Professor Mark G McGowan, with Michael Chard St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto
The following article was graciously made available to History.ca by the Ireland Park Foundation.
As many as 450,000 Irish migrants had already arrived in British North America (now Canada) before the first potato rotted in the soil of Ireland. Since the 1790s, Irish migrants had settled in Upper Canada’s rich farmlands, built canals, established businesses in cities, and had helped create the social and economic foundations of everyday life in this fledgling outpost of the British Empire. The Great Famine, 1845-1851, however, was so traumatic in terms of the destruction of a way of life, the death of a million Irish, and emigration of two million more, that the memory of the famine would become the principal touchstone of identity for Canada’s Irish, whether they had crossed the Atlantic in 1847 or not. Buckets of ink have been spilled in efforts to account for the causes of the Famine, “the Great Hunger” (Gorta Mor to the Irish), the diaspora it engendered, and to support the ensuing generations of finger-pointing, as the Irish, their descendants, and the British attempted to assign or deflect blame for this catastrophe or to attribute it to natural and historical forces. For Torontonians, the influx of 38, 560 refugees from the Famine to their city, in 1847, not only challenged public officials, and strained local resources in what would amount to the greatest civic crisis in the young city’s history, the spring and summer of “Black ‘47” would leave an indelible set of images regarding the nature and character of “the Irish.”
Roots of the Crisis
In the early nineteenth century, the Irish landholding system, horticultural practices, and a population explosion provided the recipe for an agricultural crisis in Britain’s oldest colony. For decades Irish tenant farmers had subdivided their plots of land in order to ensure that their growing families had a means of livelihood. As plots became smaller, Irish farmers became increasingly dependent on potatoes, which could be grown cheaply, provided high yields, and offered many of the essential nutrients required in the family diet. When, in the autumn of 1845, the fungus “phytophthora infestans” turned the potato crops in seventeen of thirty-two counties into a putrid mess, many Irish likened this nasty turn of events to periodic crop failures experienced in the past, from which they had always recovered. The British Government offered temporary stop gap measures, including food depots selling American Maize, and local officials anticipated that the crops the coming year would be sufficient to return the country to some degree of stability, as had been their experience in past crises. Lord John Russell’s government discontinued relief. By autumn1846, however, the promising new crop of potatoes failed again, this time in nearly every county. Irish farmers and the cottiers to whom tenet farmers sublet land, were forced to eat their seed potatoes, leaving no hope for future planting. By 1847, starvation haunted much of Ireland, particularly in the western and southern counties, where the disfunctional landlord-tenant system and subdivision of lands had been most palpable. Unable to purchase food easily, rent went unpaid. People left their farms willingly to seek out nourishment and work, while the agents of absentee landlords, with the help of the constabulary, evicted tenants who were in arrears when it came time to pay “the gale” that secured their tenancy.
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