the annual grainharvest, which, he claimed, was close to 1.6 million tons. He asked in particular for a prohibition on distilling and brewing using grain. While Heytesbury thought the demand about the harvest premature, he did counsel Peel to open Irish ports to the importation of foreign grain – an option that was contrary to British government protection policies. He also sought permission to stop the use of grain in distilling. His advice and requests were ignored.
    However, in the bitter winter of 1845–6, when the starving had begun, Peel decided to make an urgent purchase through a London brokerage of £100,000 worth of Indian corn or maize from the United States. He intended to keep it a secret so that the grain prices in the markets of Britain and Ireland were not influenced downwards. He did dare hope, however, that once the secret was out and the corn began to be sold at cost to the Irish, it would bring down high grain prices in a reasonable way.
    Indian maize was harsher than the corn grown in England and Ireland, and was unaccustomed foodstuff to the citizens of the British Isles. Thus it had the advantage that the Irish would eat