Latest / The History of Ireland: Rebellion, Empire, and Independence — Fexingo History / The Great Frost of 1740: Ireland's Forgotten Famine
Transcript
- Lucas: So, we've spent a lot of time in the great famines of the 1840s, the ones that reshaped Ireland forever. But there was a famine before that, sixty years earlier, that's almost been scrubbed from memory. The Great Frost of 1740—a winter so brutal it killed maybe a quarter of a million people, and yet it's barely a footnote in most history books. Lucas: And the fascinating thing is, it wasn't just a cold snap. It was a full-blown climate crisis. A massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, probably the Katla volcano, sent ash into the atmosphere, blocking the sun. In Ireland, the winter started early, in December 1739, and it didn't let up for months. Rivers froze solid, lakes turned to ice, and the poor couldn't keep warm or cook their food. Luna: So the cold itself was the killer? Or what came after? Lucas: The cold was just the beginning. When the thaw came in spring, the crops were ruined. The potato, which had become the staple for the poor, rotted in the ground. The oats and barley failed too. And then the rains didn't come—summer was dry, so the harvest failed again. People were already starving by autumn, and the next winter was even worse. Lucas: But here's the cruel part. Ireland was a colony, and the English administration saw the famine as a market problem, not a humanitarian one. Grain and beef were still being exported to England and the continent, even as people were dying on the roads. The Dublin Parliament was full of landowners who wanted to keep prices up, so they actually encouraged exports. Luna: That's insane. They were shipping food out while people starved? Lucas: Exactly. And they had the law on their side. The Penal Laws, which we talked about before, had stripped Catholics of almost all their rights. They couldn't own land, couldn't lease it for more than thirty years, couldn't even vote. So the people who grew the food had no say in what happened to it. And the legal system was rigged against them at every turn. Lucas: There's this one story that captures the desperation. A parish priest, a man named Father Nicholas Sheehy, started organizing resistance. He was a Catholic priest, which was already illegal, but he began preaching against the export of food and the injustice of the tithes that poor Catholics had to pay to the Protestant church. Luna: Father Sheehy — what happened to him? Lucas: He was arrested on trumped-up charges of complicity in a murder, but really it was because he was stirring up trouble. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1766, the last person in Ireland to suffer that punishment. The charges were so flimsy that even some Protestants protested, but the message was clear: if you speak up, you're going to die. Lucas: And the famine itself? It's not that nobody knew about it. There were reports in newspapers, letters to Dublin Castle, desperate pleas from local officials. But the government's response was basically to pray for rain and let the market do its thing. They even held a day of public fasting to ask for divine mercy, which didn't exactly put food in anyone's belly. Luna: So how did they get through it? I mean, the people who survived — how? Lucas: They survived on whatever they could scavenge. They ate nettles, weeds, and even boiled hides. Some families sold their children to landlords in exchange for food, a practice that was technically illegal but happened anyway. Others tried to flee to England or the colonies, but most couldn't afford the passage, and those who did often died on the ships. Lucas: And the church, even though it was illegal, became the only source of aid. Priests were already being hunted, but they risked everything to set up soup kitchens and distribute whatever food they could find. There's a story of one priest, Father John O'Brien, who sold the church's bell to buy oats for his parishioners. He never got the bell back, but his people survived. Luna: I feel like I should have heard about this before. Why is it so forgotten? Lucas: That's the mystery, isn't it? Part of it is that the later famine was so much bigger, and it became a political wedge for Irish nationalism. The Great Frost got overshadowed. But also, the memory of it was suppressed. The British didn't want to admit that their policies had made things worse, and the local elites didn't want to look bad either. So it just kind of faded away. Lucas: But there are traces. In folklore, it's remembered as 'An Troid Gheal' — the bright suffering, because the frost made everything shimmer. And in some counties, they still tell stories of the 'black frost' that killed the birds in midair and froze the milk in the cow's udder. Luna: An Troid Gheal — that's a powerful name. It sounds almost poetic, but it's harrowing. Lucas: It is. And it's a reminder that famines aren't just natural disasters. They're shaped by politics, by who owns the land, by who has the power. The Great Frost was a natural event, but it was human decisions that turned a hard winter into a catastrophe. And that's a lesson that resonates far beyond Ireland. Lucas: You know, the more we dig into these stories, the more I think about how we can learn from them. If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support. If you can, buy me a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small thing, but it keeps us going. Luna: Yeah, it really does. And it's a way for us to keep uncovering these forgotten chapters. Lucas: So back to the frost. The immediate crisis ended by 1741, but the scars remained. The population had been growing steadily, and it took decades to recover. And as we know, the pattern repeated itself a century later with the Great Famine, but that time, the world was watching, and the response was different. Lucas: There's a particular moment I find haunting. In 1740, the island was so desperate that people were mixing clay with flour to make bread, trying to stretch what little they had. And there are accounts of children fighting over a single potato, the kind of scene you'd expect in a war zone, not in peacetime. Luna: That's heartbreaking. And you said the government response was basically nothing? Lucas: Almost nothing. There were some public works schemes, but they were funded by local taxes that fell mostly on the poor. And there was a ban on exporting grain eventually, but it was too late and too weak. The ports were already clogged with ships loaded with Irish beef and butter, heading for England. Lucas: One of the most telling details is that the only group that consistently spoke out were the Catholic clergy, and they were outlaws. You'd think the state would have seen the value in feeding its people, but they were more worried about the cost and the precedent of helping Catholics. It's a shameful chapter. Lucas: And yet, from that darkness came a kind of resilience. The famine of 1740 forced people to rely on each other, and it sowed the seeds of a more organized resistance. The Whiteboys, a secret agrarian society, were active in the decades after, fighting against the injustices that had made the famine so deadly. Luna: So the famine wasn't just a tragic event, it was a catalyst for change. Lucas: Exactly. It exposed the cracks in the system, the deep inequalities that would eventually lead to the rebellions of 1798 and beyond. The Great Frost may be forgotten, but its echoes can be heard in every struggle for Irish rights that followed. Lucas: I think what strikes me most is how quickly we forget these things. We tend to think of history as a straight line, but it's more like a spiral. The same patterns repeat, just with different names and dates. And if we don't learn from them, we're doomed to make the same mistakes. Luna: That's a sobering thought. But it's also a call to remember, isn't it? Lucas: Yeah, it is. And that's why we tell these stories. Not to dwell on the pain, but to understand the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of justice. The Great Frost of 1740 might be forgotten, but the lessons it holds are timeless.