Was The Great Irish Famine an Act of Nature? PART TWO Student Activities: Diverting Resources During the Great Irish Famine . 423 Lady Wilde and “The Famine Year”. 426 The Great Irish Famine: An Act of Genocide?. 430 Maria Edgeworth’s Analysis of the Famine . 441 The Irish Poor Law . 448 Designing Relief Legislation. 455 The Irish Workhouse System . 458 Afraid of the Workhouse. 462 An Ejected Family: Illustrating Eviction During the Great Irish Famine . 468 Stealing Food: A Crime or a Failure of the System? . 473 Did James Hasty Murder Major Denis Mahon? . 481 Food Exports During the Great Irish Famine . 487 Interpretations of the Great Irish Famine: Written and Visual? . 493 Wave of Evictions . 498 Diverting Resources During the Great Irish Famine BACKGROUND he British government was sharply criticized for its laissez-faire economic policy during the famine and particularly that it allowed food to be exported while Ireland starved. There was also food left in TIreland that was diverted to other use, including the production of alcohol. The American traveler and famine worker Asenath Nicholson strongly criticized the diversion of grain that could have been used for food to produce alcohol in Ireland during the famine. According to Elizabeth Malcolm’s ‘Ireland Sober, Ireland Free’ Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth Century Ireland (1986), in 1847, with the price of grain sky high, the production of legal spirits fell 25 percent—from about eight million gallons to about six million gallons. (Note: This activity can be used in conjunction with Food Exports During the Great Irish Famine.) RESOURCES ADDITIONAL READINGS Malcolm, Elizabeth. ‘Ireland Sober, Ireland Free’ Drink and Temperance in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. Nicholson, Asenath. Annals of the Famine in Ireland. ed. Maureen Murphy. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1998. CLASSROOM MATERIALS Research materials related to Learning Experience #2. STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES Students will be able to: Analyze data to determine the rationale and appropriateness of diverting resources during the Great Irish Famine. Prepare a group presentation stating a point of view about individual responsibility for community health and welfare. STANDARDS SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments and turning points in the history of the United States and New York. SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas, eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history from a variety of perspectives. SS 4: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources, how major decision-making units function in the United States and other national economies, and how an economy solves the scarcity problem through market and nonmarket mechanisms. ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding. ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression. 423 PERFORMANCE INDICATORS Explore different experiences, beliefs, motives, and traditions of people living in their neighborhoods, communities and state. Identify historical problems, pose analytical questions of hypotheses, research analytical questions or test hypotheses, formulate conclusions or generalizations, raise new questions or issues for further investigation. Know some ways individuals and groups attempt to satisfy their basic needs and wants by utilizing scarce resources. Explain how people’s wants exceed their limited resources and that this condition defines scarcity. Know that scarcity requires individuals to make choices and that these choices involve costs. Understand how societies organize their economies to answer three fundamental questions: What goods and services shall be produced and in what quantities? How shall goods and services be produced? For whom shall goods and services be produced? Investigate how production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and services are economic decisions with which all societies and nations must deal. Make distinctions about the relative value and significance of specific data, facts, and ideas. Select a focus, organization, and point of view for oral and written presentations. Support interpretations and decisions about relative significance of information with explicit statement, evidence, and appropriate argument. DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING INTELLECTUAL SKILLS . analytical thinking . draw conclusions . ask and answer logical questions . identify premises and rationale for points of view . participate in interpersonal and group activities . communicate results of research and projects . set up hypotheses and alternative courses of action . interpret information and data . make generalizations . identify patterns and themes MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES English Language Arts Math/Economics PATTERNS TO ORGANIZE INFORMATION Scarcity and Interdependence LEARNING EXPERIENCES 1. Ask students if they have had experiences where scarce resources are allocated. If there is a water shortage during the summer, students and their families might be restricted by how often they water their lawns or gardens. Their parents will remember when there was a short-term oil shortage when people were limited to when they could buy gasoline. In Ireland during the Great Irish Famine, there was a debate about diverting food to other use. One 424 diversion was the legal production of alcohol. The government policy was not to interfere with the free market economy. Alcohol also produced revenue for the government. For others, this diversion of grain to alcohol represented a loss of a potential food source. The question of diverting grain to alcohol came at an important moment in social history. Father Theobold Mathew, who was to do so much for famine relief in Cork, was leading a campaign to encourage temperance. Many of the Quakers who worked with the Central Relief Committee were strong temperance people. The question of the diversion of alcohol was more than an economic policy decision for them. Government economic policy would have an impact on Father Mathew’s campaign. 2. Ask students to discuss in small groups: You are a member of the Relief Commission for Ireland and you have to recommend a policy about food resources diverted to other use. What is your recommendation? Would you restrict, ration or choose not to regulate such diversions? Write and present your recommendation. 3. Ask students to calculate what the restriction on the legal production of alcohol would have contributed to the food supply in Ireland in 1847. How much grain does it require to produce one gallon of 80 proof spirits? How much grain does it require to produce 6,000,000 gallons of spirits? How many servings of grain-based cereal could have been produced if grain had been diverted from spirits to food? 4. Students can research rationing during World War II, and if possible, interview people who lived during World War II when the United States rationed critical supplies: meat, butter, sugar, fuel oil and gasoline and diverted them to the war effort. During the oil crisis of the 1970s fuel was in short supply and there were some restrictions about when and how much fuel one could purchase. Sometimes water use for lawns and gardens is restricted when there is a shortage. Ask students to write a short essay expressing their point of view, after discussing the question in a small group. What is the responsibility of government when there are shortages? What is the responsibility of citizens when critical supplies are rationed? ASSESSMENT OPTION Prepare a short presentation responding to the following questions as if they were issuing the “proclamation” as the National Famine Committee: “The shelves of Food Pantries are empty in this country, and many families will go without food until we can fill the shelves with donations. Every family is required to select 10 items and donate it immediately, or they will be fined. We justify this because...” TEACHER REFLECTION This question asks students to consider whether in a time of critical shortages the common good takes precedence over individual choices and comforts. What does being a member of a community ask of us? ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES For younger students: Ask students to discuss the importance of saving water, recycling, and donating food to Food Pantries. Are individuals responsible for the health of others? 425 Lady Wilde and “The Famine Year” BACKGROUND ady Jane Francesca Wilde (1826-1896) wrote under the pen-name of “Speranza” (hope) in the Irish nationalist paper The Nation. She was also a well-known folklorist. Her son was the celebrated Lnovelist, poet, and playwright Oscar Wilde. “The Famine Years,” first titled “The Stricken Land,” was published in The Nation in 1847, the worst year of the famine. It is a poem that has shaped the way people think about the famine. Lady Wilde accuses the British of genocide, their victims being the Irish poor. In this activity the students will be analyzing the poem “The Famine Year.” Poems like Lady Wilde’s “The Famine Year” and her emigration poem “The Exodus” stirred the Irish in America as well as in Ireland. A million a decade – of human wrecks Corses lying in fever sheds – Corses huddled on foundering decks And shrouded dead on their rocky beds; Nerve and muscle, and heart and brain, Lost to Ireland – lost in vain It was the kind of poetry that encouraged those who founded the Fenian Brotherhood in 1865, a secret nationalist organization dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland; it planned to provide aid and trained officers form the Irish and Irish-Americans who fought in the American Civil War. (The Fenians staged two unsuccessful attempts to invade Canada in 1866.) Lady Wilde warns that the British and their landlords will be answerable for the famine at the last judgement. Note that corses is not a typographical error, but Wilde means the word corpses.