LAST August, the collection in Corpus Christi Church, Drumcondra, for the flood victims in Pakistan, amounted to €11,800, a figure rivalling the Christmas collection for the St Vincent de Paul Society. It was another example of the undoubted generosity of Irish people, arising, perhaps, from a race memory of the Famine of the 1840s when our ancestors were dependent on the charity of others.
In fact, the greatest outpouring of international charity for Ireland occurred a generation later and is largely forgotten. At the beginning of 1879, grain growers were already impoverished by the partial failure of the two previous harvests, cattle and sheep prices had collapsed because of competition from America, a depression in England had reduced the demand for butter, and many shopkeepers who had extended credit were in difficulty.
Up to 100,000 labourers were dismissed by larger farmers who could no longer afford to employ them and, in the words of a contemporary report, they “swarmed” into the towns in search of food.
In June, the Catholic clergy in Galway claimed that there was “dire distress” unequalled since the Famine.
Then, the summer was cold and wet. Temperatures were more than 2.5 degrees below average and rain fell on 61 days between July and September. Two thirds of the potato crop, half of the wheat crop, and much of the oats and turnip crops were ruined.
Turf, the primary source of fuel for the poor, lay drenched in the bogs and farmers lost produce worth £10,000,000, the equivalent of the rateable valuation of the land.
Initial warnings about a calamity were heard with suspicion in England and were only taken seriously when the Duchess of Marlborough, the wife of the lord lieutenant, had a letter published in the Times on December 16th, and launched a relief fund.
Meanwhile, the mayor of Adelaide sent a telegram to the lord mayor of Dublin, asking if the distress in Ireland warranted relief. His action spurred a meeting of prominent people in the Mansion House on Christmas Eve while 300 people begged food from the bishop of Achonry, Dr Francis McCormack. It led, two weeks later, to the launch of another fund intended to reach sources of help that wouldn’t be accessible to the nobility.
The president would be the incoming lord mayor, Edward Dwyer Gray. It would be non-political and non-sectarian. It would raise money mainly for the purchase of Indian meal at current prices from local traders. It would operate through 800 local committees with Catholic and Protestant clergy and dispensary doctors as members, and it would launch an international appeal.
It was a great success, not least because the Great Eastern and Anglo-American Telegraph Companies provided their services free. In the words of the fund’s final report on December 7th, 1880, “men in the young Australian cities, French noblemen, African diamond diggers, Mohammedans, Hindoos, the Canadian parliament, the great hearted citizens of the United States and the exiles in remote South America were stirred by the same impulse. Tens of thousands of pounds were flashed back and many thousands of Irish peasants were sheltered from the agonies of famine. Money lodged in local banks and flashed to London could be available to feed famished peasants in Connemara within a week.”
The largest single donation, £1,000, came from the Maharajah of Vizianagaram, £351 was raised in Fiji and British soldiers fighting in the Afghan war sent £239 from Kandahar.
The fund collected £181,000 before it closed in August, including £95,000 from Australia, where the lord mayor’s mother-in-law was the respected social reformer and advocate of rights for immigrant women, Caroline Chisholm. At a peak in February it was assisting more than 500,000 people.
It was run efficiently. The Mansion House was used as an office, almost 10,000 people, including clergymen, doctors and poor law guardians, gave their services freely, and less than two per cent of the money was spent on salaries and advertising. The committee also convinced the government to provide interest-free loans to poorer farmers to buy seed oats and potatoes that allowed the sowing of substantial crops.
Meanwhile, the duchess's fund, other funds organised by the New York Heraldand the Irish National Land League and funds in Canada and Philadelphia raised £300,000 and the American government provided a frigate, the Constellation, to carry relief supplies to Cork where they were transferred to gunboats bound for Galway.
The Catholic bishops of America held collections in their dioceses and in all, about £630,000 poured into Ireland from these and other sources, including the governments of Canada and Newfoundland.
In France, a Comité de Secours aux Irlandais, established by the Mansion House Committee, and with the archbishop of Paris as president, raised 700, 000 francs, mainly from church collections.
Unknown amounts came directly to families from relatives living abroad.
Apart from financing seeds, the government’s response to the crisis was sluggish and inadequate. The Fund Report stated pointedly that “we share with the other charitable organisations of 1880 the satisfaction of believing that now for the first time in a history fruitful of famine precedents, a crisis which rendered 500,000 of the population foodless paupers has been grappled with and got under control by the almost unaided arm of private benevolence, a calamity broken by an extraordinary outpouring of human sympathy, without limit of race, creed or distance.”
Mercifully, the summer of 1880 was exceptionally warm and the harvest ripened three weeks early. The potato crop was also largely free of blight. Thousands were still in want and the workhouses were still full, but a catastrophe of 1840s proportions had been avoided.
The worst was over, but the widespread distress had consequences. More than 400,000 people, one in 12 of the population, emigrated between 1879 and 1884, and the fear that gripped hitherto comfortable tenant farmers in the east and south made them more amenable to the National Land League campaign to end the era of the landlord.