.......1853.......The royals were visiting as patrons of education, the arts and industrial progress. Coinciding with the second royal visit was the emergence of an understanding of the effects famine had on Irish demography. Those that perished through the effects of hunger and those that left for foreign shores featured for the first time in the census of 1851, making it a landmark post-famine survey. Mass emigration and the establishment of the Irish Diaspora, especially in the U.S. and Canada, began to raise international consciousness of the plight of the Irish under British rule. Permanent and irreversible change had begun and the early years of the 1850s bore critical witness to this. .......The years immediately preceding the 1853 royal visit set its general and specific contexts, and a discussion of such issues as the famine death toll, emigration, depopulation and ideologies for rebuilding a devastated nation provides the contextual reasons why Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were more than keen to see Ireland rise like a phoenix from the ashes of despair. *****The humanity and warmth of Queen Victoria was particularly evident on this occasion, as is exemplified in her greetings to William Dargan that included a personal visit to his home – the first by a British Monarch to an Irish commoner. This visit was not about lamenting over the catastrophe of the preceding years, it was about embracing and supporting technological progress as a means of improving the lives and livelihoods of the Irish. .......Ireland was in transition in 1853, and the hope was that indigenous industrialization would replace a backward and impoverished peasant culture. Did the visit achieve its goal? This paper critically evaluates this central issue. .......Emigration While the Great Famine ( an Gorta Mór) was responsible for between 45% to 85% of Irish emigration depending on the year and the county, it did not actually initiate the trend of widespread emigration. The emigration can be traced back to the mid 18th century with thousands departing for the Americas, with some even being sold as white slaves. The western part of Ireland witnessed the greatest population decline with figures reaching as high as 250,000 per year during the famine period (1845-48). The famine marked the beginning of the steep depopulation of Ireland. Population had increased by 13% – 14% in the first three decades from 1800 to 1830; but in the fourth decade, the population just grew by a mere 5%. Thomas Malthus’s applied theory that population expands geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was a popularly accepted hypothesis in the early nineteenth century, but came to be eventually viewed as rather simplistic; Ireland’s problems in the mid nineteenth were seen as less an excess of population and more as a lack of capital investment. ******* In fact, it is interesting to note that the population of Ireland was contemporaneously increasing no faster than that of England, which endured no comparable cataclysmic fate. The Estimated Death Toll It cannot be accurately determined the exact number who died during the Great Famine, with more perishing from disease than from actual starvation. The registration of births, marriages or deaths as recorded by the Roman Catholic Church was not reliable, and state records were practically non-extant. One of the few reliable and valuable sources has been eyewitness accounts of what was taking place on the ground. William Bennett, an English Quaker, described the scene in Co. Mayo as ‘three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs ... perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stages of actual starvation.’ Rev. Traill Hall, Protestant rectoro f Scull in West Cork, which was one of the placed most severely affected, observed that the aged and the young ‘are almost without exception swollen and ripening for the grave.’ The quaker James Hack Tuke in the company of William Edward Forster vividly described the scene in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Roscommon during his visit there in 1846: ‘I visited a number of the poorest hovels. Their appearance, and the condition of the inmates, presented scenes of poverty and wretchedness almost beyond belief.’ An even more graphic account of the same region was rendered by Joseph Crosfield, who writing a report in 1846 for the London Relief Committee of the Society of Friends recorded that ‘children were worn to skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the bone.’ Is it possible to determine with any degree of accuracy the number of people who perished? One possible means is by comparing the projected population with the actual extant numbers in the mid 19th century. The projected Irish population for 1851 was to be around 9 million. The 1841 census calculated a population of slightly over 8 million; whereas the 1851 census, taken immediately after the Great Famine, presented a figure of 6,552,385, which represented a decline of almost 1.5 million in just ten years.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 22:54:32 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015