| Poverty and how that led to the Famine |
In
1844, before the famine most people were rural dwellers.
They lived off the food they grew which was wi
However,
not everyone was poor. There were
two main groups of society: The Rich Ascendancy and the Farming
Class. The Ascendancy were
rich landlords descended from the original planters years before.
They owned most of the Irish land, for example, Lord Ventry had 130,000
acres in Kerry and Lord Headfort had 20,000 of some of some of the best farmland
in Meath. Some of the landlords were known as absentee landlords.
They lived abroad, mostly in England, and had agents doing their work for
them in Ireland. Absentee Landlords were hated a lot more than resident ones.
There was a big gap in wealth between the Ascendancy and the Farming Class. Most of the farmers were cottiers who dwelt on one acre of land with a cottage. However not all farmers were as badly off as the cottiers. Strong Farmers rented hundreds of acres at a time and, in turn, rent them out to other farmers usually cottiers.
The cottiers land consisted of a single cottage surrounded by an acre of potatoes, usually lumpers. When the owner of the land died, the land was divided up among his sons, each son getting a quarter of an acre maybe less. When that son died his quarter of an acre was divided up among his sons and so on. This was called subdivision. Having only a small piece of land was one of the reasons for the dependence on the potato. As these poor farmers had no money with which to pay off the rent, they often worked on their landlord’s estate, paying the rent with their labour. Very little cash was used in this type of economy. The Devon Commission 1843 which examined the Irish Economic System blamed the land system and the landlord system as the main cause of Poverty.
When the blight finally came in 1845, the majority of farmers had little or no money, so they could not buy food. The dependence on the potato and poverty were two large factors on why many people died.
Malachi Arrigan.