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to direct and cause all such idle persons, beggars, and vagabonds to be removed and con-
veyed out of and from such parish and place.” There is no word in the act on where these
“idle” infected masses might then go, or be provided for. The peculiar indifference of the gov-
ernment to the fate of the Irish poor themselves did not pass unnoticed. Advocates for Ireland
suspected the influence of genocidal ideology in the British government's legislative response
to the crisis, bitterly denouncing “those pseudo-philanthropists, who can contemplate, not
only without pain but with complacency, pestilence thinning the ranks of our 'superabundant'
population; or who, to use the philosophic phraseology of our Malthite disciples, can, with
unalloyed satisfaction, behold fever 'doing its business.' ”
32
While the poor in Ireland had at least a handful of advocates in Parliament, however inef-
fectual, they had no voice at all in the media. The metropolitan newspapers in Ireland, taking
their cue from the government, systematically misrepresented the crises of 1816-18. First,
the rural famine went largely unreported for fear of prompting speculation in the grain mar-
kets. Then, in early 1817, as typhus ravaged rural Ireland, newspapers in urban centers such
as Dublin and Cork labeled the rumors of epidemic as “alarmism,” shilling for a metropol-
itan merchant class concerned about the disruption of trade and possible quarantines. Even
in the autumn of 1817, when typhus had reached the cities and its presence could no longer
be denied, little sympathy was spared for the rural victims of famine and disease. Instead,
the city papers demonized the starving refugees, calling upon authorities to bar the city gates
against the typhus-bearing hordes. In Dublin—the metropolitan hub of Irish government and
public opinion—editors railed against those “vagrants and beggars, who have emerged from
receptacles of disease, and spread themselves in various directions.” They demanded the gov-
ernment crack down on the beggary “which prevails to such a disgusting, and in the light
we are now considering it, dangerous degree.” In the grip of their paranoia of contagion, the
newly arrived beggar, their countryman, was worse than a leper: “his touch, to whomsoever
given—nay, even the very air which is about him, are pestiferous.”
33
On the outskirts of blockaded Irish towns in 1817, “fever huts” cropped up every-
where—“wretched structures of mud or stone” with straw roofs hastily erected along road-
sides and in fields for fever victims with nowhere else to go. There the refugees “struggled
with a formidable disease on the damp ground, with little covering but the miserable clothing
worn by day, and scarcely protected from the inclemency of the weather.” For the homeless,
there was competition even for these pitiful dwellings. According to one account from Kan-
turk near Cork, a refugee family found a fever hut too small to accommodate their number,
whereupon two daughters were forced to live outside on the open ground. When the fath-
er succumbed to typhus, his daughters then fought to take his place in the hut, the stronger
wretchedness during the Tambora period, but surely none more obscene than this. More im-
portant is the general truth it elicits. To quote an Irish doctor of the time, “nothing short of
extreme misery could have wrought so sudden and complete a change in the feelings of a
people, whose attachment to their offspring and relatives is proverbial.”
35
Into the first week of September 1817, newspapers in the southern towns continued to
hold the line against panic. “There is no ground whatever for alarm,” the
Kilkenny Moderator
reassured its readers, while the
Sligo Journal
quoted the opinion of a “professional gentleman”
who firmly believed that “the symptoms and operation of the existing fever are of a very mild
description, and merely such as usually occur at this period of the year.” In Dublin on Septem-
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