Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Nation's Soup Kitchen
Rural Ireland had become overwhelmingly dependent on the easily grown potato. Blight -
a disease that rots tubers - had always been an occasional hazard, but when three success-
ive crops failed between 1845 and 1847, it spelt disaster. The human cost was cataclysmic:
up to one million people died from disease and starvation, while more again fled the coun-
try for Britain and the United States. The damage was compounded by the British govern-
ment's adoption of a laissez-faire economic policy, which opposed food aid for famine oc-
curring within the empire. In Ireland, landowners refused to countenance any forbearance
on rents, all the while exporting crops to foreign markets. Defaulters - starving or not -
were penalised with incarceration in workhouses or prison.
The British government's uncompromising stance hardened the steel of opposition. The
deaths and mass exodus caused by the Famine had a profound social and cultural effect on
Ireland and left a scar on the Irish psyche that cannot be overestimated. Urban Dublin es-
caped the worst ravages, but desperate migrants flooded into the city looking for relief -
soup kitchens were set up all over the city, including in the bucolic Merrion Sq, where pre-
sumably its affluent residents bore direct witness to the tragedy.
The horrors of the Famine and its impact on Dublin's centre saw the wealthy abandon
the city for a new set of salubrious suburbs south of Dublin along the coast, now accessible
via Ireland's first railway line, built in 1834 to connect the city to Kingstown (present-day
Dun Laoghaire). The flight from the city continued for the next 70 years and many of the
fine Georgian residences became slum dwellings. With such squalor came a host of social
ills, including alcohol, which had always been a source of solace but now became a chronic
problem.
By 1910 it was reckoned that 20,000 Dublin families each occupied a single room.
Charles Stewart Parnell suffered a swift fall from grace after it was made public that he had been having
an affair with a married woman, Kitty O'Shea. He was ditched as leader of his own Irish Parliamentary
Party in 1890 and died a broken man the following year. More than 200,000 people attended his funeral at
Glasnevin Cemetery.
