The Blight Begins

The Blight Begins

While reading the book, Angela’s Ashes I learned about what the people of that time went through as far as death and disease and even food scarcity. I occasionally would run across the words “famine” and “potato famine”. I also read about the English and how “they might not have brought it over, but they did nothing to stop it”. By the end of the book I thought I had a pretty good idea of what had happened and what had left people so sick and hungry…but I was wrong. Let me summarize for you the information I read that answered all of my questions about the Irish Potato Famine.

According to my source of information, The History Place, It appears that this Famine “mysteriously” began in September 1845. It caused the leaves on potato plants to rot almost suddenly, apparently due to a fog that traveled across the fields in Ireland. In all actuality though, it was an airborne fungus (phytophthora infestans) that originally came from ships traveling from North America to England. This fungus traveled very fast and when it landed on the potato leaves it rotted the plant almost instantly. In October 1845 Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, finally heard about the famine and quickly tried to asses the situation, which in the end he declared that “over half of Ireland's potato crop might perish due to 'wet rot.'” Over time people tried to come up with theories about what caused the blight. Now as I read about all of these potato plants dying as much as I understood that this would probably affect Ireland, I had no idea that those potato plants were Irelands MAIN food source! There was actually a very significant starvation threat throughout Ireland. In order to help the people, Dublin set up a Relief Commission that set up local relief committees throughout Ireland. These committees were made up of landowners, their agents, magistrates, clergy and residents and were supposed to help raise money for landowners, help with employment and give food to those who were starving and in addition to that the British government would match the amount of money raised in the committees. In my opinion this sounded like a great idea and a very generous effort from the British to help out during this time of need. But as I continued to read I learned that the committee meetings did not go as planned and were very disorganized. On top of that, for various reasons people neglected to donate any money. (Gavin, 3)

Eventually the relief commission was handed over to Charles Edward Trevelyan who was the Assistant Secretary of the British Treasury. He made some changes in an effort to improve the conditions the Irish were living with specifically with employment. He tried to start a “large-scale public works program for all the people in Ireland that were unemployed with failed due to a new more