It was obvious to outsiders that the root of Ireland’s misery was what de Beaumont characterized as a “bad aristocracy”—the monopolization of land by a small élite that had no cultural or religious affinity with its tenantry and little sense of obligation to develop sustainable agriculture. But an English ruling class in which many leading politicians were themselves owners of vast estates in Ireland was unable to acknowledge this inconvenient truth. Who, if not the landlord system, could be to blame? It must be the Irish poor themselves. As Scanlan puts it, “Intensive monoculture made Irish potatoes vulnerable to blight. The solutions proposed to mitigate famine were themselves the product of a kind of intellectual and political monoculture. Solutions were unimaginable outside the market that fuelled the crisis to begin with.”
In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who did so had clearly chosen the easy life. “Ireland, through this lens,” Scanlan writes, “was a kind of living fossil within the United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.” Or, as William Carleton, the first major writer in the English language to have sprung from the Irish Catholic peasantry, put it with withering sarcasm, the Irish poor had not learned “to starve in an enlightened manner”: “Political economy had not then taught the people how to be poor upon the most scientific principles.”
Civilized people ate meat—England’s unofficial national anthem was “The Roast Beef of Old England.” The desire to consume animal flesh stimulated effort and enterprise. Thus, the destruction of the potato crop, however terrible and regrettable its short-term effects, would teach the Irish to crave meat instead and become proper capitalist wage earners so that they could afford to buy it. “When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi,” wrote the editors of the London Times, “they must become carnivorous.” Let them, as Marie Antoinette did not say, eat steak.
This arrant nonsense obscured the reality that the Irish had no particular love of potatoes. Their historically varied diet, based on oats, milk, and butter, had been reduced by economic oppression to one tuber. Nor were they reluctant to work for wages. Many travelled long distances to earn money as seasonal migrant laborers on farms in England and Scotland, and Irish immigrants were integrating themselves into the capitalist money economy in the mills of Massachusetts and the factories of New York.