The Famine That Wasn't? Ireland, 1799–1801
Published in Irish Economic and Social History, January 2025.
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Abstract
The year 1800 is best known in Irish and British history for the passage of the Act of Union, a constitutional change that bound Ireland and Britain together under the one parliament. Yet the common people had more urgent matters on their mind. ‘Mobs’ took to the streets of Dublin, not to protest at the abolition of the Irish parliament in College Green but to protest the hunger that afflicted their stomachs. Similar protests took place in other places, from Clonakilty in west Cork, Killaloe on the Shannon to Drogheda on the east coast. The years 1799 and 1800 witnessed poor harvests, with soaring food prices and widespread distress in 1800 and 1801 in both Ireland and Britain. The rise in potato prices relative to its pre-crisis level was as great in 1799–1801 as in the worst years of the Great Famine a half century later. Indeed the prices of potatoes and oatmeal, the principal means of subsistence for the poorer classes in Ireland, rose more in 1799-1801 than at any time between the mid-eighteenth century and the First World War. Yet the surprising fact is that Irish society somehow side-stepped a full-blown famine. How and why this happened are the subject of this paper.