leo i

An Gorta Mór

It was in a pub at Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, in mid August, that I first considered the question. How was it possible for Ireland to have suffered such a devastating famine in the 19th century? Is it not an island surrounded by open waters full of fish? Were there not streams and rivers full of nutritious salmon and trout? Oysters, mussels and clams grew by the coasts, did they not?

A few days before our arrival to Wicklow we were driving around Connaught, the Western province that suffered most from the famine. There I noticed the juxtaposition between the overabundant seafood that must have been available back in the 19th century, and the suffering of the Irish people desperately seeking blight-free potatoes for their daily meal. Today the seaside villages of the Western and Southern provinces boast numerous restaurants and pubs that local fishermen supply with superb fresh food every day.

How and why did the Irish people in 1845 ignore the highly nutritious food that came from the rivers and the sea?

A famine, I realize, is not just the effect of food scarcity. Famines occur today in our world in spite of infrastructure that enables, say, a restaurant at the top of the Rocky Mountains to serve fresh Maine lobsters within hours of pulling the crustaceans out of the water.

Famine, I understand, is the failure of infrastructure and policy. Famine is an issue of cultural misconceptions as well. To the Catholic Irishmen, fish was Friday food. It was the food of penance and contrition, of bodily punishment to some extent, as they were cleansing their souls and bodies in preparation to receive communion on Sunday.

In Christian tradition, fish was blessed by Jesus. Why were the Irish (Catholic in their overwhelming majority) so avert to fish that nearly one million of them perished in the famine, and about 2 million took the boat to America — many dying along the way? What caused such an aversion? Was it church dogma about Friday meals? Only an organized religion could have orchestrated a cultural distortion of this magnitude.

The Popery Act, the Penal Laws, and other instruments of oppression inflicted on the Irish by the British conquerors, combounded the situation beyond hope and recovery. The famine of 1845 was neither the first nor the last to hit Ireland. But it was the worst. It launced the Irish Diaspora that depopulated the island and altered the Irish psyche for ever.

Driving in Connaught one can imagine emaciated people searching the fields for one healthy potato. A few yards away, trout was jumping in the streams, salmons were defying gravity and river flow, and the coast was full of cockles and mussels.

The tragedy is not only in the famine itself. It’s also in the inability of the Church and the British rulers to show to the desperate population how to survive on sea food. Ironic it is that the root symbol of the christian faith is the ichthys. Just as ironic as the emergence of fish and chips as a British institution in the middle of the 19th century.