(dark music) (narrator) 1845.

Europe is gripped by famine.

♪ Having escaped from South America, a deadly fungus, Phytophthora infestans, triggers a blight which kills every potato crop it touches.

♪ (Ó Gráda) Everywhere in Europe where the potato was an important part of people's diet was affected by a serious food crisis.

♪ (Gallagher) An estimated 100,000 people die from famine-related causes, particularly in Belgium and in Holland and the Kingdom of Prussia.

(dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) In Ireland, where a third of the population relies almost exclusively on the potato as its primary food, the Famine will last seven years.

♪ (Gray) Proportionately, this catastrophe kills one in eight of every person living on the island.

That puts it amongst one of the greatest famines in global history.

(Kinealy) The Great Famine changed Ireland in so many ways.

One million dead, two million emigrated.

(narrator) A mass of Irish migrants become refugees on the world's seas, desperate to build new lives.

(Lee) So they're starting at the bottom in America.

There's a ladder in America, and, by God, you're gonna climb it.

(crowd whistling, cheering) ♪ (narrator) As with more recent famines, food is available, but only for those who can afford it.

In the Great Hunger, it is only the poorest who will starve and die.

♪ (Mac Suibhne) Not all Irish people are descendants of people who suffered during the Famine.

Some Irish people are descendants of people who prospered during the Famine.

♪ (Reilly) In the late 1840s, it's survival of the fittest, in certain parts of the country.

♪ (Mark-FitzGerald) The Famine occurs in one of the wealthiest parts of the world, in the British Empire, so how could something like this be allowed to have occurred?

(man) Great Britain fails Ireland in a catastrophic way.

Neglect, indifference, cold-heartedness, insufficient humanitarian care for the Irish.

♪ (Whelan) All of those million people were real, warm, living, flesh-and-blood individuals.

There were sons, there were daughters, there were fathers, there were mothers, there were lovers, there were sweethearts.

They were your neighbor.

(Crowley) In relative time, we are actually quite close.

We are maybe five or six generations away from the worst catastrophe in our history.

♪ (solemn music) ♪ (narrator) The decades that precede the Great Hunger are times of tumult and transformation for Europe.

♪ Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, people have rebelled against oppressive dynastic rule.

(sounds of battle) From France to Spain, Germany to Greece, people rise to demand an end to inequality, mass poverty, and social injustice, and the establishment of nation states based on democratic principles.

♪ (Ó Gráda) It was an undemocratic world.

It was a world in which the poor had very little voice.

(dramatic music) (narrator) On the eve of the Famine, Britain stands apart, With a vast empire that spans the globe, it is confident in its position as the world's most powerful nation.

♪ (Gallagher) British society transforms socially and economically in this period.

This is a revolution.

(narrator) Advances in farming techniques and population growth propel many to leave the countryside and make new lives in the cities.

(Gallagher) People are pouring in from rural areas, crowding into the towns, the new megacities that have grown up as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

And with this rise in population comes one of the greatest social ills of the Victorian era, and that's poverty.

(dark music) ♪ Attitudes towards the poor were very negative.

But they were particularly negative towards the Irish poor.

♪ ("Walter Scott") Their poverty is not exaggerated.

'Tis on the verge of human misery.

Their cottages would scarce serve as pigsties in Scotland.

(Kelly) For centuries past, the native Irish or the Catholic Irish had been cast into a subservient status, and, very definitely, there was a common understanding of Catholic Irish as inferior.

♪ (narrator) Since the conquest and plantation of the island in the 1500s and 1600s, Ireland has been ruled by Britain.

♪ Under the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland is completely subsumed into the United Kingdom.

In principle, the Irish should be treated equally to the English, Scottish, and Welsh.

But in practice, Irish Catholics are treated with prejudice and disdain in their own land.

(Gallagher) The Irish were thought to be feckless, thought to be lazy, "indolent" is a word that's used commonly at the time.

They needed to be led, they had very little initiative themselves.

They were often considered to be the lowest of the low.

♪ (Lee) The function of Ireland, from a British perspective, is basically, "What can we get out of it?

We've got the land now; we own it."

(narrator) Ninety-five percent of Ireland's land mass belongs to a small group of mainly Protestant landowners loyal to the British crown.

♪ (Kelly) The ascendancy, the elites, the major landowners, the estate owners, the titled families.

You've approximately 5,000 families who would belong to that class.

They supplied members of Parliament.

They were the local authorities, in many ways.

♪ (narrator) The elite farmed their lands to produce massive quantities of food, mostly for export to Britain.

(Kinealy) On the eve of the Famine, ninety million eggs every year were exported to Britain.

Salmon, all sorts of fish, alcohol.

Enough corn is being exported from Ireland to feed two million people in Britain.

And so, some people would describe Ireland by the 1830s, 1840s, as being the breadbasket of Britain.

♪ ("Karl Marx") Ireland is an agricultural district of England which yields corn, wool, cattle, and military recruits.

♪ (narrator) Unlike Britain, farming in Ireland has not been modernized.

Instead, a force of millions of tenant farmers, cottiers, and landless laborers work the fields.

The tenant farmers rent small farms from the land-owning elite.

The cottiers work without payment in return for a patch of poor land on which to subsist.

The landless laborers are also working for no other payment but the permission to occupy a rough piece of land.

Though they have no money, the cottiers and laborers have one thing they can rely on: the highly nutritious potato, which they plant in ridges which mark the land to this day.

♪ ♪ (Murphy) It's very easy to propagate it, so you just cut it-- you halve a potato, you take it off and you plant it and off you go.

It could be planted in poor land, mountainous conditions, and still provide.

(woman singing in native language) (Lee) Long as the potato held, they were very well-nourished.

They were dirt poor, but they were very well-nourished.

(Murphy) Here you had a God-given food stock that was hugely nourishing, that would grow almost anywhere, and it fueled a population explosion.

(somber music) (Reilly) The decade or two before the Famine, the population increases massively, from over three million people in the 1780s right up to eight million in 1841.

And so, there's a huge pressure for land.

(Whelan) The population surged up the valleys, it surged onto the bogs, it surged into Connemara.

It surged into areas which hadn't really been very heavily populated before.

♪ (narrator) The census of 1841 records the United Kingdom's population at just over 27 million, with the Irish making up one third of the total.

♪ The census also records the extent of Ireland's poverty.

Three million people live in basic cabins built of stone or mud.

♪ Two million more are poorer still.

They live in primitive hovels classified as fourth class.

♪ (Murphy) The fourth-class housing would be a single-room mud hovel basically built of organic material.

(dramatic music) ("William Steuart Trench") There are neither windows, bedsteads, tables, nor chairs.

(Murphy) And oftentimes, you've got three generations living in the same hovel.

(Mark-Fitzgerald) There are some later photographs which have been misidentified as Famine photographs.

Generally, they're from the 1870s and later.

But many of those images were depicting conditions which would have been very similar to the Famine period.

♪ (traditional fiddle music) ♪ (Whelan) The whole west of Ireland was full of these kind of settlements.

Geographers sometimes called them clachans, which in the Irish language were called ballya, which means a little settlement or village, but not a village in the European sense.

It's a village of just farming people.

There's no shops, there's no pubs.

It's often groups of kin-related people.

And these were very vibrant in terms of oral culture.

They were singing, they were dancing.

You know, they were face-to-face neighbors.

(Mac Suibhne) Patrick, Hugh, James, Ryan, Mary, Bridget.

You know, they're people with recognizable names.

They had human wants, they had human desires, they had human frailties.

They loved each other, they hated each other.

They drank, they smoked, they played music, they danced.

The majority were Irish-speaking.

They were living, breathing people.

♪ (narrator) Centuries of British rule has caused the decline in use of the Irish language.

But it remains strong among the illiterate poor.

♪ The ancient language is rich in poetry, story, and song.

♪ Traveling in Ireland a year before the Famine, the American philanthropist Asenath Nicholson notes the vitality of their culture.

("Asenath Nicholson") At night, we had full proof of Irish merriment.

They ate their potatoes and rose to play.

The dancing and singing were so boisterous, they shook the cabin and reached the ears of most of the neighborhood.

♪ (Whelan) And now it is when we look at the west of Ireland, we see emptiness and remoteness.

But all the people talking about pre-Famine, what they talk about is the noise.

Everywhere, people talked!

There was constant noise.

Constant chattin', constant hubbub.

One of the saddest things during the Famine is that that culture disappears or weakens dramatically.

(music turns dark) ♪ (birds cry, bell peals) ♪ (narrator) On the eve of the Famine, not everyone in Ireland is poor.

The 1841 census classifies three million people as belonging to the better-off middling classes.

Larger farmers and merchants.

Professionals and shopkeepers living in the towns and cities.

Since the Catholic emancipation movement of the early 1800s, led by Daniel O'Connell, Britain has granted more equal rights to Irish Catholics.

Those with access to money and education have risen up the social ranks to join their Protestant counterparts.

Some have bought land, and like the landed gentry, they rent it to the ranks below.

♪ Ireland's poverty has not gone unnoticed by the British authorities, among whom many are concerned with the people's overreliance on a single food source.

(somber music) ("Sir Randolph Routh") Though little industry called for to rear the potato leads the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labor and a higher order of food would prevent.

♪ (narrator) A series of official government reports have concluded that the way of life of the Irish poor -is not sustainable.

-There is nowhere in the world today where the dependence on a single food is as great as it was in Ireland in the 1840s.

(Murphy) You have poor housing, you have endemic poverty, you have a single food source, which was the kiss of death.

(Kelly) It's a system that built towards disaster, really, from every perspective.

♪ (gulls crying) (ominous music) ♪ (narrator) From the Andes Mountains of South America, the fungus Phytophthora infestans escapes northwards... ♪ ...and crosses the Atlantic in the holds of cargo ships.

♪ In the summer of 1845, the blight makes landfall in the port of Antwerp.

The blight arrives at the very moment the potato crop is ripening.

As it sweeps across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Prussia, every crop the blight touches is destroyed.

As millions of people face starvation, European authorities move quickly to provide relief.

(Ó Gráda) The Belgians and the French did something which was common practice in Ireland during earlier famines, and that was to put a halt to brewing and to non-food uses of crops, and also to encourage imports and restrict exports.

(dark music) ♪ (narrator) When the blight finds Ireland's damp, humid climate, it spreads like wildfire.

♪ ("Alexander M. Sullivan") The withering breath of a simoom seemed to sweep over the land.

(Kelly) People notice a blackening of leaves in the field, and they also notice a smell.

(Murphy) Can you imagine that mentality?

"My God, what I depend on for my existence is rotting in front of my eyes, as I look at it."

("Alexander M. Sullivan") I saw whole tracts of potato growth changed in one night from smiling luxuriance to a shriveled and blackened waste.

♪ (narrator) One-third of the Irish potato crop is destroyed.

One million people are left with little or no food.

♪ (dramatic music) In London, British Prime Minister Robert Peel understands the impact this potato famine could have.

Ireland has had famines before.

(Gray) Sir Robert Peel, his first government job had been as Chief Secretary for Ireland back in the 1810s.

He'd been Home Secretary in the 1820s, so he knew Ireland very well.

And Peel, due to a sense perhaps this will be another short-term failure, is relatively quick and relatively generous in terms of his intervention.

(narrator) But Peel also understands that any relief for the Irish has to be implemented without upsetting advocates of the free market.

British economic policy at this time is strongly aligned to the laissez-faire free market principles of John Locke and Adam Smith.

(Whelan) Smith's central argument was that the hidden hand of the economy, the magic of the market, distributed resources more efficiently than any government could.

(Kelly) Their decree was that it is the role of government to facilitate employment, work, not to be giving handouts to people, even people in dire need.

♪ ("James Wilson") It is no man's business to provide for another.

♪ (narrator) Peel, however, is determined to help.

His government establishes a temporary relief commission which sets up hundreds of relief committees around Ireland.

♪ These voluntary relief committees are charged with distributing cheap corn, which Peel imports from America, and setting up public works projects where the hungry can earn money to buy the cheap corn.

(shovels scraping) (dark music) The message is clear: The poor must work in return for any relief they receive.

(O'Leary) Liberal political economy implied that if you gave people welfare or benefits without linking that to work or productive employment, you would create in effect a parasitic or drone class.

♪ (narrator) Conditions on the infrastructure projects are intentionally harsh, and pay is kept low so that only the most desperate will apply.

♪ (woman) The work should be as repulsive as possible, consistent with humanity.

That is, paupers would rather do the work than starve.

♪ (narrator) With no other option, people clamor for the jobs.

(Gray) You've got a ticket, then you get employment, and you get paid on a weekly basis.

You get paid cash, and that means, then, you've got some income to purchase whatever food is available in the marketplace.

♪ (Reilly) On these public works schemes, you would have seen men, women, and children employed, children as young as eight or nine employed in the schemes; men and women as old as 75, 76.

Women, in particular, they go looking for relief, which would have involved long hours going to and from the relief depot, and queuing, and so on.

(Crowley) There's accusations of fraud and favoritism.

The most deserving sometimes aren't getting the works, they're not selected.

(narrator) Though the relief has been given with stringent conditions attached, Peel's measures are a success.

No one dies of famine in Ireland in the winter of 1845.

(faint wind blowing) (somber music) ♪ In Britain, however, Peel's actions are widely criticized.

(Kelly) Peel knew the risk he was taking, and he knew that he was risking his own political future.

(Gray) The Times newspaper is reporting Peel's relief system is too generous, it's corrupt, the landlords are getting things done at state expense, at public expense.

(narrator) The prime minister is further criticized when, in order to make food cheaper, he repeals the Corn Laws that had placed tariffs on imported foods.

(Gallagher) And that triggered a downfall in the government and the creation of a new Liberal Party government under the leadership of Sir John Russell.

♪ (Gray) Russell's party and Russell's government is also deeply factionalized.

He's a weak prime minister with very little, if you like, personal authority.

♪ (Gallagher) When he comes to power in June of 1846, the Famine is not on his agenda.

He believes it will be over by the summer.

That's what had been predicted.

(narrator) But in 1846, the blight returns.

(eerie music) This time, it kills almost the entire crop in Ireland.

(Gray) And somewhere between three-quarters and nine-tenths of the potato crop is wiped out in one week, in the last week of July, first week of August of 1846.

("William Steuart Trench") I shall not readily forget the day.

I could scarcely bear the fearful smell which came up so rank from the deceitfully luxuriant stalks.

The crop was worthless.

(Ó Gráda) Therefore, the livelihood and the food of the millions who depended mainly on the potato, that's gone.

(bleak music) (Lee) It's really only with the failure of the crop of '46 that the realization, I think, struck: "Hey, this is massive."

So '46 becomes in effect the first year of sustained, serious famine.

♪ ("William Bennett") We entered a cabin.

In one dark corner were three children huddled together.

Perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voices gone, evidently in the last stage of starvation.

♪ (Gray) Given that this is the second year of crisis, people's resources are running out in the countryside.

(man) Such is the scale of the widespread hunger that even the crows have been reduced to skeletons.

(Gray) So people have been able to perhaps get through one year by selling their pigs, by pawning their agricultural tools, their clothes, by perhaps not paying their rent.

In the second year, there's nothing left to pawn, there's nothing left to sell.

♪ (narrator) People scavenge or steal to stay alive.

With tackle and boats pawned and sold, fishing is not possible.

Coastlines are picked clean of all that can be eaten.

♪ (man) In Ballyheigue, great misery prevails.

A woman was drowned in endeavoring to gather seaweed, the only food to be procured for herself and her wretched family.

(melancholic music) ♪ (Whelan) Now you have a problem that you don't have enough food to feed people.

Who do you feed?

Do you feed the teenage boys, because they might be able to earn a few shillings working on the road?

Do you feed the grandparents, because maybe you feel they're at the end of their life?

And you now have horrendous choices to make.

In a sense, you have to decide, who do you want to live and who do you want to die?

What would you do?

♪ (Gray) Very rapidly in the course of the late autumn, early winter of 1846, we hear reports of deaths taking place on a significant scale.

♪ (woman) Mary Anne McDermott lived the past four months by begging.

The deceased had some green of bad quality in her stomach and a small quantity of turnips in her bowels insufficient to sustain life.

The jury found her death arose from want of nourishing food.

(Geber) During the Famine, people would have died from primarily infectious diseases, so famine diseases, things like typhus and typhoid fever, and cholera and so on.

(narrator) Infection spread through crowded villages and towns.

(Lee) People literally laid down and died.

Family members laid down and died.

You know, a parent watched their children die.

Children watched their parents die.

♪ (Mac Suibhne) The burial of their own dead was massively important to people, and they went to extraordinary lengths to see that the dead were properly buried.

(narrator) But as resources run out, sacred traditions must sometimes be abandoned.

(Murphy) So there were carts going every day carrying people to the local graveyards.

To facilitate their burial, the only option was to bury 'em in mass graves.

(narrator) Throughout Ireland, burial pits still contain the remains of tens of thousands, their graves unmarked, their identities forgotten.

(Whelan) You had the sense that death becomes denuded of its dignity.

(wind blowing) (somber music) ♪ (narrator) In 1846, the Illustrated London News commissions drawings from artist James Mahony.

They will define the Famine memory.

♪ ("James Mahony") Not far from where I made this sketch, six dead bodies had lain for 12 days without the least chance to interment, owing to their being so far from town.

(Mark-Fitzgerald) The interesting thing about 19th century illustration is that it's a nascent medium.

And because of that, there are a lot of artistic conventions which govern how representation can appear.

So you don't see starving and emaciated bodies.

It's mediated.

It's oftentimes romanticized, it's often sanitized as well.

Nevertheless, it does show the extent of devastation in a way that audiences had never seen before.

(tense music) (narrator) The deepening crisis in Ireland worries the government.

(Gallagher) People within government are getting very concerned about the amount of money that taxpayers, ratepayers, are paying in Irish relief.

(Lee) There was quite a bit of tension between the English officials in Dublin, saying, you know, "There's famine, there's famine," and the Treasury in London saying, "They're exaggerating, they're exaggerating.

We'll do something, but we can't be lavishing English's largesse on Ireland."

("Sir Charles Wood") Except through the purgatory of misery and starvation, I cannot see how Ireland is to emerge into a state of anything approaching prosperity.

(narrator) Some in government circles see the Famine as an opportunity to modernize Ireland and reduce what they see as its surplus population of poor people.

("Sir Randolph Routh") I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity.

♪ (Whelan) The British already had in their mind a template of what they would like in Ireland and getting rid of all these people, introducing what they thought was modern farming methods.

As it were, fast-forwarding Ireland into a version of Scotland and Wales which would be absorbed peaceably into the British state.

♪ (Lee) You have to realize a certain diligence of the English self-image at that particular stage.

We are the greatest in the world, which in many respects I agree they were.

♪ (faint wind blowing) (somber music) (narrator) By winter, people are dying in their thousands every week.

Even so, Russell's government stops distributing cheap corn.

♪ (Kinealy) The winter of 1846 to '47 was the coldest for a hundred years.

It snowed as late as April in the west of Ireland.

(narrator) Now the only state help available was a job in the public works.

The ruin of the potato crop has caused the price of other foods to soar beyond the reach of the meager public works wage.

Nevertheless, Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, cuts pay by 20 percent, from ten to eight pence per day.

♪ (Gallagher) Trevelyan also introduced another clause whereby laborers would be paid for the amount of work that they did as opposed to a day's work itself.

♪ (Ó Gráda) And of course, that meant that the unhealthy and the weak, people who needed it more, were paid less than people who were healthy.

♪ (narrator) By March, 700,000 people are employed on the works.

The projects are intended to modernize the country.

♪ New piers and harbors are built or renovated around the coast.

♪ Many of them still stand today.

♪ Major drain schemes reclaimed land in the midlands and the west of the country.

♪ New roads are built, in some cases, shortening travel by days.

♪ However, the majority of projects have no practical merit.

♪ Literally roads to nowhere.

(Crowley) They were of little value, bar creating work to give money.

And as one contemporary report in the Kilkenny newspaper, it said the country is riddled with useless roads.

♪ (narrator) People work with barely any food in their stomachs.

Many live far away.

Too weak to return home at night, they sleep rough by the works, exposed to the winter elements.

♪ ("Hugh Dorian") Had the poor creatures got this allowance at their homes, it would've been relief.

But in the way it was given, it meant slow murder.

♪ (Ó Gráda) The whole system was perverse.

Instead of prolonging life, it probably in lots of cases, it killed people.

♪ (dark music) ♪ (narrator) In France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, people do not rely on the potato to the same extent as they do in Ireland.

But, here, the famine crisis is exacerbated by steep inflation in the price of wheat.

♪ ♪ (narrator) In 1846 and '47, many tens of thousands die from famine across Northern Europe.

But for the timely interventions of authorities, the death toll would've been far higher.

(dramatic music) (Smyth) When the crisis broke, they moved to stop the problem: banning food exports, establishing public works.

The French give free bread to the people in the public works.

They tried to control prices.

(narrator) Authorities in Europe want to avoid the social unrest that food shortages could provoke.

(Kinealy) Governments in Europe had witnessed revolutions very recently.

There'd been the massive revolution in France, in 1789, which had an impact all over Europe.

(dark music) ("Major Parker") A woman with a dead child in her arms was begging on the street yesterday.

♪ Notwithstanding all the distress, the market was supplied with meat, bread, and fish.

(narrator) During even the worst years of the Famine, food markets in Ireland are full and food continues to be exported to Britain as normal.

(man) We saw droves of bullocks winding their weary way to some port to be shipped to Liverpool.

(narrator) Some argue that Ireland needs the money from exports to keep the wheels of the economy moving.

♪ (Ó Gráda) One issue with stopping exports in Ireland is that if you impose that kind of a restriction for several years in succession, farmers will not grow anything because you would remove the incentive farmers had to produce.

♪ (Mac Suibhne) There's something visibly wrong with taking food further beyond reach of people.

Something wrong with that.

And deep inside us all, we know the British government should've closed Irish ports.

They should've refused to allow food to leave the country.

Whether it would've fed everybody, it wouldn't.

It would've fed somebody, though.

(dramatic music) ♪ (Ó Gráda) There was a good deal of protesting in the early stages of the Famine.

They would riot against bakers.

They would riot against retailers.

(man) Towns and villages are invaded and plundered by armies of idle laborers who famish for want of bread and will not be put off.

♪ These are not really revolutionary protests.

They happen spontaneously.

They are focused on one issue: food scarcity, scarcity of food.

♪ (narrator) For all their anger, emaciated and exhausted, the Irish poor present no real danger.

♪ Britain has learned from previous revolutions.

The island is heavily militarized.

♪ (Smyth) It had taken them a long time to conquer Ireland, so the military are there to contain.

The number of soldiers in Ireland, in 1843, is 15,000.

The number of military in Ireland, in '47, is 29,000.

It has doubled.

(Ó Gráda) Once people realize that the situation is hopeless, the instinct to protest and to try and do something about it gives way to apathy and resignation and despair.

(somber piano music) ♪ (narrator) As authorities falter, individual medics, clerics, and charities try to fill the gaps on the front line.

♪ The Christian Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, in particular have a profound impact.

(Gallagher) There are roughly 3,000 Quakers within Ireland on the eve of the Famine, and they were tremendously helpful in their reliefs to try and stave off the worst effects of famine among the poor.

They also took a really important and active role in setting up soup kitchens across the country in places like Youghal and Waterford and Kerry, for example.

(narrator) Catholic priests and Protestant clerics raise money and buy food and clothing for the poor.

Some Protestants are accused of proselytizing in exchange for food.

Most, however, are motivated by pure altruism.

♪ (Gray) We see lots of clergy dying, Protestant and Catholic.

We see relief officials, both paid by the state and also voluntary relief officials, dying.

We see doctors dying.

(narrator) Twenty-seven priests and clerics and at least ten Quakers die trying to save the lives of the millions starving in Ireland, each motivated by their Christian faith to help.

(moody music) However, others find a very different message in God's word.

("Charles Trevelyan") God, grant that we might rightly perform our part and not turn into a curse what was intended as a blessing.

♪ (Gray) For people who are evangelical providentialists, like Charles Trevelyan and many of his supporters, the Famine is not an accident.

(Whelan) It's seen as a direct intervention by God in the natural world because it's delivered by a blight.

And you might then say that this is a judgment of God on these papist, potato-eating Irish.

So the worst thing you can do is to prevent God's will taking place by intervening too much.

(Whelan) It's the combination of that providentialism, of that laissez-faire, or as we would now say neoliberal economics, and early proto-racial thinking.

Remember, everybody in the 19th century world was a racist.

And it's that trifecta of racism, providentialism, laissez-faire economics which creates the real tragedy of the Famine.

(solemn music) ♪ (Mac Suibhne) On Friday, 22nd January, 1847, Dr. Daniel Donovan, late one evening, opened the door of his house to find a woman standing there.

She was emaciated, she was in fever.

("Dr. Daniel Donovan") It was as if the grave had at that moment vomited her forth.

♪ (narrator) Mrs. Keating has come to seek help from Dr. Donovan, but the doctor fears she will endanger his children's health and offers her cash to leave.

("Mrs. Keating") I don't want this.

My child is dead for over a week and I need somebody to come and bury him.

(Mac Suibhne) The neighbors wouldn't help to bury the child, and that she was afraid that the pigs would eat her child.

And the doctor went out to the house which he described as being like a sewer.

("Dr. Daniel Donovan") On the ground lay two children, and in the ditch in front of the door was a coffin containing the putrid body of a dead boy of seven years old.

There was something so awe-inspiring in this specter-looking woman that I yielded to her entreaties.

The coffin was purchased.

(Mac Suibhne) And in all, he buried three of her children, and he then buried herself.

♪ (stylus scratching) ♪ (narrator) By 1847, every corner of the island is haunted by death.

The south and west suffer most, but Ireland's east and north also count hundreds of thousands of people dead.

♪ ("Erne Packet") In Garvary Wood, hundreds of corpses are buried, and their relatives too weak to carry them to the graveyard.

♪ The idea comes down to us is that Ulster was relatively untouched by the Famine.

The actual mortality rate in Ulster is significant.

(Gray) There are thousands of famine-related deaths in Belfast and the surrounding towns.

Lurgan, for example, has a massive outbreak of typhus fever.

It's one of the stopping points for people coming from the west hoping to get to Belfast to get relief or to get a boat to get off the island.

(narrator) Evictions become a new plague as families who can no longer pay rent or work are forced from their homes.

Refugees crowd into slums in the towns and cities.

Society begins to collapse.

♪ (Reilly) You can see this mass body of people moving and that brings its own tensions.

People are fearful of the disease being carried.

Hunger drives them to desperation, and you read accounts of robberies, murders that are committed by people as they move along the way.

("Edward Jones") The country is in a state of anarchy.

The industrious feel uneasy for the safety of their property.

Cattle and sheep being carried away.

Petty robberies committed on almost every road.

♪ (Ó Gráda) Self-preservation, the urge to live, causes people to maybe leave their spouses, reject their children, rob from their neighbors, steal, and in extremis, you know, fight or maybe kill people for food.

♪ ("Rev.

Francis Webb") There are reports from Curragh of half-buried bodies, of a mother and children eaten by dogs, and bodies of people who had died a fortnight previously left for weeks where they expired.

Are we really living in a portion of the United Kingdom?

♪ (whirring) (Mark-FitzGerald) The Famine, it actually coincides with the explosion of the mass media in the 19th century.

Because you have the emergence and really the invention of illustrated journalism, at this exact point in the 19th century, the Irish Famine becomes one of the first sort of visually mediated catastrophes.

(piano music) (narrator) Media reports prompted donations from around the world in 1846 and '47.

From Irish America, shipments of food and supplies worth well over $1 million are sent.

♪ In England, the banker Lionel de Rothschild helps raise 400,000 pounds through the British Relief Association, while Queen Victoria's appeal to the British public raises 170,000 pounds.

The Tsar of Russia, Sultan Abdülmecid of Turkey, and British officers in Calcutta also contribute generously.

And from America, despite their own poverty, the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations send $800.

♪ Pope Pius IX issues a rare papal encyclical calling on Catholics everywhere to help the Irish.

♪ ♪ (narrator) French people donate more than 50,000 pounds to the cause of the Irish poor.

♪ ♪ (dark music) (narrator) But despite their scale, the philanthropic donations will never be enough to feed Ireland's hungry millions for long.

Now that the world is watching, Britain knows it must be seen to do more to help.

Chancellor for the Exchequer Charles Wood, however, is reluctant to allocate any more British taxpayers' money to Irish famine relief.

(Gallagher) There is a financial crisis which begins through the collapse of the railway bubble.

And in 1847, two successive banking crises happen within Britain that is occupying a lot of the attention of the government and of Parliament.

The only way it can continue funding Irish relief is to raise taxes within Britain.

And of course, this is a very unpopular move amongst the public.

They don't want to be funding Irish relief.

♪ (narrator) Charles Wood decrees that no further British taxpayers' money is to be spent on the Irish.

(melancholy music) The government also announces a change in policy.

The public works are to close.

Instead, hundreds of soup kitchens will be open throughout the island in which the poor will be fed for free.

The cost of the kitchens is to be covered by a loan from the British Exchequer and new higher rates on Ireland's landholders, rates that already indebted landlords barely can afford to pay.

(Kelly) Landlords aren't able to collect rent.

They're not in a position themselves to be able to pay the rates.

Many of them were debt-ridden to an extreme.

(soft music) (Gray) The problem with the soup kitchen regime is it takes ages to set it up.

So there are three months in which there's virtually no government relief.

And mortality rises because they've nowhere to turn.

(eerie music) ♪ (narrator) The soup kitchens open in June 1847.

The impressive and unprecedented logistical operation feeds three million people every day with a cheap stirabout of maize, rice, and oats.

(Smyth) The greatest achievement of British policy and Irish participation are the soup kitchens.

And it wasn't expensive.

The public works before them had cost over five million.

The total cost for the soup kitchens was 1.75 million.

(solemn music) (narrator) Summer 1847 brings more relief.

The blight does not return.

But few potatoes have been planted and so the harvest is of no use.

Without the free soup, the poor would starve.

♪ And then they declared the Famine over.

("Charles Trevelyan") The Famine is over and no further financial aid can be justified.

♪ (Gray) Why does he say that?

I think it's because it's tied into this idea the Famine was a divine intervention.

The blight was the agent of divine providence to force Ireland to change itself.

And if the blight isn't there in the summer of 1847, Trevelyan is using that to close down the argument that there is a continuing famine crisis.

He is wrong, he's absolutely wrong.

(somber music) (narrator) The Famine is far from over.

Even so, the government closes the soup kitchens, leaving four million people with no source of food.

♪ (Crowley) That was a callous decision because so many will die on the basis of that decision.

(Whelan) The British essentially abandon people to starvation.

Had they the capacity to do it?

Yes.

Had they the money to do it?

Yes.

Had they the will to do it?

No, because at the highest level of government, there was that sense that this ultimately wasn't their problem.

♪ (Gallagher) This then becomes the year of Black '47 because these policy decisions lead to an increase in fatality, an increase in the worsening effects of the Famine itself.

(narrator) Britain's decision brings death to Ireland on an unprecedented scale.

The Famine worsens.

Half a million people are evicted from their homes.

A million are forced to beg entry to the workhouses.

♪ Two million leave to seek sanctuary far from home.

♪ After Black '47, Ireland can never be the same.

♪ (singing in native language) ♪ (bright music)