Latest / The History of Ireland: Rebellion, Empire, and Independence — Fexingo History / The Irish Famine Before An Gorta Mór: The Forgotten Hunger of 1740-41
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about the Great Famine of the 1840s — An Gorta Mór — but there was another famine a full century earlier that's almost completely forgotten now. I'm talking about 1740 to 1741, what people back then called Bliain an Áir — the 'Year of Slaughter'. Luna: Wait, a famine in the 1700s? I've never heard of that. Lucas: Hardly anyone has, and that's partly because the Great Famine overshadows everything, but also because the 1740s famine didn't have the same political aftermath. No mass emigration, no dramatic rise in nationalism. It just... happened, and then people tried to forget it. Lucas: It started with weather. The winter of 1739 to 1740 was brutal — one of the worst of the Little Ice Age. Across Ireland and Britain, temperatures plunged. The freeze was so severe that the River Shannon and Lough Neagh froze solid. People walked across them. In Dublin, the Liffey froze, and they held a fair on the ice. Luna: That sounds almost festive, but I'm guessing it wasn't. Lucas: Not at all. The 'Great Frost,' as it was called, lasted about two months, from late December to mid-February. It destroyed the potato crop in the ground — the potatoes froze and rotted. And most of the grain that had been sown for the next harvest was killed too. Livestock died in the fields. Mills froze, so even what grain was left couldn't be ground into flour. Lucas: And then, when the thaw came in February 1740, there was widespread flooding. So the spring planting was delayed, and what did get planted often failed. The harvest of 1740 was catastrophic — maybe a third of normal yields, in some places less. Luna: So by the winter of 1740, people were already starving? Lucas: Exactly. By early 1741, the famine was in full swing. Contemporary accounts describe people eating nettles, weeds, even dead animals. There are reports of families boiling hides and eating the leather. The mortality was staggering. Historians like David Dickson and Cormac Ó Gráda have estimated that between 250,000 and 400,000 people died — out of a population of maybe two and a half million. That's proportionally around 10 to 15 percent, which is actually a higher death rate than the Great Famine. Luna: That's shocking. So in relative terms, this was worse? Lucas: In percentage terms, yes. The Great Famine killed about 12 percent of the population, but over several years. The 1740-41 famine was more concentrated — most of the deaths happened in a single year, 1741. And it was caused purely by weather, not by a plant disease. The potato blight didn't exist yet. Lucas: Now, here's where the politics come in. Ireland in 1740 was under the Protestant Ascendancy — the Penal Laws were still in full force. The Irish Parliament was dominated by landowners, many of them absentee. And when the famine hit, they did very little. Luna: So no relief effort? Lucas: There was some, but it was completely inadequate. The Parliament voted a small sum for importing grain from America, but it arrived too late and in tiny quantities. Meanwhile, grain was still being exported from Ireland to England — because landlords wanted to make a profit. There's a famous letter from a clergyman in County Cork who wrote, 'The poor are dying daily, while ships laden with provisions leave our harbours.' Luna: That sounds like a direct parallel to the Great Famine, with the exports continuing during starvation. Lucas: It's exactly the same dynamic. And it wasn't just grain — butter, beef, and pork were also shipped out. The logic was that the famine was a temporary crisis, and trade shouldn't be interrupted. But for the poor, it was a death sentence. There were bread riots in Dublin, Cork, and Limerick. People attacked grain carts and bakeries. The army had to be called out. Lucas: The disease environment was terrible too. With malnutrition, typhus and dysentery swept through the country. Contemporary doctors called it 'fever' — they didn't really understand it. In some parishes, the death rate was so high that the normal burial practices broke down. Bodies were left in ditches or buried in mass graves. Luna: Were there any attempts at long-term reform afterward? Lucas: Very few. The Parliament set up a commission to distribute relief, but it was underfunded and corrupt. Some landlords reduced rents temporarily, but many evicted tenants who couldn't pay. One positive outcome was the establishment of the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, the Rotunda, partly as a response to the crisis — but that was a drop in the ocean. Lucas: You know, talking about this — the way a disaster can expose the fault lines in a society — it reminds me of something. A handful of listeners actually chip in monthly to keep this show going, through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. And that's literally what funds making episodes like this one — digging into stories that don't get told elsewhere. Luna: Yeah, it's a small group, but it makes a real difference. We don't run ads, so it's listener support that keeps us independent. Lucas: Exactly. Anyway, back to 1741. So the famine eventually ended with a decent harvest in the autumn of 1741. But the demographic impact was huge. The population didn't recover its pre-famine level for decades. And the psychological scar must have been immense — whole communities wiped out, families decimated. Luna: So why do you think this famine is so forgotten? Lucas: Partly because it was a 'natural' disaster — no political villain like the British government in the 1840s, no blight to blame. Also, the 19th century famine was so transformative that it rewrote the national narrative. But there's another reason: the 1740s famine didn't produce a diaspora or a rebellion. It was just... endured. And people wanted to move on. Lucas: There's also a lack of source material. Parish registers are incomplete. The government records from the period are patchy. Historians have only really started studying it seriously in the last few decades — David Dickson's work 'Arctic Ireland' is a key text, and Cormac Ó Gráda has written about it too. But it's still overshadowed. Luna: So it's a kind of historical silence. A famine that nobody talks about. Lucas: Exactly. And I think there's something important about remembering it. Because it shows that famine was not a one-time tragedy in Irish history — it was a recurring threat. And the way society responded — or failed to respond — tells us a lot about the values of the time. The same inequalities that caused suffering in 1847 were already there in 1741. Lucas: There's a poem written during the famine by a local poet in County Limerick, Seán Ó Tuama. He wrote about 'an drochshaol' — the bad life — and described children crying for bread. It's one of the few literary records we have from the ordinary people who lived through it. Most of them didn't leave any trace. Luna: That's haunting. That we only know about it from a few lines of poetry. Lucas: And from the numbers. The demographics don't lie. But the human experience — the day-to-day suffering — is mostly lost. Still, we owe it to those people to at least remember that it happened. Bliain an Áir. The Year of Slaughter. Luna: I think that's a good place to leave it. Thanks, Lucas.