THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 107

Harty's point: survivors of the epidemic faced a brutally diminished existence marked by
poverty, dislocation, and family breakdown.
Back in the devastated town of Strabane, the “humane and reflecting mind” of John
Gamble saw few familiar faces and received no joyful welcome. Heartbroken, he looked
across the empty streets and contemplated the massive depopulation that had occurred in
his home county. Some had emigrated, while many more had died of starvation and disease.
Where a few years earlier he had seen a bustling high street full of shops doing brisk wartime
trade, now all was eerily quiet. “I walk therefore,” he wrote, “nearly as much alone as I should
in the wilds of America.” 28 During the previous two years, one-and-a-half million Irish had
been infected with typhus, with probably in excess of 65,000 deaths. Up to 80,000 had per-
ished the previous year, 1816-17, from the famine that preceded the epidemic. An unknown
number, too, had fled the country as the last best means of escaping the deadly pincer grip of
these tragedies. Perhaps expecting a hero's return to his old town, Gamble instead stumbled
into the desolated landscape of the new Ireland—a famished, traumatized Ireland—the Ire-
land of the nineteenth century.
“THE AMIABLE PECULIARITY OF THE IRISH CHARACTER”
The fact that there are almost no official statistics on the Irish famine of 1816-17, while
the typhus epidemic of the subsequent two years produced a veritable library of reports and
treatises, signifies that the ordinary suffering of the Irish peasantry mattered little to their
urban compatriots, and even less to their British rulers. But once the malnourished masses
took to the roads, bringing contagion with them, the privileged metropolitan classes and their
agents in the government and media rose up in alarm. Parliamentary debates characterized
the typhus epidemic of 1817-18 as a security threat rather than a public health crisis, thereby
ignoring the systemic issue of Irish poverty and famine's close relation to disease.
Along the length and breadth of Ireland in 1817, typhus fever had spread “to an extent
unprecedented in the recollection of any person living.” 29 And as the epidemic reached the
cities, so did its refugees. Exact numbers are unknown, but certainly hundreds of thousands
of Irish abandoned their homes and took to the open roads in 1816-18, a demographic up-
heaval that fully exposed the fragility and stark inequities of British Ireland under the Act of
Union. A countryman of William Carleton's reported that during the first wave of the refugee
crisis, “many hundred families, holding small farms in the mountains of Tyrone, have been
obliged to abandon their dwellings in the spring of 1817, and betake themselves to begging
as the only resource left to preserve their lives.” 30 Reports from Limerick were that “the whole
country is in motion,” while in Derry, “almost the entire population” of the rural districts had
left their homes for the towns. 31
The emergence of mass refugeeism in almost every region in Ireland spurred a vigorous
government reaction. Everywhere, city authorities floundered. Tullamore officials posted sol-
diers on all routes into the town to turn away the indigent crowds while, back in the imperial
metropole of London, Parliament acted decisively. The “Act to Establish Regulations for Pre-
venting Contagious Diseases in Ireland” is a legislative document of class panic and spectac-
ular inhumanity, endowing health officials with powers “to apprehend all idle poor persons,
men, women, or children, and all persons who may be found begging or seeking relief … and