Sir, I have followed with interest the recent flurry of correspondence on Edmund Burke and the Great Famine and, in particular, the issue of whether he would have endorsed the laissez faire solution advocated by the Liberal government during 1847-51.
Even amongst professional historians, there is confusion over the role of laissez faire at the time. All too frequently this doctrine is blamed, demonstrating a grave misunderstanding of classical political economy, and indeed of recent Irish history.
At the risk of trivialising, the basic fallacy is this: free market principles and nongovernment intervention played a significant part in the onset of the Great Hunger and had much to do with the persistence of starvation after "Black 47". But a reading of any of the history books, whether old style or revisionist, clearly points to the contrary; namely, that there was much ill judged government intervention up to and during the Famine and that a free market economy never existed in Ireland at the time. How could there have been a market based economy, when the whole land system was so inefficient and poorly designed by the then ruling class, headed by successive British governments?
As William Barry O'Brien recounts in his masterful biography of Parnell, farmers weren't given farms, they were merely given strips of land. Moreover, they had no incentives to improve their land; there was no marketplace for agricultural out put; and there was little or no food processing industry which they could supply. Agriculture the very backbone of Ireland and Irish society at the time - was doomed under the system.
Had there been a free market economy, the relationship between landlord and tenant would have been utterly different. Tenants would have been protected by law, with well defined property rights and rights to contract with others; they would have been fairly rewarded for any improvements made to their land; and they would have had proper access to both local and national, and indeed international, markets. Free markets rest on these essentials, which in turn require carefully framed institutions, stable national government and a credible legal order.
Like many of today's Third World countries, pre Famine Ireland never had any of these essentials. Only in Ulster - with the so called "Ulster Custom" - was there a semblance of a civilised order and an internal market - but then, Ulster was always different. It was not until well after the Famine, with Butt, Davitt and Parnell, that the appallingly inefficient land system was at last challenged with any real authority. By then, of course, it was too late. - Yours etc.,
Dept. of Economics and Accounting.
University of Liverpool.