THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 109

ber 11, the Evening Post considered itself “authorized to declare it as their opinion, that the
Epidemic Fever of the Country does not pervade this City! ” Even from their tone, it is clear the
editors doth protest too much. For by this time, the newspapers in the north of the country
were reporting “unprecedented numbers now dying of Fever.” Typhus was “raging” in En-
niskillen, while from Strabane, in County Tyrone, came reports of a shortage of carpenters for
building coffins. By mid-September the game was up, and subscribers to the Dublin Evening
Post were called upon to digest the following solemn announcement: “We regret to learn, that
the Fever, in the vicinity of Dublin, has assumed a very malignant type .” Two months later,
the editors had abandoned all rhetorical restraint: they reported the typhus “deepening and
spreading with the rapidity and ravages of a Plague.” 36
Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economic theorist of famine, has identified “the
nature and freedom of the news media” as critical to whether food shortages will escalate
into general famine. If information about localized problems flows freely, and media pressure
is applied to governments to act, many incipient famines may be prevented. 37 No such re-
sponsible fourth estate existed in the Ireland of the late 1810s. But if the journalists of Ire-
land emerged with little credit from the disaster—whipsawing from denial to doom-filled pro-
nouncements—the same cannot be said of the clergy and medical men, many of whom risked
their lives to organize relief and personally care for the sick. Thirteen priests died attending
typhus victims in Carleton's hometown of Clogher alone, while for the medical profession,
still in its infancy, the Tambora crisis was their finest hour. 38 As rising members of the civic
establishment, prominent Dublin doctors such as Francis Barker (the amateur meteorologist)
and William Harty urged new public health initiatives upon the recalcitrant Irish elite and
their English colonial masters.
As part of their improvised insurgent strategy, the doctors attached themselves to the new
Association for the Suppression of Mendicity (street begging) in Dublin. As self-appointed
members of the “subcommittee of health” in early 1818, they began to agitate for an enlarged
public health system and anti-poverty measures to be introduced to address the root causes of
both beggary and disease. Harty and Barker's progressive agenda did not meet with a ready
welcome in the offices of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, however, who distanced himself
from the association and bluntly refused to provide government funds to alleviate the crisis.
The doctors' plans, he averred, “can be more effectually carried into execution by private
exertions and parochial subscriptions.” 39 In other words, the usual organs of charity and the
church should bear the burden of humanitarian relief, as they had under the Old Regime.
The doctors were undeterred, however. Through the desperate weeks of early 1818 the
health committee continued to publish embarrassing resolutions calling the government re-
sponse “totally insufficient” to the magnitude of the ongoing crisis. Decades ahead of their
time, these Dublin doctors preached “a preventive system … calculated to avert an immense
accumulation of wretchedness and poverty.” They went so far as to call the Lord Lieutenant's
expressed reliance on private charities a “fatal delusion”—strong language that, in 1818, re-
tained more than a whiff of Jacobin revolutionary spirit about it. They expressed outrage at
the rejection of their plan to mandate the cleaning of houses infected with fever and bitterly
denounced the efforts of Dublin authorities to downplay the extent of the epidemic for fear of
its impact on trade. “Can we,” they railed, “with such examples before our eyes, vilify Maho-
metans, and abuse their stupid indifference (under better motives) to the desolating devasta-
tions of the Plague?” 40