Famine role of Irish church criticised by Catholic paper

THE Catholic Church "took advantage of the prevailing destitution to increase its land holdings" during the Famine, according to an editorial in the current issue of the respected British Catholic weekly, The Tablet.

It also notes that Irish landowners, "some of them Catholic", were "among the indifferent".

It says: "Many Irish farmers made money from the export of wheat from Ireland to England; some evicted their tenants, knowing they had nowhere to go and neither food nor work to sustain them."

Headed "Blame for the Great Hunger", the editorial welcomed Mr Tony Blair's message last weekend - "in which he freely accepted English guilt" for that country's role in the Famine - as "well judged".

"It describes the Famine as "one of the most dreadful episodes in the course of the entire 19th century, anywhere in the world".

Conditions at the time were "unspeakably horrendous" with "countless parents and children clustered together in holes in the ground, with nothing to eat, nothing to wear, delirious with exhaustion and fever, just waiting to die".

The editorial continues: "Above all, however, blame for the Famine must be laid at the door of the prevailing economic and political ideology of the time." Free trade was never to be interfered with, the rights of property were paramount, and laissezfaire economic theories were sacrosanct. The consequences of these theories, no matter how harsh, "were regarded as the working out of God's will".

It notes that Mr Charles Trevelyan, head of the Treasury in London at the time, had expressed the hope that Catholic priests were adequately explaining this to their starving flocks.

Ireland was "badly governed", "far worse" than England, Scotland and Wales. Its social institutions were "weak", its poor laws "hopeless", bad relations between landlord and tenant were "unmitigated by paternalism or basic decency". Starving people were made to work "at absurd schemes of public works even when the Famine was at its height".

And this "insane economic experiment", it continues, was "remorselessly pursued long after its failure had become obvious".