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of Europe was spared further fatalities when a year later a severe drought helped kill off the blight, thus avoiding the catastrophe that befell Ireland. The following statistics indicate the extent of the Irish famine: the blight destroyed one-third of the potato crop in 1845, three-quarters in the years 1846 and 1847, and one-third in 1849. [3]

    The Macedonian sails into Cork with provisions for Ireland.
(The Illustrated London News, 7-8-1847)
    Charles Edward Trevelyan, who was the permanent secretary of the British Treasury during the famine, worked hard on introducing relief schemes that generated employment in the area of road construction and repair. However, Trevelyan was against the idea of dispensing free aid and his attitude to the Irish was appalling. He believed that the famine was God’s way of punishing an idle, ungrateful and rebellious nation.

    Searching for potatoes in a stubble field in County Clare.
(The Illustrated London News, 22-12-1849)
    By November 1846, with food prices on the increase, a labourer had to earn twenty-one shillings a week to sustain an average-sized family. Even if one was fortunate enough to secure work on a relief scheme, wages were still only between six and eight shillings a week. Families hadn’t enough money to feed themselves and they were becoming increasingly malnourished all the time; this was a recipe for disaster. It was not as though the authorities were not informed of the imminent dangers. In a letter to Trevelyan dated August 1846, Fr Theobald Mathew wrote:
    A blast has passed over the land, and the food of a whole nation has perished. On the 27th of last month I passed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the third instant, I beheld, with sorrow, one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless. [4]

    Bridget O’Donnell and her two children, County Clare.
(The Illustrated London News, 22-12-1849)
    When one considers the ongoing exportation of food, the tenant evictions and the poor travelling conditions on offer to those fleeing the country, it is reasonable to say that a serious lack of concern for the Irish people existed. While the government received ample warning of the seriousness of the situation in Ireland, they simply failed to take adequate action. In fact, even as the disaster was unfolding the British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, stated, ‘there is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting upon them is always desirable’.
    The following letter, published in the Galway Mercury in July 1847, challenged the ‘absolute rubbish’ being ‘peddled’ by politicians in relation to the hidden treasures of the Irish peasantry:
    Of all the wonderful discoveries in this age of invention there cannot be found one so remarkable as that lately set before the public, by the Prime Minister of England, in relation to this unfortunate country. Two or three years ago Lord Stanley astonished the world by announcing, what he declared to be a well-ascertained fact, that the Irish peasantry were possessed of heaps of hidden treasure – that they had hoarded up wealth, and that money, in all shapes, could be found in their coffers. But what was this to the assertion of the noble member for London, lately made in the high court of parliament, namely, THAT THERE WERE VERY FEW DEATHS FROM STARVATION IN IRELAND?
    No doubt, in the estimation of the very great, though withal very insignificant Statesman, the deaths have been by no means on as extensive a scale as he could wish – no doubt his policy was intended to produce a far more wide-spread mortality. It is not his fault if no more than two millions of human beings shall not in the course of a single year, be