THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 110

The coup de grâce of the militant doctors' campaign came in September 1818, when the
Association for the Suppression of Mendicity evicted the vast number of beggars it had itself
accommodated and let them loose upon the affluent neighborhoods of Dublin. Their goal? To
shame the government and wealthy citizens of the city into coughing up relief donations. In
what was for that time a remarkable public demonstration of class inequity and resentment,
two thousand ragged beggars—many of them emaciated and sick—marched from the associ-
ation's headquarters on Hawkins Street through the leafy squares of Dublin's elite, stopping
to yell abuse at the houses of those known to have refused charitable aid. The impact of this
daring piece of political theater was dramatic: almost ten thousand pounds in private dona-
tions, a huge sum, flowed into the association's coffers in the following days. 41
At the height of the typhus epidemic, in September 1817, the Dublin doctors could loudly
warn of “the ruin that awaits us, if every heart and hand are not speedily roused to exer-
tion.” 42 Even as late as October 1818, with typhus spread across the British Isles, the medical
establishment in Edinburgh expressed alarm at “the state of continued fever … in our time
we have never known it extend so generally over the Empire, or continue so long.” 43 By the
end of 1818, however, the worst of the epidemic was over, and with it the doctors' platform
for agitating for public health reform.
Almost a year after the beggar's march in Dublin, Charles Grant, the new Chief Secretary
for Ireland, felt comfortable in rising to his feet in Parliament to give the official government
account of what had happened in Ireland over the preceding three years. Like Francis Barker
and, later, William Carleton, Grant opened his narrative of the disaster with a meteorological
description:
In the years 1816 and 1817, the state of the weather was so moist and wet, that the lower or-
ders inIreland werealmost deprived offuel wherewith to dry themselves, and offood where-
on to subsist. They were obliged to feed on esculent plants such as mustard-seed, nettles,
potato-tops and potato-stalks—a diet which brought on a debility of body and encouraged
the disease more than anything else could have done. 44
Where Barker's interests in the weather were scientific, however, Grant's were political. The
bad weather was to be one of a suite of causes Grant would offer for the death of some
150,000 of his Irish subjects from famine and disease in lieu of any acceptance of government
responsibility for their deaths. 45 These included a particularly arch tactic of sugarcoating the
blame for the spread of the typhus epidemic, then directing that blame toward the victims
themselves. Native hospitality, “that amiable peculiarit[y] of the Irish character,” had meant
the sick were not quarantined as they ought, while the ritual waking of the dead exposed still
more to the contagion. Also, the poor had failed to adequately “fumigat[e] their houses.” 46
Unfortunately for the historical reputation of the British Parliament, these explanations
were either patently false or irrelevant. In many cases, the Irish locked their doors against
the sick and indigent, an attitude abundantly evident in the mass evictions of rural cottiers
and the anti-beggary editorials of the Dublin press. To offer an example: Thomas Mellon, who
was to become patriarch of one of the richest banking families in the United States, spent his
boyhood on a moderately affluent farm in County Tyrone. Late in life, he remembered that
when his parents left him to go to the market during the Tambora years, they left him strict
instructions to bolt the farmhouse door and a fierce dog to help repel the “tramps” that were
“numerous at that time.” 47