Irish Potato Famine Part Three- Exporting a Surplus of Sadness

This week we continue our series on the Irish Potato Famine. We are really getting into the thick of it. This episode starts in 1846, when the harsh reality of a second year with so much crop failure catches up to everyone. 

The new prime minister John Russell has a tough time filling his predecessor's shoes and Trevelyan is still there, mailing people books about scarcity and talking about the plans in generalities while ignoring true human suffering. The UK government continued to believe they didn't want to create a dependency on government, while the Irish struggled to simply stay alive.

The public works programs were changed and many less men were hired, while thousands of other people put aside their pride and went to the workhouses in droves. Mass famine is upon a huge population in Ireland, and winter is ushered in with a whole week of snow. 

It's getting bleak here folks, but I think we're all learning a lot!

Sources: The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Don't be ashamed if you get confused when you talk to your friends or you watch the news. They try to tell you where it all went wrong. Now you don't need to argue, you just sing this song. Rich people get stacking the dick. Rich people with big fat chicks. Rich people get the heaven. Rich people in the song.

SPEAKER_06 0:35

Hi everybody, and welcome to Yeet the Rich. I am Emily Walsh, and I'm here with my co-host, as always, Danny Moss.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

How do you do there, partner?

SPEAKER_06 0:44

Didn't care. That was I guess I didn't not like it, but how how do you do that?

SPEAKER_02 0:49

I was just thinking about, you know, Woody, because we got a little Woody doll for for Frankie's. Toy Story, yeah. Toy Story. Yeah, that's what that is. Oh, yeah, not yes, the the the from Toy Story. From Toy Story. There's a snake in my boots. That's right.

SPEAKER_06 1:02

All right. And this is uh okay, we gotta do baby and beverage.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Yeah, okay. Uh baby's asleep. Coffee.

SPEAKER_06 1:10

We've had so many coffees.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Yeah, not enough, somehow, still. I've had a lot.

SPEAKER_06 1:15

Three coffees and a Coke Zero.

SPEAKER_02 1:17

And they we we're not talking, they're not all just donkey's coffees. They we were high octane, maybe and now whiskey.

SPEAKER_06 1:23

It's been a day. Yeah. It's been a day. I have poison ivy. That's fine. Sick. Yeah. I didn't know that adults, I mean, obviously, anybody can get. I feel like an 11-year-old because I have a sunburn and poison ivy for the first time since maybe like sunburn, like I guess my 20s, but like I'm pretty diligent.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

We went hard this weekend.

SPEAKER_06 1:41

Yeah, we lived it up and uh great weekend. Frankie loves the beach. Yeah. Her job is beach.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

She is beach, Frankie. She is beach.

SPEAKER_06 1:48

Uh she makes me want to move to the beach, honestly. She loves it so much. And uh yeah. And it's we're doing whiskey because it's just super long weekend, a long day.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

I think I'm gonna need a bracing whiskey for this episode. This one's gonna be pretty soon. You know, if it if you're inclined, grab yourself a whiskey.

SPEAKER_06 2:08

Yeah, but before we get into part three of the uh Irish Potato Famine, aka Potato Genocide, uh one we're gonna do a couple fun facts about Ireland. Oh, okay, great. To kind of just be in a better mood.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

Yeah, no, I think that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_06 2:23

So uh there's an Irish festival where a wild goat is made king for three days.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Yay! It's pretty fun. Is it in a specific town or like the whole uh you know, country? Not the whole country, no.

SPEAKER_06 2:34

It's uh it's called Puck Fair, and it's one of the long it is said to be the longest running festival. Got it.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

I'll uh like Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream.

SPEAKER_06 2:42

I don't know. I'm just googling fun facts. Fair. So uh I think it's a goat.

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Puck was a uh maybe it was a fairy.

SPEAKER_06 2:50

He was a well no, he was in Midsummer, but if it's the longest running one of the longest running festivals, maybe it precedes Shakespeare.

SPEAKER_02 2:56

Yeah, so Shakespeare might have might have uh because I bet this goat is like a trickster goat of some sort.

SPEAKER_06 3:02

Well, every August, a goat is caught from the Carey Mountains and placed in a cage in the village of Kilgorin, which I don't know why you're doing that to your king. No. But he's not yet king, so well he's crowned king, and there's three days of festivals in the town, and then they bring him safely back up to the mountains.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Okay, good. I was gonna say they didn't eat him after making him king, right? Because that'd be really rough.

SPEAKER_06 3:21

That would be but also like the Irish people probably hate the monarchies, so yeah, which maybe they're like, this is an upgrade.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Yeah. Which also, fun fact, this is not an Irish fact, but we went to the Faroe Islands, which is technically part of Denmark. Denmark. Uh they're semi-autonomous, mostly autonomous at this point. Uh, but in order to geo map, you know, for like Google Maps, uh, they basically strapped a one of those like Google Maps GoPros on the back of a sheep and let it walk around the island. Uh and that island, those islands have more sheep than people.

SPEAKER_05 3:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Uh there's a lot of puffins there. We stayed on one with more puffins than people. They were in the National Geographic one time ten years ago, and then their tourism boomed.

SPEAKER_06 4:03

Basically, white girls on the internet found out about it, and we were like, let's go. Yeah. And we did go. We did go. And it was great, but also they did not know how to make maps or trails or uh after 8 p.m. But we did have a good time.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

We did have to, you know, uh trespass through a couple of sheepfields.

SPEAKER_06 4:21

Yeah, and we camped and Danny got attacked by a goose. But that's a story for another time. Yes, but we gotta get we gotta get moving. Yeah, let's get on in it. We got a lot of depressing facts to talk about. So, again, the source for these episodes are The Graves Are Walking, The Great Famine, and The Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna do a really quick because we gotta keep moving, and presumably you guys have listened to part one and two.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Presumably.

SPEAKER_06 4:47

Presumably, but uh, welcome. Stuff is bad. It's the summer between potato harvests, so they've had one tough year. They have lost people, but it's not uh, you know, full of things.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

They were like, oh boy, that was rough. Good thing it's over.

SPEAKER_06 5:03

Good thing it's over. This year's potato should be fine.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

Yeah. Um did we do anything to change the potatoes? No, no, we did not.

SPEAKER_06 5:10

But the British kept claiming that the Irish were just bad people, so that's why they're dying, which is sick. Yeah, really cool.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Pretty cool, pretty cool.

SPEAKER_06 5:17

But okay, so for the past two episodes. Goat King would never do that to the show. Goat King would never do that. For the past two episodes, which kind of makes me believe this might be a five-parter. For the past two episodes, we've been talking about one year. Uh you remember everything haunting I said to you?

SPEAKER_03 5:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 5:31

How many percentage-wise, how many potatoes do you think they lost in the year we've already spoken about?

SPEAKER_02 5:38

Um 45%.

SPEAKER_06 5:43

Only 25%.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

No, no. It's about I get a whole lot. Well, it's about again. I feel like uh because they needed potatoes to feed so many families, I feel like they were also not, there was not a lot of potato surplus. Uh and so like this is this is about to get really weak. Weak.

SPEAKER_06 6:08

Really bad. So um, you know, it's we're uh I got nothing. Potato no. Potato no. Potato no. Our child now goes, ah, ah, and that's how I feel right now.

SPEAKER_05 6:22

Ah it's bad.

SPEAKER_06 6:23

So it is summer uh of 1846 in Ireland, and in the month of July, there were plenty of social diversions uh for the medium to wealthy um to distract them from the latest crop reports. They were going to hornicultural exhibition exhibitions, they were going to county fairs, there was cock finding in country cork, they were all bopping around.

SPEAKER_02 6:46

Just guys, the potatoes are dying. Yeah. Get out the roosters, get out the roosters.

SPEAKER_06 6:50

And everybody who is like above the starvation line, and maybe those people as well, but I don't know the how many jokes they're making.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 6:58

Kind of had the same joke that they thought was very funny, where somebody, the paraphrasing, because I I'm not gonna do an Irish accent because I think I'd be really bad at it. Um, is they're like, hey, what's your belief? And he's like, I have the same belief as my landlord, and they're like, Well, what's that? And he's like, I haven't uh paid rent in five and a half years, and she believes I never will, and I believe that too.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

Yeah, that's fair. Pretty good joke. That's a pretty good joke. Maybe uh you could do the next one in a Boston accent since you feel pretty comfortable. Fucking Boston kid.

SPEAKER_06 7:26

You could do that all day. Um, but not even that well. I just have certain words. But anyway, I digress. Uh the people who were suffering didn't really need distractions because they were literally only focused on trying to stay alive. Sure. And they were consumed with the rising food prices and the empty government depots. The depots are running out of corn. Reports were coming in from hundreds of localities that they were a few days away from thousands being launched into the endless abyss of an awful eternity.

SPEAKER_03 7:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_06 7:55

And again, I say, if you could monetize haunting phrases, they would be fine. If you could monetize being so upsetting that you make me want to crawl into a cave, they would be they'd be doing great.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Kill it. If you if you could eat sadness, if you could if you could eat sadness, they would be full.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

They'd be feasting. Oof.

SPEAKER_06 8:15

Uh so in Skibbirdine they said, I defy anyone living to exaggerate the misery of the people. It is impossible. So it's bad. In the middle of July, a 10 to 12 acre man, one of those medium types of people, someone who would have been respected, lived in a cottage instead of a cabin, paid their rent, and their family, you know, did okay. These people were walking 12 miles to another depot to, you know, one of these men, he he walked 12 miles with a letter from his local priest saying he was on the verge of famine. And when he came in, they said they could see the skin hanging off his body like an oversized coat. And he was like, I I just am starving. They're like, Why did you walk 12 miles then? And he's like, Because I couldn't like admit. Yeah, there was nothing to do. Yeah. Well, they didn't go in their local places a lot of times.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Oh, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 9:07

There were many reports coming out that summer about the blight continuing, but by late July, tens of thousands of infected but healthy looking potatoes.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

You've got uh what is it, the um Schrdinger's potato? No, no, no, no. The the what is it called with COVID when they they asymptomatic. You've got a bunch of asymptomatic potatoes. Asymptomatic potatoes causing a real problem.

SPEAKER_06 9:31

Yeah, they are being sold to merchants who resold them to shoppers who watched them turn black in the boiling pot. So it's pretty bad. Constabulary officers were in the fields monitoring the crops, and out of the 8,000-man force, there were almost 2,000 that were over six feet tall, which I think is wild. And they all wore a leather harness in their training so that they had perfect posture. So these constabulary officers were spotted very easily.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

And they just found all the six-foot-tall men and were like, put the give them a mustache and get them out in the fields.

SPEAKER_06 10:02

Get them out in those fields.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

I don't know if their cops have mustaches, but it'd be funny.

SPEAKER_06 10:06

Yeah. The the Bobbies. Yeah. The Bobbies have mustaches in cartoons.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Yeah, I would think so, right?

SPEAKER_06 10:11

I would think so. This year the pattern had changed, and while the year before they could have a ruined field and then a pristine field right next to that, now it was hard to find any field without spotted leaves. And unless they got some better weather before October, they were going to have a second major crop failure.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Whatever happened to the science people being like, put copper sprinkles.

SPEAKER_06 10:32

It takes too long. They they put the copper in the wrong place, they put smoke. It takes a while. Yeah, I gotta take a while. And also a lot of people that have the resources to like do scientific testing were kind of like, maybe it'll just be one year. Like they all are kind of right now living in this bubble of like, well, we got through it, everybody. Yeah, we're pat each other on the back here.

SPEAKER_02 10:49

Sorry, I got a rooster I gotta bet on real quick.

SPEAKER_06 10:52

I gotta go. I'm not working this summer. The Europeans, they take like 12 weeks off a year. Um for the spring, weather remained somewhat temperate, but then in July, the skies had opened up and there were deep pools of water in the meadows, gravel and mud washing through the potato fields, and billions of fungal spores were traveling through that's how it travels. So the the washouts are just making it traveling faster. It's the fields in July. Reports were worrying about this year's crop. They're finally starting to pay attention. And in 72 to roughly 96 hours of July, the better part of that year's crop was already gone. Oh, and not just the early crop. So the early crop is like the first one that goes to merchants, and then the rain churned up the loose soil and got underground to the quote grand crop, which is what fed peasants from October to May.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Okay, so the the potato, because the potato grows down, makes a bunch of potatoes, but keeps growing down, makes a bunch more potatoes. Yeah. They harvest the top layer of potatoes and sell them, and then the rest of it is what it's like.

SPEAKER_06 12:00

They harvest to live on, yeah, and those are done.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

The grand crop.

SPEAKER_06 12:04

People were scraping desperately to try to unearth potatoes, finding nothing useful, and a relief official in Cork found a cabin with two naked children on a pile of stones, a malnourished woman with them, and a newly dead infant who had starved because its mother had no milk. Things were much, much worse. The potatoes were black and rotting, and the livestock wouldn't even eat them, and people were starting to warn that violence could come if they were pressed that much more by hunger.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_06 12:35

Count Dracula was written in 1897 by a Dubliner.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

Oh. Fun fact. Wow, he's from Dublin. He's from Dublin. Huh. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 12:46

It's kind of bleak. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 12:48

I thought it I just went to the next. I haven't pre-read these fun facts. They're coming in hot.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 12:54

So Pinecoffin. Do you remember him?

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Yeah. That's where Dracula might hang out.

SPEAKER_06 12:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

You're like, no, thank you. No, thank you to that.

SPEAKER_06 13:04

Well, he's also part of the relief and it's not going well, and he's very we don't like Pine Coffin. No. And also his name's Pinecoffin.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Hard to respect a man named Pinecoffin.

SPEAKER_06 13:15

And he also is like already with bad takes. He's like, that awesome job we did last year is already being ruined. And you're like, you didn't do an awesome job.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

You kind of did nothing. Yeah. So by teach people about dried hash browns.

SPEAKER_06 13:27

So you remember how I said 25% of last crop was gone? And how they ate from October to May on potatoes?

SPEAKER_04 13:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 13:35

By August 18th, 75% of the entire harvest was already gone.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Oh and the stores are empty. Yep. And what's left in the stores are rotting.

SPEAKER_06 13:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Dope. Dope. Dope.

SPEAKER_06 13:50

Trevelyan, who we also don't like, had ordered in July to close the public works program and the food depots by August 15th. Ruth and others thought this was nuts, and that even closing the sites would take time because the roads really would be going nowhere. Because that was part of the all the public works jobs. We're kind of just not doing a whole lot of public work. And they many thought that closing these would essentially be committing to general starvation. Like if we do these last measures, this is committing to the idea that everyone is going to starve. But Trevelyan wanted to, he didn't want to stop providing relief, but he wanted to restructure the relief program. And he had he was operating, even though 75% had already died, he was operating under the estimation made by the Scientific Commission that it would be a 50% crop failure. And Peel had done all this big work in 19 in 1845 for what turned out to be a 25% crop failure. So he really wanted to restructure it and get a better idea of the data before doing any action. Well, I can almost sort of appreciate that. You can't stop helping to help better when people are dying.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Yeah. Yeah, especially because it's it's moving fast. This hunger is now because it was already bad. You've used up whatever stores that everyone had in their bodies to hold on. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_06 15:06

There's no fat, there's no poters, there's no nothing.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

No.

SPEAKER_06 15:09

And he also wanted to make it a more efficient system and get rid of possible fraud and abuse, which again you can't focus on right now, my guy.

SPEAKER_02 15:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it yes.

SPEAKER_06 15:18

Peel had also he had meant to buy 100,000 pounds of American corn, and it ended up being 185,000 pounds, and that did hurt the food prices that were on the market. So that is a tricky thing because you want the market to succeed, but you also need to feed these people. And politicians really wanted the programs to come to an end because they didn't want to teach reliance on government, which we've talked about a lot.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

You know, they're moralizing nonsense. Yeah, let alone that like the idea that you're in a a fully industrialized like world and country, uh, and you have all of the ability to solve this starvation that is not that far away from you. It's not like across the world. You're witnessing it. It's right there, and you didn't do that, so that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_06 16:03

Yeah. So in most places, the deadline of closing these things on August 15th did hold people close them. But towards the end of August, several hundred people marked on Westport in Mayo went to the Westport house and demanded Lord Slego for help, and he kind of brushed them aside and told them to put their faith in good intentions. This interaction did resolve itself peacefully, but it would not be peaceful for long.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

No.

SPEAKER_06 16:27

Meanwhile, Old Ireland, our friend O'Connell, who's like this politician speaker guy, and the repeal association, the political organizations in Ireland, were fighting with each other and not preparing for the crisis, which is not helpful.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

No.

SPEAKER_06 16:41

Young Ireland, the group of younger men that were really fired up that were like, maybe violence is okay, because his whole the older O'Connell was like never violence, and they were like, but just a little violence.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Just a little as a treat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 16:54

Yeah. They were well-born Protestant, some were educated in the UK, and they had a very idealistic vision of Irish nationhood, nationhood that leaned on a German romanticism. Old Ireland were Irish Catholic and old-fashioned, so they're clashing for sure. And in the years leading up to this crisis, they had had big disagreements over education reform, federalism, and the use of violence. And now they're fighting about the repeal of the Anglo-Irish Union. Young Ireland wanted the restoration of Irish Irish nationhood to be holy and invalid. They were like, this is what we need. It is sacred. We're not doing any compromises. We're not like our focus is to be our own nation. And O'Connell, who was from the older group, was the father of that movement, but he was not like by any means necessary. He wasn't as I I think from just this brief reading, I'm not a historian on this at all or on anything, but I my feeling is that he just had the wisdom to know that sometimes you need to compromise, and like they were like all or nothing, yeah, family-less like men who were like, who cares? Let's go die for our deals. And he was like, but what if we just did it?

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 18:05

But in the 1830s, the liberator, our friend O'Connell, uh-huh, made a temporary and unofficial alliance with the Whig Party. But in 1946, when he was leaving, seen leaving the home of the future Prime Minister Russell, who was a Whig, Smith O'Brien and his lieutenant Mager, who were both young Ireland people, were worried that he was out there making a deal. The nation, which was the newspaper of Young Ireland, said in all caps, never trust a Whig. And on June 13th, O'Connell countered that. He wrote to the Repeal Association in an open letter and mocked Young Ireland for their dissension, hoping that that would calm things down. I don't know why he thought being like, let me poke fun at them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they'll shut up. Um, but that did not work. And Mager, one of the lieutenants, responded by saying that the Whig Alliance was writing fool upon the tombstone of every Irish patriot. An associate of the younger men said, There are times when the issue must be decided by a man's blood.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Oh, God. Yeah. So things are kicking up. So they're like, like maybe a little violence is like, you know what? Violence. Did you say violins? No. No. Violence. Violence.

SPEAKER_06 19:16

They also were like, their argument was, would a George Washington sign? Okay, oh, sorry, I skipped ahead. So on July 15th, they had a meeting, and the olds tried to get the Young to sign a nonviolence pledge.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 19:29

And the young guys were like, would George Washington sign a nonviolence pledge?

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Probably not.

SPEAKER_06 19:34

And apparently they all were big fans of George Washington, so they did not sign it. And they tabled the issue for a few weeks later to a general meeting at the end of the month. At that meeting, O'Brien, who was one of the major leaders of the Youngs, kind of danced around what he was saying, kind of was like politely like, maybe I'll be violent, but he wasn't like committing to anything. And um, but the younger 22-year-old Maker started reasonably, but then quickly ramped up and called the sword a sacred weapon and then like really insisted on violence. And O'Connell told him to sit down and shut up. But when the other young men defended him, they all stormed out. So the young guys all stormed out of this general meeting.

SPEAKER_05 20:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 20:14

O'Connell got what he wanted when these young men left, but he was taking a risk because if his alliance with Russell and the Whigs didn't work out, then everyone would say that he had been duped and that he was splitting up their most important domestic political organization. So he is basically risking. He's blowing it up because he doesn't like the way they do things. So we'll talk about that more later, but that's the state of Irish politics.

SPEAKER_03 20:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 20:37

And John Russell, who is now the prime minister, when he was young, his brother told him that he should try to help Ireland if he wanted to make a mark on the world, because quote, the gratitude of the millions and the applause of the world would attend the man who would rescue that poor country. So he decided on justice for Ireland and he planned to modernize it. He wanted to reform education, improve tenant landlord relations in the treatment of the poor, but he was not a particularly charismatic or powerful speaker. And Peel had been. So a lot of people would just compare him to him. There were a lot of like mean political cartoons where he's like wearing Peel's big suit and they're like, it's never gonna fit.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Like just didn't sure classic.

SPEAKER_06 21:18

Classic. And he took office in July 1846 when things are like hitting every shit is hitting everything.

SPEAKER_02 21:25

Guys, I really want to try to do like educational reform. And then uh like, oh, unfortunately, the entire you know, country's gonna be a couple of things.

SPEAKER_06 21:33

Schools are closed, yeah, due to lack of aliveness.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That'll happen.

SPEAKER_06 21:40

There were only three Irish men in his cabinet, and they didn't want to put more financial pressure on the Irish landloan, landowner, because they thought if they had to pay more, they would also end up in the poor house. So they did not like the idea of taking on because again, if we um the English have this idea that the middle class and the upper class should. Help pay their poor, like help the poor, but the Irish don't want to do that.

SPEAKER_04 22:03

We're not into that.

SPEAKER_06 22:04

The cabinet, other than the three Irish, also had three moralists, the people who thought that they shouldn't help and were more focused on remaking the Irish characters. So there's three Irish landlorders and there's three moralists. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Moralists I do not like. Not a fan. Not a fan.

SPEAKER_06 22:20

One of those was a guy named Charles Wood, who was the new Chancellor of the Execure. I don't know what that is. I apologize. He's in the cabinet. Exchequer?

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Uh yeah. Exchequer, I think. Are you No, no, I think that's what he was. I believe you, I guess. Yeah. I don't know what it means, but I think it's exchequer.

SPEAKER_06 22:37

Great.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Uh I've heard it in an audiobook once. Got it.

SPEAKER_06 22:41

Well, Charles Wood is a big fan of Trevelyan, and he wrote him like an admirer's note. So that's not a good sign.

SPEAKER_04 22:47

No.

SPEAKER_06 22:48

Um public opinion also wasn't really super high about the Irish people in before Brits. Brits are not big fans of the Irish right now because in 10 months they had sent 800,000 pounds, but it didn't avoid famine and did or it but Well, they spent it all on pamphlets. Yes. But the question was did that money stop the famine, or was there no famine because it wasn't actually that bad? Uh is the sentiment in the UK now. They're like, but what if wait, why did we it seem like they're fine.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

Not on the precipice of doom.

SPEAKER_06 23:24

And also, we've talked about this before, but at this point, the Irish are so dependent on the potato, but I don't know that everyone's like fully grasping that because they're the Brits are bringing up the fact that the Dutch had lost 75% of their potatoes. Belgium, 87%, Ireland only about 25%.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Yeah, but no other country is as reliant on the potato, it seems like.

SPEAKER_06 23:44

And now people recall seeing maybe a lazy couple of public workers or mothers lie about how many kids they had to get more corn. So they're starting to come up with these anecdotes, which may or may not be true about the Irish.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

But also, like everybody loves to like pick on a little f fraud or little moments of uh like cheating the system. But even if it is like a thing that is happening, which is again, it's very hard to prove that it is, it's usually like uh 2%, 1% of the overall like amount of money that was spent. So you're not trying to like solve that one thing, even if you were able to solve it somehow. Putting a band-aid on a bullet wound, like there's much bigger problems. Stop focusing on this.

SPEAKER_06 24:25

And uh at this point, the first time the O'Connell Russell Alliance is tested, the politician in the party, it failed. Russell was like, I don't really think we need to help more. And O'Connell left that meeting depressed, and on his yearly trip to his family estate in Kerry, he said that he felt something fundamentally break inside of him. And he returned to Dublin after this, a dying man.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

Oof, wow. Yeah, it's tough. Broke his heart. He blew up his whole like opposition party. Yeah. Uh he was, you know, uh teamed up with this guy who was gonna be in power, and that guy was a wet sock.

SPEAKER_06 25:02

Yeah, basically.

SPEAKER_02 25:03

That's a tough, that's a tough road. And now he's gonna just die of sadness.

SPEAKER_06 25:07

Die of old Irish sadness.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Old Irish sadness. But if only sadness, if only you could eat sadness.

SPEAKER_06 25:12

He'd be full. Yeah. He'd be stuffed. In August, reports started saying that the suffering was going to be much worse this year. Spoiler alert. That was a little waste of paper printing that. We know it. And across Europe, people are losing potatoes like crazy. They've lost 60%, 67% in the Scottish Highlands, 43% in Belgium, 50% in Denmark. And so, with that fear, the London corn market bid up the price of a quarter, which is 480 pounds of wheat by almost 50% from the year before. In Dublin, a stone of potatoes was now 15 pence, which was three pence two years before. So prices are crazy different.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

Yeah, how um they deal in with like wild inflation and other stuff like that? Because it feels like money, their their like monetary system is expensive.

SPEAKER_06 25:59

Well, they don't really have money as the problem. That's right. Which so they're the people who are doing a lot of people were abandoning working on the farms at all. And we're gonna talk about this later because the farmers used to pay them in potato ground and they don't want potato ground. Right. So they're trying to get on public works to get wages to buy this corn.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

To build more roads to nowhere.

SPEAKER_06 26:18

To build more roads to nowhere. But what they're concerned about is getting a cash wage, which they've never gotten before, right? But they need it in order to live now, all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

All of a sudden. In kind of the worst time in history to to uh you know start a new financial system.

SPEAKER_06 26:31

Yeah. They calculated that they would need one and a half million pounds of maize to get through the year, and that might not even exist, let alone be available. Like that amount of food might not be on the earth. And if they got it, the market would still be able to charge famine prices, like they uh the regular people, etc. And Lord John Russell, the current prime minister, is really living in Peel's shadow. In August, he addressed the House of Commons reading three different letters expressing from different people in Ireland that the potato was dying off much more than before. But he didn't think that the Brits should bear the cost for a second year. So beside the 50,000 pounds he set aside, he wanted to pass the cost onto the Irish gentry, creating a targeted tax called the labor rate, which quote fell on persons possessed of property in a distressed district.

SPEAKER_02 27:19

Yeah, I'm sure they're gonna love that.

SPEAKER_06 27:21

They're gonna love that. The treasury would loan money for public works, but it used to be that if you got ten thousand dollars for a road, you'd get to only pay five back. They had some partial grants for land uh for road buildings. Sure. But now the loans would have to be paid in full at 3.5% interest, which did not exist before either. So much less appealing.

SPEAKER_04 27:42

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 27:42

By now, the gentry's participation was no longer voluntary either. Last year they had kind of been like, hey guys, what if you helped?

SPEAKER_02 27:49

And they didn't, and then yeah, so now they're like, hey, sorry. Yeah, last year you could have you could have done better last year.

SPEAKER_06 27:56

You didn't so this year you gotta do it no choice. No choice. Do it, no choice. That's the sentence.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 28:03

Three coffees, one whiskey. Full of ivy, covered in boys' ivy. Dublin Castle could now compel them to help. It also reduced the government corn program from a national program to a regional operation. Not going to help.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

No problem.

SPEAKER_06 28:22

Peel endorsed this plan from afar because he wasn't responsible for Ireland anymore, and he was more worried about the moral debasement of helping rather than sampling lives. A second year would stamp a permanency on a relief. So they're all like, if we do this again, they're gonna think we're gonna do those every time we're almost dying.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 28:41

We helped you already. That's like helping somebody get a splinter out, and then they break both their legs, and you're like, sorry, I tell truth that's I'm tapped out of goodwill.

SPEAKER_02 28:50

If I did if I helped you with this. Yeah, but I said you might be able to do that. Tomorrow, what are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_06 28:57

So Wood and Trevelyan collabed on a new non-helpful plan, which would create a new public works pay structure based on productivity. Because that's the other thing, is they were getting a day's wages, whether or not they broke rocks, so they all kind of just hung out and tried to save their energy. Yep. The new labor rate. Because they were starving to death. Because they were starving to death, literally starving to death. Uh, the new labor rate, the tax, would foster a moral responsibility in the middle class that didn't normally want to help. The government would only interfere with the West, where it was much worse, maintaining the depot system there. But in the East, they would have to keep the corn to a free market. So they they could buy corn, but the cost would be determined by the merchants. But to encourage private trade, they would have to keep the depots closed until after Christmas and when reopening, charge the market price, not at cost. So last year they charged at cost. Okay. Now they're gonna charge the market rate. So whatever the lowest merchant cost is, the depot's gonna charge them that. London would no longer be able to control the market prices from London in Ireland, which is what they were doing when they sold at cost. Right. Other people had to keep their cost low to compete.

SPEAKER_01 30:04

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_06 30:05

But now they're gonna say, Oh, you guys think it's 15 pounds? Great, let's charge 15 pounds.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_06 30:10

Within weeks, three-quarters loss, 75% of potato loss went to five-sixths and then to six sevenths.

SPEAKER_04 30:17

Oh.

SPEAKER_06 30:17

And white, while potatoes could still be found in nice hotels, everyone else is suffering. A priest in Cork wrote to the relief commission talking about how they were starving and waiting for death. The peasantry look forward not merely to distress and want, but to fem famine and annihilation with an appearance of calm resignation. Rather to be wondered at than described. They are like the old sailor who, believing destruction inevitable, sits silently over the magazine, awaiting the blowing up of the ship as she burns.

unknown 30:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_06 30:50

Again, dark as hell.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

Bleak.

SPEAKER_06 30:53

So bleak. So bleak. But poetic. It makes me want to. I mean, it would be bad for me, but it makes me want to like read a bunch of Irish poetry.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

Yeah, beware. I'm all madness lies there.

SPEAKER_06 31:06

I don't think I can do that. I don't think it's good for me.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

A feast of feast of sadness. A feast.

SPEAKER_06 31:10

I don't need any more. I'm good. Yeah. While the inspector general of the Coast Guard authorized free cornmeal to some villagers in a mountain range with zero food when he was not supposed to do that, he was scolded by the treasury and told that he hadn't been authorized. So people are the boots on the ground, some of them are like, I can't, you're telling me not to feed these people, but they're literally walking skeletons. Like I'm gonna feed them.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Their skin is a suit. We can't give them food.

SPEAKER_06 31:36

We can't feed them till after Christmas. And it is August right now. And they're like four months from now, we'll give you corn that's expensive.

SPEAKER_02 31:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 31:45

Yay!

SPEAKER_02 31:46

Yay, that's helping.

SPEAKER_06 31:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:47

But at least they won't be morally corrupt.

SPEAKER_06 31:50

Uh because they'll be dead. You can't be morally corrupt after you've passed.

SPEAKER_02 31:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 31:57

On August 28th, the Times printed a list of the latest exports out of Ireland. So you ready for all the food that they do have that they're mailing away? Sat poetry is the main export. One million pounds. Uh 1,616 quarters of Irish oats, 1,929 packages of Irish bacon, 542 boxes of eggs, 5,606 packages of butter, 892 packages of lard, 1,240 of pork, 39 of beef, 170 hampers of hams. Which I imagine is a box of hams.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Yeah, probably.

SPEAKER_06 32:34

178 of malt, 132 live pigs, and 1,488 packages of fresh salmon. So lots of food.

SPEAKER_02 32:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 32:45

But it is leaving.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

It's going away.

SPEAKER_06 32:47

And meanwhile, Roth had 2,100 tons of corn and 240 tons of oatmeal. And even if the free trade could help, which they weren't going to, the food would only last several western counties for a few weeks. Like this is not going to do much for anybody. Ruth requested an emergency 2,000 tons of corn immediately. And Trevelyan approved it if it was brought in from the UK.

SPEAKER_04 33:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 33:12

Unfortunately, the 46 crops of corn were still in the fields in places like the United States and the Ukraine and wouldn't be able to ship until December or January. And they wouldn't be able to get these gigantic amounts from just UK markets. Sorry, the to clarify, the corn doesn't have to be grown in the UK. They have to buy it through Irish or through UK markets. They're like, yeah, you can buy this much more if you're paying British people for it.

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Yeah. As a kind of basically a political move to quote unquote pay back the enhance the yeah.

SPEAKER_06 33:42

There were two or three buyers for every seller. So there are tons of people looking for food in general across Europe. And people were trying to buy corn that was still on boats, like trying to like call dibs on things that are traveling. They were asking for five to six thousand quarters of corn by November. And the purchaser that was working for the depots, Mr. Erickson, could only find about 900 to 1,000 for December. So they want 6,000 in November. Best he's gonna be able to do is 1,000 in December.

SPEAKER_04 34:11

No, yeah. No.

SPEAKER_06 34:14

Yeah. Like I said, it's not gonna be not great. Yeah, it's gonna be bad. It's gonna be very bad. Very, very bad. In Ireland, panic has taken over. And over a week, people had started in Cork City. There was 217 people applying for relief. By Sunday, it was 1,400. So relief is uh or need is is really expanding. And Trevalian knew that he should have approved foreign portraises, purchases of corn by then and lift the ban on other places, but it was already too late. He did lift the ban, but it was kind of already too late because all the purchasers had already called dibs on all this corn.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Right. You know something I just realized? So they're they're really talking about the idea of like the people becoming immorally like uh needy and reliant on government. But we also just talked about a man who was so guilty about the fact that he needed help. Yeah, they had walked 12 miles.

SPEAKER_06 35:08

They don't want to be reliant on the government, yeah. They don't, that's not their goal.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Yeah, they're just dying, they're just dying. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:17

That's it's all insane. Um so in August and September, their purchaser was able to buy 7,600 tons of food. Sounds like a lot, but Ireland needed 1.5 million tons just to live.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Again, this is just bare bones to live minimum.

SPEAKER_06 35:37

In August and September, oh, I just said that. Um, and Irish merchants were exporters, not importers. So even the merchants who are now being tasked with getting more corn, they don't know how to enter the market. They're like, we just sell stuff.

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Yeah, we take it from here and we know how to sell it. Give it away.

SPEAKER_06 35:52

We don't know how to go there and get stuff.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:55

Bids on large purchases were too low and not accepted, but they were too afraid to go too high because they didn't want to change the market cost of food. Famine was at this point inevitable.

SPEAKER_02 36:05

And on September 31st, the cost of food has to be going way up because so many people need food. Because even in other countries that aren't so reliant on potatoes, it is part of their food source. So like they're also what does suck is that I'm sure that like you know, uh I'm not sure Belgium was doing fine because also they were pillaging the Congo, but uh, you know, they were probably buying a lot of the the resources of of food and taking it to their countries, even though most of their people were definitely not gonna starve.

SPEAKER_06 36:34

Well, and it's like we're gonna talk about them more later, but Scotland is part of this uh like part of the UK as well at this point, and they are only suffering in the highlands, and those men were able to go down to the lowlands and get factory jobs without leaving their country, without like so they had an easy one.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

Still not something white they wanted to do, but it was much easier transition and and uh etc.

SPEAKER_06 36:57

So on September 30th, corn was up to 16 pounds a ton, which was almost 50% up from September 1st. So across one month it's gone up 50%. The barter economy failing was hurting everything because oats were growing overripe in the fields, but there was no harvest labor because the agricultural workers were fleeing to market towns to hope to overturn the canceled relief programs for work, and because the farmers couldn't pay them with anything other than potato ground. Yeah. So there's there's food to be had, but they can't also work to be had, but they don't have a way to pay them.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:37

People started petitioning Dublin Castle to please reopen the public works program. They're showing up with rags, with no bedding, with no food. They're like, please just give us work. And some predatory landlords started even evicting small tenant farmers. Farmer Thomas O'Brien and his family was evicted in a matter of 30 minutes. His cabin torn down, his sheep seized for rent, his family turned out. A few days later, friends of his killed the agent's dogs and shot the landlord's prized horse. So they're trying to retaliate in any way they can.

SPEAKER_04 38:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 38:10

And the poor houses that we've talked about a few times that people don't want to be in had been in the 40 percentile range for occupancy, but now men are scaling the walls to get in. Wow. Occupancy rates rising and reaching 80%, and people who ran them feared over a hundred percent um occupancy. So they started cutting meals from three to two a day and reduced their staff. And in early September, they finally announced that they would reopen a few abandoned public work sites on an interim basis, so very little work.

SPEAKER_02 38:41

You know what a good public work uh probably could have been? Harvesting that yeah, harvesting that grain, uh, setting up a different uh crop, uh factories and milling, yeah. Uh, and setting up a new food supply.

SPEAKER_06 38:54

So many things.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 38:56

You could even pay them to hand out the government corn.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

Right.

SPEAKER_06 39:00

But they're sending British people over to do that.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 39:03

By late September, the landed classes were burdened with debt and could not provide the relief that the UK had expected. And without intervention, the corn prices are still going up. And now that prices are surging, by the end of September, everyone is saying, here comes the famine. Uh but also Ireland's oldest pub is one of the oldest on earth. Dating back to 900 AD. Wow. Sean's Bar. Sean in Athlon Town is the oldest pub in Ireland. It's also widely believed to be the oldest pub in the world. Wow. So that's cool. If you're in Ireland, go to Sean's.

SPEAKER_02 39:43

Just Sean. Just Sean's. I didn't realize Sean was such an old name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it changed names over time.

SPEAKER_06 39:51

Or maybe it's an old name.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

Maybe it's an old name.

SPEAKER_06 39:53

Hard to say. In Skibberine, a region that looked like the Middle Ages as far as advancements, there was still hardly any English spoken. They had about 104,000 people, and almost they were almost entirely dependent on the potato. And at the end of July, they could boast that in 10 months there wasn't a single starvation fatality. But now their reserve is gone. So they made it through the first year and they were really proud of themselves as a region to be like, we did it. Nobody died. But now everything they had was gone. They were living off the government and waiting on the early crop. But since that failed, servation set it basically immediately. And now in early September, there's a water shortage.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Oh, good. So wait, we were we were kind of basically like monsoon season for the last few months. And now there's a water shortage.

SPEAKER_06 40:46

Well, so it's not um it's not like drinking water. They needed flowing water to grind the grain in the mills.

SPEAKER_03 40:53

Oh.

SPEAKER_06 40:54

So in September, they preserved the government corn until December.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

And this is the the uh grinding system that was ad hoc. Great, it was anyway. Yeah, they were like, oh, it doesn't you can't use stone? Yikes.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Yikes. And then also by this point, they could have bought an actual grind. Correct. There's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_06 41:14

This is not a this is not a story where you say they did the best they could.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

They did some stuff. They did some things, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 41:24

They did some stuff. Yeah, uh, and now corn was available at 18 pounds a ton. People were eating the blighted potatoes, and by September, even the blighted taters were gone. There was no food in the markets, and one of the clerks uh who was distributing the government corn, Mr. Hughes, asked for early release, and so they gave him the last of their reserve and skibberine. He released two different amounts, but by the third time he asked for food, they said no. And in just a matter of two days, they had been emptied out for food, and it was still not enough. People were just sitting, waiting on fences, waiting to die. Like just sitting there being like, it's what are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_03 42:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 42:06

One of the only hopes was the big depot in Sligo Town. And in the first week of September, they issued 141 tons of meal, 217 the second week, 247 the third. But Trevelyan was worried about how much was being sold, and they were worried that they were gonna completely run out of food. And because of the shortages, very reasonably, the East was also now applying for government depots because they were out of food. Because remember, in 46, they were like we're only gonna help where it's the worst. So by September, still only September, and again, I remind you, they only wanted to release government food in December. So we're still three months out from when they said food was coming. Things are getting dire. Public, poor laborers are swarming the streets, threatening shop owners, taunting men at a public works meeting, red land. There were mil militias like trying to stop that. But in some places, like the town of Mayo, anarchy developed. Deaths innumerable from starvation, plunder, and robberies were occurring every day. Yeah. The bonds of society almost dissolved.

SPEAKER_02 43:08

Yeah. I mean, pretty common factor uh when like that level of starvation.

SPEAKER_06 43:13

Yeah, if that many people think they're gonna die, they have nothing to lose.

SPEAKER_02 43:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 43:17

In another town, a local gunman amused himself by terrorizing British officials. This is a year of famine, he wrote to one potential victim. Give the people the means of keeping themselves alive. If you do not, you had better bring your coffin with you. I will meet you on this noonday. I mean, yeah. At one point in Earl, this like wealthy ish guy tried to quiet people down by insulting them. He was like negging a crowd. And so they started shouting at him about how they were starving to death. Yeah. And so he ended up throwing a pile of coins in the air and running away while people scurried to pick them up.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

Yeah, that's a way out.

SPEAKER_06 43:55

That's a that's a way out.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 43:57

Lord George Bettinick. Leader of the protectionist Tories said that while four million needed food, Ireland only needed to keep all the grain they normally exported, and then three million would be fine.

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Oh. Which is almost helpful. Exceeding a million people, being like, not bad.

SPEAKER_06 44:17

They can't all be winners, you know? Oh god. It's horrible. Um, three days later, people sacked and pillaged an export center in northern Cork. And so merchants did give out 2,500 pounds to a relief fund out of fear. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:31

And that's kind of the merchant equivalent of throwing a bunch of coins up in the air. In there, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 44:35

And that same day, an armed crowd blocked the passage of two barges that were transporting grain. Buildings were set on fire, merchants were beaten, and the first Royal Dragoons opened fire, and a moment later, six people were shot and two had died. So Prime Minister Russell ordered two gunships and several units to Ireland. So now there's just British military everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 44:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 44:55

Cornmeals up to 15 pounds a ton in September, and people were being told the American corn wouldn't even be there until December at the earliest. And so they talked about bridging the four to five month gap with barley and yams from the West Indies.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 45:08

But Ruth wanted the grain at home to be used to help the people at home. Trevelyan's response to 300,000 quarters of oats still being exported was to send Ralph a copy of the book about scarcity that he sent so many other people.

SPEAKER_02 45:22

What is this book about scarcity again?

SPEAKER_06 45:24

Uh I'd have to scroll up one moment. But he said a sudden and violent interference with the regular course of trade would be regarded by the mercantile community as the habit of government. Thoughts and details on scarcity. That he first sent Pine Coffin.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

Oh yeah. A thrilling read. Thoughts and details on scarcity. You know, when you're not hungry. When you're not starving, what a read.

SPEAKER_06 45:51

Maybe could be interesting.

SPEAKER_02 45:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 45:53

Probably not.

SPEAKER_02 45:54

No. But the thing is, the thing about it all is you don't need to simulate scarcity when you just have to scarcely experiencing scarcity. Fully scarced.

SPEAKER_06 46:04

It's pretty awesome. Yeah. So his ideology stopped them from what was logical. He just like couldn't appreciate that they just needed to be helpful.

SPEAKER_02 46:19

We need to get through this uh moment, you know, full-on crisis that's happening. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 46:23

And from October to June, imports would exceed exports five to one. And if they had kept the grain, it likely would have saved a lot of lives.

SPEAKER_03 46:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 46:33

To sum up Trevalian's biggest four F ups.

SPEAKER_03 46:37

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 46:38

He let the grain leave the country. He got rid of the cheap prices of corn that could have controlled the market prices within reason. Right. And he put too much faith in merchants in finding food, and he would not let them buy food from other countries until mid-September when it was already gone.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

And he's got horrible recommendations of books.

SPEAKER_06 46:55

He only reads one book and nobody likes it. Nobody likes it. In the 1860s, despite losing a third of the Irish population, Trevelyan would stand by not interfering in the corn trade and insist it somehow would have led to more deaths. So 20 years from now, he's like, I feel fine about this.

SPEAKER_02 47:12

Get rid of this guy. Let's get the goat king. Get the goat king. It's time.

SPEAKER_06 47:15

To get rid of him. In 1846, public works meetings got very contentious, and landowners were approving any project at all because they thought that was the least dangerous path. They're like, You want to build a road? Here's a run.

SPEAKER_04 47:26

Let's go.

SPEAKER_06 47:27

Because it was a line between life and death, they needed that currency to buy food. So small and middling farmers were still only paying with potato ground, which was useless, and many large farmers weren't weren't hiring at all because they couldn't they didn't have cash to pay.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

I can't believe somebody, somebody wasn't like, hey, let's use this money to do something that produces food. Yeah. Like I know that the the they're gonna discuss a thing like that, but they're still not gonna do what that would make sense. You said earlier that like the way that their laws are written around the public work systems, it's just way easier to build roads.

SPEAKER_06 48:04

Uh it's easier to get approved and you get half of the money is a grant instead of a loan.

SPEAKER_02 48:09

Right. Which is no longer the case because they changed that. But even still, they're not like maybe we do some something for food.

SPEAKER_06 48:16

Well, they're gonna do something slightly that, but not quite that. And spoiler alert, doesn't work. Doesn't work. Right. So by October 1st, only 26,000 men were employed by public works, and the papers were mad about it. If you remember, it was roughly 200, I forget the exact number, but over 200,000 the year before. By 1847, the board would have only would have 10,000 overseers and 5,000 pay clerks and specialists. But in September of 1846, the year we're currently in. So by next year, they're gonna have all these people, but they had only about a hundred employees. Okay. And they had 1.5 million applications to go through.

SPEAKER_03 48:54

Ah.

SPEAKER_06 48:54

So they're probably took them a little bit of time. Incredibly understaffed. So now there is chaos and gridlock. Men are roving the streets and sacking food shops. And by October, there are now 114,000 working, which quadrupled the numbers since September. But now there's all these men that they're ready to pay, but there's not enough construction tools. And they literally don't have the physical money to pay them. So they have to go get it from the UK.

SPEAKER_02 49:22

Even though that's the thing that they wanted is to create a financial system. They don't have it on hand. Great. Smart guys. Really good planning. Really nailed it.

SPEAKER_06 49:29

And the piecemeal system slowed down everything. Because it basically they were like, we're done paying you for the day. We're gonna pay you for how much you do. Uh-huh. But the problem with that is A, somebody had to calculate how much work they had been done. And everything's different. It's like if you're building a road, how many feet did you do? If you're digging a ditch, how deep is the ditch? I don't even know how you measure some of this in a real way. But they had to calculate it. The Board of Works in Dublin had to translate that wage, and there's no phones, there's no internet, there's no telegram. They're like mailing paper to be like, this is uh, you know, how much we're gonna pay for that. And then that had to be sent back to the work site. They would get some of their money right away, but it might take a month to get the rest. Oh so some men just gave up working because they were like, What are you doing? They could also choose a flat rate to be paid instead of piecemeal, but it was two pence less a day than the average in the region. So that was like the workaround for that. Yeah, which in most places was still a famine wage. A man could work for three days to give his family of food, family of seven, less than a pound of food each for four days. So three days of work gives you just enough to live on for four days.

SPEAKER_03 50:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 50:45

People were assaulting works officers, and martial law was proclaimed in several districts. And as the fall went on, officers who were regulating all this were having nervous breakdowns. There were suicide attempts, desertions, and resignations. Some people just walked off. They were like, I can't do this.

SPEAKER_02 51:00

All those tall, mustachioed men were just like six-foot men just being like, Goodbye. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 51:05

My head's in the clouds. Colonel Jones thought that the violence was because of bad press, because they were just getting worked up from the newspapers, and thought that they should publish the letters that showed people defending Irish interests. Like show the paperwork of people wrong. Yeah, right. Well, it doesn't really matter because Trevelyan disagreed and sent him a copy of his favorite book. Thoughts and details on scarcity. The only thing that's not scarce is the amount of copies of books this man's own. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

I can. A book. What is a book if not a long-form pamphlet? Yeah, right. They love pamphlets.

SPEAKER_06 51:40

So the labor rate tax had passed on August 28th, moving the debt to the wealthy Irish, who over the following weeks emphasized to the Irish cabinet members that this could not be done. They don't have this money. They can't feed the entire country when they're not making any money themselves. They complained that the new roads that had been built were pointless and badly constructed. And so they came up with a new idea, the Irish wealthy.

SPEAKER_04 52:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 52:03

What if they use the money from the labor rape to make private improvements on their estates? This this well, it's good and bad. Okay. This would help the peasantry because it would help them pay workers and it would help landowners modernize. It would help them achieve this goal that the British have to modernize the area.

SPEAKER_02 52:21

And it incentivizes these people that don't want to help the poor to help the poor.

SPEAKER_06 52:25

Yes. The Irish wealthy landowners come up with this concept that they are going to be able to take out government loans to do private improvements on their land.

SPEAKER_03 52:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 52:37

But the Prime Minister and the Brits were horrified with this idea. The proposal lost in the House of Commons. And so the how heads of the Irish government met on September 27th and said Russell really did not get this. He needed to see the situation and he needed to approve some form of this idea. They had to get more public works and it had to do more than build useless roads. So they then created the proposal that the loans could only be used for drainage to convert waterlogged land to farmland. And that was approved in October. In the mind of the Brits, the Irish had turned into one big impoverished group that was just dependent on the government and they did not really want to help them. And at the Treasury, Trevelyan and Wood were determined to stop the dependency. It was the age of atonement, and everybody was very religious, like Protestant-wise. They kind of felt like everything bad that you did was because you're bad.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

And everything bad that happened to you was your own fault because you're bad.

SPEAKER_06 53:34

Yeah, and the Brits were largely Protestant, and they thought that some of this was happening because these people were Catholic, they were morally bad, or simply because they were Irish. Wood and Trevelyan thought the crop failures were a judgment from God on potato culture.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

Oh, sure. Which sounds like a vibe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 53:52

Live in that potato culture.

SPEAKER_02 53:53

Live in that potato culture.

SPEAKER_06 53:55

And that since it was so easy to cultivate normally, the potato, that has created dependency and backwardness and laziness, prone to drink, and that it made them rely on other people. So the fact that they were forced to eat the most boring food in the world to stay alive. Yeah. That was because they were lazy and not because of every other circumstance.

SPEAKER_02 54:16

Right.

SPEAKER_06 54:16

And don't get me wrong, I love a I love a potato.

SPEAKER_02 54:18

Sure, sure. But it's not it's not I don't want to eat it every day. No.

SPEAKER_04 54:22

It's crazy.

unknown 54:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:24

Mark Watney, you know, on Mars, ate potatoes every day. He did eat it. He was not a big fan of them. Yeah. By the end.

SPEAKER_06 54:29

They get boring.

SPEAKER_02 54:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 54:31

They thought maybe this would all speed up the modernization of Ireland. Because they're idiots. Yeah. Well, there's only ten people left. You can change their thoughts pretty easily.

SPEAKER_04 54:42

Sure.

SPEAKER_06 54:43

The blight has precipitated things with a wonderful impetus so as to bring them to an early head. Declared Mr. Wood. Supreme wisdom has induced permanent good out of transient evil, agreed Mr. Trevelyan. So they're just like you two minds need to get scarce. They're like twirling their mustaches and wearing top hats and a pants or up to their nipples. They're just scarcing. Like, I'll never go to Ireland. I hear it's bad. I don't want to see what I've done. The Treasury and the London Times began a relationship, and so they the paper started leaking documents from the Treasury, and they would take a moralist stance printing many editorials about the Irish dependency. So they're really a propaganda machine at this point. And there are times when something like harshness is the greatest humanity, one of the editorials said, which is literally insane. And how the Scots were handling their own relief was something to be admired. They were like, the Scots are doing great. And people who were once sympathetic were also turned off by the reports of people harming the relief officers, saying that the Irish had taken all this help to assault their benefactors. Which is a tricky situation. To starve to be dying. Obviously, I don't condone violence, but they're dying. Yeah. And to them, they're walking in, there's a British guy with a clipboard standing in front of a wall of food and he can't eat it. Like the Treasury then, at this point, very quietly put a ton of restrictions on the approved drainage loans that were supposed to help people, so that barely anybody applied because you really couldn't get them anyway. And the drainage only produced about 27,000 jobs, which again sounds like a lot, but when there's 8 million people in the country, it's not that much.

SPEAKER_04 56:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 56:26

But the gentry was taking loans, applications of over one and a half million dollars. People were perplexed, but Connell Colonel Jones told Trevelyan, People do not expect to have to pay back the money. Like they're like, something is gonna happen. I'm gonna die, you're gonna die, the country's gonna fall apart. I just don't see myself Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:43

I mean, the everything is so unprecedented that you're like, What are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_06 56:47

Yeah, they're giving me a check, I'm gonna take the check, and then I'm gonna move. There's also no like there's a paper trail in the sense that there are trails and there are paper, but like it's 1846.

SPEAKER_02 56:57

Yeah, they're just gonna talented Mr. Ripple.

SPEAKER_06 56:59

Block the door and be like, I uh there hasn't been an Irish guy here in 25 years.

SPEAKER_02 57:05

My name is Stuart.

SPEAKER_06 57:06

Yeah, that's not me. I'm Sean of Sean's Sean's pub. I almost said Sean's Pine Coffin, but that's different.

SPEAKER_01 57:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 57:15

So Mr. Hewitson, who had replaced Pine Coffin. My Pine Coffin. He had been sent to Scotland to handle their relief. Oh. Which he probably liked because they were less sad.

SPEAKER_04 57:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 57:26

So uh Mr. Hewitson was running the Limerick Government Food Depot. He took over in 1846 and he went and he actually surveyed many of the potato fields himself, and he was asking people, like, hey, is this your field? What's up? These look bad. You know, he's getting an actual sense of the situation. And while many men that fall felt like they were looking forward to something terrible, oh uh, you know when you read something and you have the wrong intonation because you like are thinking it's like saying the words out loud, yeah. Yeah, it's not what you were and many men that fall felt like they were looking forward to something terrible, and everyone's mind is super unsettled and anxious because they're just like, We're alive today. Yeah, don't know how we're gonna eat. No, going to bed every night, not knowing how you're gonna eat the next day is not a good feeling.

SPEAKER_02 58:17

Yeah. Falling to sleep, having a hard time falling asleep because of hunger pains, and then waking up just to more hunger. Yeah, and still no idea of a solution.

SPEAKER_06 58:28

So at the end of the summer, Ruth had said that they he was going to need 16,000 tons of corn by but set uh but by September he asked for another 25,000. But there was only 3,100 tons in the depots and almost nothing left unpurchased in the world. So he has about a tenth of what he asked for, and that's still that there's none to be had anywhere. Trevelyan was boasting about sending a hundred tons to a depot, and Ralph lost it and was like, there needs to be a thousand. What are you talking about? A hundred? Like, who cares? The treasury then announced that the depots in the West would close until after Christmas to keep a small reserve. So the people who are dead can eat. I don't know who this reserve is for. Prices were crazy high, and merchants were making money in cork, but prices had risen about 50 to 60 percent for food.

SPEAKER_02 59:23

Yeah, I just the thing the thing about all this is you know wherever you stand on the side of capitalism, uh you know they're making money while people are actively starving. And it they just don't need to make the money. They're not they're what's the point? Yeah, it's just like especially if it's food that's created in Ireland that is good that could be going to Irish people, maybe we don't make money this season because everyone is dying.

SPEAKER_06 59:49

Incredibly wealthy people like live in such a delusional world that they don't have the capacity apparently to have this thought. But I just can't imagine, like as a normal person, yeah walking through the world with like enough money to live, put a little bit in savings, maybe go on a vacation once a year, just live. Yeah, I walk by somebody truly in need, and I either give them something or don't, but either way, I feel terrible.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:15

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:15

And I see their suffering and I say, I wish this was different.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:19

The idea that you can just be like, I'm making money.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:23

When I walk through town, I see skeletons. Right. Why do you want to live in a skeleton town? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:30

Well, and the idea that like you see someone like working really, really hard and still being poor, and you're like, Wow, I haven't had to sweat in my entire life.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:39

Yeah, I must be inherently better than me too.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:42

I'm just so much better at least.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:44

God wanted me to be happy and tiny child skeletons to be sad.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:49

That's a thousand percent where all of this like moralization comes from is just a justification for your own comfort. Yeah, because like the whole system, this whole boss system, is predicated on the idea that like the person at the top doesn't have to do any work but makes a bunch of money.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:03

But also the idea of like a moral person being afforded benefits and an immoral person not. Yeah, then you have to live in a world where you believe children are already immoral.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:14

Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:15

Like, what are the what have the children done to not eat? Explain that to me. Yeah. Or do they just have to suffer because their parents have to suffer? Like it doesn't now I'm just fired up.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:27

So when they asked Ralph why corn wasn't being sold at cost, he said that a bad decision had produced bad habits. Some people ignored the order to close their depots because they were being approached by skeletons. And they were like, we're just gonna feed the skeletons. But some, like the depot in Westport, were shut down. And Ralph kept telling himself a delusional lie that the tiny mud-thatched cabins of the peasants must have secret food supplies that they just haven't dipped into. They're still saying that? Yeah. You know the cabins that they can knock down with like a two by four and a dog? Like those. They have secret food safes. Meanwhile, a man in Skibberen dropped dead on the work crew, and a thousand men marched into town to protest the closing of the their depot. Soldiers came up from the barracks, and it was the only thing that stopped these men from sacking all the shops. But in Galway, where the depots closed, a crowd stole a cow and killed it in the street, leaving only a hide and a bit of fat. Like people are starving.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:32

Speculation and hoarding in the market was running rampant, and in a week the price of wheat, oatmeal, and flour rose another 50%. But they were told that it would be okay, that the high prices would attract foreign imports, and that in the spring, a ton of corn was coming from the Ukraine and the US, and that even the prices would drop.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:52

But it's not the spring.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:54

It's barely the beginning of winter.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:55

There's also not enough corn in the world.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:57

There's literally not enough corn in the world. The prices of food were so high that even working people were starving. There were export riots in September, places were sacked, warehouses were burnt, soldiers were beaten, and families had started boarding themselves in their cabin to die together when the potatoes ran out.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:15

And just nobody was like, let's grow corn here.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:19

I think the land wasn't hospitable to it. In Mayo, a town fought with a flock of crows over a week old horse carcass. And at the end of October, the last of the grain crop had sailed out of Cork. I think we need a fun fact.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:35

Yeah, I think we could use a fun fact. One of the lions used in the opening clips for MGM movies was born in Dublin.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:43

Oh, they're like, ah, lion. Legend.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:54

Probably. That's probably what it is. Legend Fairfield. Um people are trying to start to think outside the box because they don't know what to do. But very little of it helped. They they were going to station boats to send small delivery ships. They're one of the ideas was they were in station boats on the coast of the West where it was really bad. They would have these little boats that would have provisions for immediate help. So if a town was like in dire, they'd be like, here's a hundred pounds or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:25

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:26

But most of them couldn't even land on the jagged land's edge of the West.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:30

And so some towns would see the boat come to shore, get excited, all go to the port, and the boat couldn't actually get to the port, and they would have to walk home empty-handed.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:41

Uh yeah. Get your robots out, fellas. Figure it out. Come on.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:46

I mean, they're dying and they don't have robots, so that's those are two problems with that. But I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:50

They could have used the works progress, you know, the robot system, build a better dock. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:56

The Irish uh or the UK wanted to buy food for them in Malta, but the high price was simply too much. They talked about importing yams, but then London decided that Ireland wasn't the right climate for yams. They also didn't have enough milling power, and there was hundreds of tons of unground corn in the warehouses. Can you not just get it pre-ground? Well, I guess not. But also, they were like, maybe they had spoils faster. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. They had some bad ideas. Uh at first they said, what if we don't mill it? And a guy named Captain Percival came up with a way to eat unmilled corn, but it took 15 hours, 12 hours of soaking in cold water, and then boiling it for three and a half the next day. So that's not the most helpful. Trevelyan had another idea a personal hand mill. We give the people unmilled corn. Okay, they mill it themselves. Those really strong, hardy people.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:51

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:52

Um, so he got four mills, a couple from museums, one from a plantation in the United States, and also a coffee grinder. And had a guy create a hybrid, had the Royal Engineers actually create a hybrid, which was called the Kilke Mill. But it cost 15 shillings.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:10

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:11

People don't have 15 pence. Like it's it's like, do you guys want to buy a car to drive on the roads that you built to nowhere? It's like, that's an insane, insane ask. So then they asked for donations to provide the mills to the poor. It didn't really.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:29

Yeah, because they got don all all those donations do other really dumb stuff.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:32

Yeah. Yeah. The only thing that he kind of did to help was that he or did do, and it kind of helped.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:38

Is he ended the Scottish preference because at first the Scottish were getting all the best stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:44

Uh, but they only had 600,000 people at risk of starving, not four to five million people. And those people could also move to the lowlands and work in all these brand new factories that had been opening up.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:54

So they finally realized, hey, maybe we help the people that need it the most, regardless of their different brogues. And like I don't understand. Whatever. That's probably very deep-seated and religious and mean. And yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:10

They were pretty, pretty bad to the Scottish as well.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:13

The next, the end of the next like 10 minutes are I'm gonna pre-fun fact us. Here we go.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:20

I hope this one's extra fun.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:22

I gotta find a really good one. Ireland is the Emerald Isle. We knew that, you website. The brazen head is the oldest pub in Dublin, but we already talked about the oldest bar. That's not good enough. County Cork was once the largest exporter of butter in the world.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

Whoa. But also they could have eaten that butter.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:42

Okay, keep going, keep going, keep going.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:45

Carry gold from Cork.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:47

I believe it is. I believe it is. Um Cork is the biggest county. These are getting less fun. Less fun. That's a famine fact. Super. Oh, this is kind of fun. Okay. The first St. Patrick's Day Parade was not held in Ireland. It was held in Boston in 1737. Okay. And the largest one takes place in New York City.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:15

Huh.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:17

I have heard this before, but I don't really know that the Irish care a lot less about St. Patrick than we do. They're kind of like, yeah, he's fine. He's one of the Saints. And we're like, he's the guy.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:26

He's the guy.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

With the snakes.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:28

With the snake. Yeah, it drove him out, but also Ireland's just never had snakes or something. I forget exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he did it. Thanks, thank you. He definitely did it. Thanks, Pat. Okay. Are you ready to be a little sad?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:40

So ready.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:41

Do you have anything silly you need to like get out of there before you no?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:46

I've been pretty uh pretty broody this episode.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:50

I also think the pre-warning of like hey, this is sad helps because then you're not.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:54

Yeah. So like if y'all are feeling sad, ready to be sad words.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:59

Well, I mean, it's not surprising. None of it's a surprise. None of it's gonna be like wood.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:02

It's like there isn't miracle, uh miracle. You guys know how many people are gonna die. Yeah, a lot. I wonder if they could have made vodka with the sad old potatoes. Death vod fungus vodka? Yeah, fungus vodka.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:15

And sold that to who? Fungus Russians? Yeah. Maybe could have traded it to the Ukraine for some.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:20

When you know, if life gives you moldy potatoes.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:24

Make bad vodka. Make bad badka. Very common phrase.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:26

It's a common phrase.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:28

Death is now becoming very common.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:30

Oh no.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:31

And half of the children in the workhouses in Skiberin were either dead or faded to die. Oh people were collapsing dead on the street, and others were roaming the streets, wolf-like in appearance, begging, looting, fighting, attacking convoys, killing and stealing cows and sheep. Men were breaking into the houses of their large farmers, demanding their rent money back for the useless potato ground. But landlords were still not creating work for the poor. And now they were not even paying them to sow the land. Oh. So the burden increased on the Board of Works. The numbers had been between 70 to 100,000 workers at the end of December, and now it was 441,000.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:14

But still, in some places, 70% of applicants had been turned away. So it's in no way enough work. Men still weren't being paid properly, and some died even with jobs. And now the women and younger children were on the work sites. Only the youngest kids below five were at the site with their family, gathering around small turf fires or hiding under wagons. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:36

The really tough thing about all of this is that if they're doing because all of this, these works things are probably heavy in manual labor. Yes. So like you're making money to get food, which needs to be a certain level of calories to keep you alive. However, you're expending more energy. So it like makes the bargain even more.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:57

Which is probably why a lot of them were like, I'm gonna sit on this fence. Yeah. Like, why would I they're dying too? Like workhouses started collapsing under the need. Children were dying. There were cesspools of disease everywhere. Like there wasn't enough in the workhouses, and some Irish started to feel like this was a purposeful genocide. Uh there was a quote that I'm just gonna read in full because I feel like it is very appropriate. But uh, British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, according to this author, but its effects often were. Passing through Southwest Cork in early December, one traveler could barely credit the things he saw: fever, dropsy, diarrhea, and famine, rioting in every filthy hovel, and sweeping away families. 75 tenants ejected here, and a whole village in the last stage of destitution there, the dead bodies of children flung into holes, hastily scratched into the earth without shroud or coffin, wives traveling 10 miles to beg the charity of a coffin for a dead husband and bearing it back that weary distance. A government official offering one-tenth of a sufficient supply of food at famine prices, neither mill nor corn store within 20 miles, every field becoming a grave, and the land a wilderness.

unknown 1:12:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:16

Yeah. It's getting bad. Yeah, it's been bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:19

Yeah, but also like this also isn't the last year of this.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:23

No, there's like five more. Ralph requested the depots stay open, but Trevelyan told him no, that the UK and the Scots were in need too, and that they couldn't spare more for the Irish. And in December, Daniel O'Connell gave a speech saying London wasn't doing enough. He acknowledged that his alliance with the Whigs did not work, and he finally did lose his position of request of respect. Young Ireland did take over, but unfortunately, they were busy from September to October promoting, quote, the intellectual and moral discipline that best fits men for freedom. Which might not be super helpful in this moment. The problem again with Young Ireland is they're they're well off, and a lot of them were UK educated. Uh-huh. So they have probably some of this stigma as well. Yeah. And they're not starving to death. Yeah. So they're like, well, we're going to do our pious work and not the very pressing work of stopping.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:21

Stopping the famine.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:24

Okay. So we're almost done, but it is a little bit more bleak. It's gonna get more Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:30

It's uh it's always bleakest before the more bleakness.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:35

The second longest running talk show in the world hails from Ireland. Wow. The late, late show, an Irish chat show, first aired in 1962. The only other show that's been running longer is the Tonight Show. Wow. So that's fun. That is fun. Right? Yeah. It's pretty good.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:52

Pretty good.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:53

Pretty good. All right. Um, and because things weren't good enough at the end of November, they had a full week of snow. Oh, great. It covered the fields, it covered the bodies on the ground, it covered the land, where shoeless, jacketless families to the fungus? It did not for seaweed. There were people starving in doorways, and it made the bad roads impassable. And in December, mass death is going to begin. This is one of the more upsetting stories.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:27

Oh, super.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:30

One woman, uh, Brudy Sheehan, had already buried her husband and son, and she came back home to her daughter, who was dead. Oh God. She cleaned her up and put her on her back, taking her to the chapel to bury her, and someone else came up to help. And when she left the bodies, she said, God bless all of you. No one else will join you now. There's only me left, and there will be nobody to look after me, to bury me here, or anywhere else. I would have just laid down dead.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:02

Yeah, I would have been like, I think I'll be clocking your man.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:05

Clocking out.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:07

It's just the saddest Jesus.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:10

The idea that you're like, I have to go home and try to live without my family and not even get to rest with them as a person who probably really believes that they need to be with them and would prefer that. Yeah. As most people would.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:24

That's not like very importantly, like also like not it's it just goes back to the whole thing of like these people are dying and starving, uh, and they have just such an abundance of moral rectitude that even in all of this, they're unwilling to like roll over and die.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:43

Yeah. There was also literally a coffin shortage. But the women who could afford would balance an empty one on their head and walk it back to their homes. If people couldn't afford or find a coffin, they would often bury their dead at night to avoid the embarrassment. And wakes and funerals, which had been a big part of the Irish culture, ended because there was really no one left to mourn the people dying. People had sold their clothing already, so many faced this winter barefoot, wearing rags, and most of the pond clothing ended up in the UK pulped into paper mills. So it's not even like it's just being come, yeah. At one point they were even selling Irish hair.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:24

Oh god. In like palette, like clumps to like turn into clones. I think horse hair.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:32

Yeah, I'm not sure. And it was like one merchant was like, I think this is gonna work. It didn't become like a big export, it was just like a weird idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:41

Oh god.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:43

In December, the animals also started to die off, the crows dying in the fields and roads, the horses and pigs, the dogs dying and preying on each other. There was like one, it was like a long anecdote, but it was basically like one night of weird bird sounds, and then they came out in one village and basically all their crows had died in the same night. Like they were just had fallen down dead.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:04

Yeah. That's haunting. That feels like an omen. Yeah, you know, not a good one. Not not good.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:11

In Dublin, a few weeks before Christmas, two young Irish women sat in a cheerless, unheated room and calculated the days remaining to them. We've been talking, Mary and I. One of the young women told an American visitor, the furthest the good God will give us on this earth cannot be more than 14 days. And the American said, You are willing to live longer? And they said, We cannot see how.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:41

Yeah. Interesting that there were visitors. Yeah. Weird poverty tourists.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:46

I mean, maybe they didn't, I don't know. It feels weird. It's in Dublin, so I guess Dublin's the city, but it's weird.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:52

Feels strange.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:52

It's weird.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:53

Um had the trip planned for years, so yeah, yeah. Not the boat ticket.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:58

Oh, that's our last. That's not really fun. The Titanic was built in Ireland.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:02

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:05

I need like one more really good one. Yeah. The funnest of fun facts.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:10

Just vamp for a minute.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:12

Yeah, bum-bum bow. That's vamping, right? Uh just making sounds. Yeah, well, I think it vamping is is a musical thing where they just like, you know, are basically doing elevator jazz.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:24

I thought vamping was just like take it up a little, like keep it.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:28

Yeah, yeah. But I think I think it's like, I don't know. That's maybe I'll find that fun fact about vamping. Uh it's probably not vampiring, unless it's about Bram Stoker and Dracula. You know, you're vamping.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:42

Sucking blood with your buds. That's what vampires do.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:47

Sucking blood with your buds. Yeah, that's right. That's like the poor man that drank cow's blood.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:52

Oh no. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:54

Sorry. Sorry. I was them bloody buddies. I'm looking for a good one. These are Yeah, this is all the corn cake. A bird died because of the lock of the everything's bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:09

Ireland has no moles. Okay. Yeah, because St. Patrick, after getting rid of the snakes, was like, get out of here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:17

Were you talking about like on their face?

SPEAKER_06 1:19:19

No, I'm talking about ground moles. No beauty marks. Yeah. There was a fact about castles I'm trying to find because that feels also literally every single website that I've Googled, fun facts in Ireland. Somewhere they're like, Did you know two million people? I'm like, that's not a fun fact.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:34

That's not a fun fact.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:35

Learn. Okay, here it is. Ireland has more castles per square kilometer than almost any other country in Europe.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:43

Hey, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:44

Estimates suggest that 30,000 castle structures survive in various states of preservation, from intact tower houses to moss-covered stone mounds at the corner of a field. On almost every waymarked way, you'll pass ruined tower houses that have become so naturally integrated into the landscape that locals barely notice them. Most were built between the 12th and 17th centuries. Many were never grand affairs, just a small landlord's fortified home. Okay. So it's all pre-famine.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:13

So uh vamping, you know, because I uh now that people gotta know. Uh but apparently uh in music it's improvised repeating a short musical phrase, uh like a chord sequence or an accompaniment over and over again, and just kind of continuing some some background music while somebody else preferes until like a cue is given and then they start whatever their other thing is.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:37

Yeah, it is. This is a Well we've all heard that before, right? Like vamping is as a like if you're like like an award show, they say vamping.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that the the point of it is, in a musical sense, was to like fill space while the the next thing got prepared.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:11

Which is what it is what I'm I know, I'm agreeing with you. Doesn't feel like it. It feels like you're googling things to disagree with me.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:19

No, I just was vamping badly.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:22

Badly.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:26

Did you say vamp? No, you said vow?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:28

I just said vow. I made a noise.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:32

Oh, three coffees, one whiskey. Not enough. One podcast episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:37

We did it.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:38

We did it. Um did you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. There will probably be two more parts because we're still there's a lot more stuff said. Yeah, just a this was I'm gonna do a heisty dumb thing next time.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:53

Ooh, okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:54

I found I got a couple ideas, okay, and none of them have much death.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:59

Just you know, silly mess around.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:01

Just a mess around. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta, this is bumming me out. Okay, yeah. Um, so if you're like a new listener and you're like, man, bummer, uh, some are less of a bummer.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:13

Some are less of a bummer.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:14

Because sometimes we like scamsters.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:15

And I found uh isn't the catch me if you can guy not as uh uh redeemable as the end of that movie.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:22

Yeah, he's not he's not like a uh rascal. He's a little more nefarious. He's pretty nefarious, too. Yeah, but uh yeah, maybe we'll talk about him someday. Yeah, but yeah, thank you guys so much for listening. If you have a topic for us, uh Youth the Rich Pod at Gmail.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:37

Especially one that's like heist and fun.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:38

Yeah, if you have um anything else you want to draw to our attention, if you've if you heard the word vamping and you thought about talking, let us know. Yeah, um follow us on the social.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:52

If you are watching us on YouTube, leave a comment. We love a comment. Sure. Thank you to the 74 people on YouTube. Yeah, we appreciate it. Tell your friends, you're great. We love you. Uh yeah. I don't know why I'm vamping now.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:06

Yeah. It's done.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:08

I get to go to bed when we're done. Goodbye! Thanks for listening. And a big thanks to Carsi Blanton for the theme music. You can follow the podcast everywhere at Yeathe Rich Pod. You can email us your suggestions for future episodes at eatherich pod at gmail. You can follow me at thefunnywalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.