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Perhaps aware of the disingenuous nature of his tribute to Irish compassion, Grant moved
quickly in his speech toward safer rhetorical ground: a glowing panegyric on Irish stoicism.
The “patience” with which the Irish had borne their suffering was “truly admirable,” he de-
clared to an approving parliament; in fact, it “was not to be paralleled by anything in history.”
Despite their acute miseries, the population had not been moved to “the slightest tumult” or
riot, while the “general benevolence” of the clergy and medical profession was “beyond all
praise.” Only at the very end of his lengthy speech did Grant allude to the minimal actions
of his own government during the crisis by restating the unalterable principle of laissez-faire
economics that no government should interfere with the workings of the marketplace. Al-
though a public works program might be temporarily introduced to relieve unemployment,
“any permanent legislative enactment on such a subject would be nothing more than a delu-
sion.” With that, Charles Grant sat down, “amidst considerable cheering from both sides of
the House.”
48
While allowance should be made for the harsh ideology of Grant's speech—laissez-faire
notions of “political economy” stood unchallenged at the time—little excuse can be found
for his premeditated falsehoods. The most egregious was his claim that there were no civic
disturbances in Ireland during the height of the crisis of 1817-18. Grant would have known
this to be untrue, and not simply from his privileged access to government documents and
deliberations. As early as May 1817 newspapers had carried reports of riots in Kildare and of
food convoys on their way to Dublin for export. Similar violent incidents were reported in
Cork, Limerick, and Waterford. On March 4, 1817, the
Times
of London reported a full-blown
“rising” in Tullamore, where “carts and cars have been broken, potatoes and meal seized and
forcibly sold; the luggage and provision-boats stopped on the canal; and menaces thrown out
that the locks would be smashed and the banks thrown in if the provision-merchants attemp-
ted to convey the produce of the county to Dublin.” In Ballina, the army was called in to break
up a riot over the export of oatmeal. The soldiers opened fire, killing three of the protestors
and wounding many more.
50
For William Carleton, the train of disasters that befell rural Ireland in 1816-18 followed
an inexorable course from extreme weather to crop failure, to famine, to epidemic disease,
to violent civic breakdown: “When a nation is reduced to such a state, no eye but the eye of
God himself can see the appalling wretchedness to which a year of disease and scarcity strikes
land marked the end of a period of relative prosperity in that country, and the beginning of
an era of intermittent food shortages and political instability culminating in the calamitous
crop failures, mortality, and epic social disintegration of the Great Famine.
Both in popular memory and in scholarly histories, the famine of 1845-49 stands as zero
hour of modern Irish history, when the country faced a massive and traumatic depopulation
from which it has never fully recovered. A million died in those years of the potato blight,
while another million emigrated. This history, as indelible as it is, has tended to cast events
prior to the 1840s disaster into the foggy netherland of “pre-famine Ireland.” As the Tambora-
era record shows, however, a disaster of comparable dimensions, if not length, struck many
regions of Ireland in 1816-18 when, for the first time, the subsistence potato crop failed
across the country. In the large-scale famine, social breakdown, and epidemic conditions that
ensued, the Tambora period offers a nightmarish prequel—a “black prophecy”—of the calam-
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