THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 106

procure medical, or any other aid,—provided with no matters useful for the sick,—and be-
coming objects of terror in the midst of their poor and uninfected neighbours,—they sicken,
linger, and die in their habitations.
Everywhere he went, walking along deserted streets, Trotter could hear the groans of people
dying abandoned and alone, or entire families perishing together once the last nurse among
them had fallen ill. “The heart sickens,” he wrote, “under the repeated observation of so great
a mass of human wretchedness, and our toilsome way has been frequently made insupport-
ably painful to us by it.” 23 Trotter wondered, as we do in reading his account, where was the
help for these pitiful victims, dying in their tens of thousands across the Irish countryside?
Unfortunately for the suffering rural population of Ireland, no effective system of relief
existed. The numbers of English absentee landlords, who drew profits from their Irish estates
only to spend the money in London and elsewhere, meant a fatal breach of the feudal con-
tract: the gentry weren't present to witness the suffering of their tenants and so felt minimally
motivated to help them. Nor had the government, which complained loudly about absentee-
ism, moved to supply the deficiency. In Cork, the liberal reformer William Parker lamented at
the outset of the famine in 1816 of “nearly a total absence of all legislative provision for our
Poor.” As climate refugees flocked into the city, Parker called the “mass of distress” on the
streets of Cork “a disgrace to a nation professing the principles of the Christian Religion.” 24
Such appeals were to no avail. In February 1818, after almost three years of rapid eco-
nomic decline culminating in a full-blown famine and epidemic, a group of desperate Cork
citizens petitioned the British Parliament “to protect them from that ruin into which all ranks
appear to be fast sinking.” 25 The petition was tabled without comment. Less than a year be-
fore, the same Parliament had involved itself in lengthy debate on the prospects for Catholic
Emancipation. That no corresponding attention was paid to the very present disaster of Irish
poverty and disease shows the tragic consequences of a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish polit-
ical discourse dominated by sectarian arguments. While Parliament wrangled over Irish souls,
across the Irish Sea the body count was steadily mounting.
John Gamble, a minor society writer from County Tyrone, living in London, never enjoyed
the literary fame of William Carleton, his fellow Ulsterman. But on a return visit to his ho-
metown of Strabane in the summer of 1818, he recorded unforgettable impressions of Ul-
ster at the tail end of the Tambora disaster: “Since I was last here, this town and neighbour-
hood have been visited by two almost of the heaviest calamities which can befall human be-
ings. Fever and famine have been let loose, and it is hard to say which has destroyed the
most.” 26 Gamble's reaction echoes that of the doctor William Harty, who enumerated how the
1817-18 typhus epidemic impacted Irish society far beyond the raw numbers of infected and
dead:
The loss to society from the interruption given to productive labour; the expense incurred
by providing for the sick; the debility and weakness of constitution induced by the disease;
the mortality which must attend it, and is most frequent where it is most injurious, namely,
among men advanced in life, who are often the heads and support of families; the increase
of poverty and mendicity, together with the agonizing mental distress to which it must give
rise, are consequences of this epidemic that must occur to every humane and reflecting
mind. 27