THE COMING 1 THE COMING THE COMING STORM Lush green landscapes and rolling meadows fill the Irish countryside The country is well known for its natural beauty But when French traveler Gustave de Beaumont arrived in 1838 he noticed something else Ireland was in stark poverty Misery naked and famishing starvation it is the first thing you see when you land on the Irish coast and from that moment it ceases not to be present to your view he wrote Ireland came fully under English control as part of the United Kingdom in 1801 4
De Beaumont saw swarms of poor people in the cities They wore ragged clothing They begged for food Traveling into the countryside he saw rundown one-room cabins They were made of mud There were no windows or chimneys Inside several generations of a family lived together They had no furniture They shared a single straw mattress Farmers cottiers and landless laborers made up Ireland’s large working class Farmers often had several acres of land to farm Cottiers usually had less than an acre Some of them worked for farmers with larger crops to harvest Landless laborers were the poorest They did not grow their own crops Gustave de Beaumont wrote about his observations in an 1839 book Ireland Social Political and Religious 5
Most of the farmers were Catholics They did not own the land they lived on Rather they rented it mostly from Protestant landlords Many of the landlords lived in England To make matters more complicated the farmers did not pay their landlords directly Instead the landlords rented the land to middlemen These men were usually Protestant too The middlemen divided the land into small plots They rented these plots to the Irish farmers for higher prices than they paid The farmers paid the middlemen The middlemen kept some money They paid the landowners the rest Nearly all of a farm’s earnings went to the landlords and middlemen If a farmer somehow made a profit or came into some money it was wise to hide it The farmer would not want the landlord to know that the family had new clothes or a repaired roof Any sign that they had money would be a reason for the landlord to raise the rent even higher The relationships between farmers and landlords were tense And this was not just because of unfair rent increases Most of the Irish families lived in small cottages and rented their land Reproductions and ruins of these homes can be seen in Ireland today 6
