DAVE MANSE,LL rarely been higher than that since. The spread of population loss was also uneven. In Ulster the drop from 1841 ·to 1911 was 33.8%; the average in the other three provinces was 51.6%. The main effect on the rural community was to swing the class balance sharply in favour of the farmers: in the 60 years after 1851 the number of labourers and cottiers fell by about 40%, the number of farmers by only 5%. The main effects can be tabulated as follows: Labourers Cottiers Farmers (under 5 (5-15 (over 15 acres) acres) acres) 1845 700,000 300,000 154,000 304,000 1851 500,000 88,000 310,000 277,000 1910 300,000 62,000 192,000 290,000 The exodus of the labouring and cottier classes was aided by the English government's laissez-faire attitude to the famine crisis. There was food available in Ireland but since it was a valuable export and since the lower classes had no money to buy it they had to starve or get out of the starving areas. Many were so poor that they did not even have this choice. In fact the main emigration in the famine period was from the more prosperous eastern half of the south in the form of young single people leaving for the better prospect of America. Later in the century at times of further rural crisis whole families began to depart for America from the much more devastated western regions when the severity of their situation (and money remitted from relatives in America) persuaded them to desert a way of life which, however materially poor, they were in fact loath to leave. The trend towards larger farming units was expedited by the Irish Poor Relief Act of 1847 which stated that no relief was to be given to anybody with more than a quarter of an acre of land. Another significant factor was the slump in grain prices after the effective repeal of the English Corn laws in 1849, and a :r:isein meat and livestock prices which encouraged a rapid switch-over to land-intensive cattle-rearing. Mass evictions, emigration, and the compulsory sale of bankrupt estates (provided for by an Act of the English parliament) facilitated the development of a new class of largescale ranching farmers (and this is still the main trend in Ireland today). The reduced number of labourers left in Ireland found their position stabilised since by their very scarcity 80
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==