The Rhetorical Spectre ofHunger: Famine, Fear and Food

in 1940s IrelandPlenary paper presented at ‘Rhetorics of Food’ conference, KU

Leuven, Belgium, 27 May 2014.

Abstract

As the centenary of the most significant event in modern Irish history - the Great Famine (1845-51) -approached, Ireland's policy makers of the 1940s, its public and its church leaders were locked into adisturbing rhetorical embrace.This rhetorical moment was infused by the historical memory andcontemporary threat of hunger. Irish neutrality in the Second World War (1939-45) was politicallyhigh minded but economically perilous. In this conflict - the quintessential "total war" and the acidtest of Irish independence - starvation would kill over twenty million people globally: a figureexceeding the number of combat deaths. For independent Ireland, victim of a Churchillian tradesqueeze intended to pressure Ireland onto the Allied side in the war, food deprivation and the threatof mass hunger would be the price of neutrality.

As food supplies waned and the centenary of the Great Hunger drew closer, the memory of foodsupplies running out pervaded national debate like a dimly remembered but disquieting nightmare.This time round it was wheat, rather than potatoes, that was the chief concern. Therefore therhetorical threat of starvation, wrapped within the cosier hegemonic celebration of ruralism andsmallholding, was used by government ministers and bishops alike to instil frugality and efficiency infood consumption, distribution and production. If the Ploughman on the Irish pound note of the timesymbolised a ritual of toil, a horse-and-cart simplicity and honesty in food production, this wasamplified by the Anglo-American wartime squeeze on modern productive aids and the popularpolitical yearning for Gaelic Ruritania. Meanwhile, the popularly despised 'black loaf', a 100% wholegrain staple, was the contemporary culinary evocation of this wholesome ethic.

But was such food propaganda successful? This paper explores whether the rhetoric washed with apublic frustrated by state emergency diktats that often impacted the small man the hardest. Did therhetoric of historical hunger still matter one hundred years on, encouraging adherence to rationingand state agricultural productivity drives? Or did the Irish public look instead to black markets andillegal food channels to satisfy their hunger?

This paper is based on research published in 'Ireland during the Second World War: Farewell toPlato's Cave' by Bryce Evans (Manchester University Press, 2014), from which the vast majority ofobservations are taken.

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As the centenary of the Great Famine approached in the 1940s, thepeople and policy makers of independent Ireland were facing up tothe realistic prospect that starvation might reoccur in the country.

Ireland was, of course, neutral during the Second World War, 1939 to1945. But wartime supply shortages, exacerbated by a cripplingBritish supply squeeze, excited fears of national cataclysm.

Globally, twenty million people starved to death during the SecondWorld War and, for Ireland too, hunger was a realistic threat.

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The Ireland of the early 1940s was, as George Bernard Shaw, picturedabove, put it, ‘a powerless little cabbage garden’, attempting tomaintain a precarious neutrality in the face of economic pressurefrom Britain and America to join the Allies.

In nearly every account of Ireland the during the Emergency (theofficial Irish shorthand for the Second World War) the rhetoricalspectre of hunger lurks.

Famine, as I’ll demonstrate in this paper, was present in the mindsof those responsible for Ireland’s material wellbeing like a dimlyremembered but disquieting nightmare. And, in achieving social andeconomic control, its memory was invoked constantly by Ireland’sspiritual and political leaders.

Part and parcel of this stirring up of folk memory of starvation wasthe celebration of the rural smallholder.

This is encapsulated in the Irish pound note of the period, whichfeatured a ploughman, back hunched beneath the sun, carrying outhonest, Christian toil.

The Irish small farmer found himself locked in the deeplypatronising rhetorical embrace of the nation’s establishment. Theploughman was celebrated as pure, anti-materialistic and, mostsignificantly, as the shock troop in Ireland’s war to produce morefood and thus avert starvation.

But, as I’ll show, the Irish government of the 1940s wassimultaneously undermining this material reality in desperateattempt to produce enough wheat to feed the Irish urban poor.

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First, though, I want to take you back to 1914: partly because weare in the year of another centenary (the outbreak of the FirstWorld War) and partly because the food issue in Ireland in the FirstWorld War helps us to understand the same in the Second.

Following the Easter Rising, British state legitimacy in Irelandslowly declined. To add to this national mood, wartime priceinflation was compounding food shortages. This subject has beenwritten about extensively by historian John Borgonovo.

Anxiety about famine increased thanks in no small part to Britishpropaganda reports of German starvation, which backfired. Rationingwas introduced in mainland Britain but not in Ireland. Price risesnegatively impacted the Irish poor and illustrated how the Britishadministration struggled to cope with the famine anxiety amidstIrish public opinion.

Orthodox nationalist interpretations of the causes of the GreatFamine being British food export, understandably resurfaced amongsta population possessing a powerful sense of historical memory aroundthe 1845-51 dearth.

AE Russell, pictured, wrote that a country which would again leaveits people to starve en masse had ‘no purpose or excuse forremaining on the face of the earth’.

The extent of famine fear in the First World War tells us a lotabout the success of the German U-boat campaign in targeting Britishand Irish food supplies.

Sinn Fein seized on this widespread mood by creating foodpreservation committees countrywide to capitalise on the situation.‘Never again!’ Was the Sinn Fein cry as bread shortages grippedIreland.

Similarly, Borgonovo informs us, People’s Food committees wereestablished by the more radical Irish trade unions, which monitoredfood consumption and distribution.

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So, in the First World War, fear of famine centred around the factthat Ireland was not producing enough bread to sustain its urbanpopulation. The Irish agricultural economy was, of course, cattleand dairy-dominated, and there was a need to produce more wheat.

Therefore, the Department of Agriculture, which was of course underBritish Crown control, urged an increase in tillage and in 1916‘compulsory tillage’ was introduced by the Crown authorities.

Compulsory tillage was, quite simply, a mixture of propaganda andcoercion. Irish farmers who, selling cattle to the British wartimemarket, were really doing quite well from the war, were now urged toinstead till more of their land or face eviction.

In short, Irish farmers were being coerced into turning from the cowto the plough.

Now 1916 was, as we know, a year of revolutionary violence inIreland and these measures, introduced in the same year, werecriticised by some Irish nationalists, who pointed to the forcedchanges benefiting Britain and her food supply, and her war effort,more than Ireland’s.

Most significant was the threat of fines, imprisonment and evictionfor those farmers not complying with the new compulsory tillageorders.

To Irish nationalists of the First World War, this was grist to therhetorical mill because these threats evoked uncomfortable memories.The Irish national psyche was still haunted by evictions during theGreat Famine of the mid-nineteenth century and the Land War of the1870s.

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The memory of famine, then, hung noticeably over Ireland during theFirst World War and infused debate about the food issue. Debatesabout wartime trade gave nationalists the chance to wield therhetorical weapon of impending food shortage and some even allegeddeliberate British starvation of Ireland.

The alleged frailty of the wartime body was increasingly used inthis debate, as historian Ian Miller reminds us. Oliver St JohnGogarty, pictured, the famous surgeon, athlete, poet and writer (and

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the inspiration for the character of Buck Mulligan in James Joyce'snovel Ulysses) himself raised this issue during the First World War.

Whereas Joyce famously describes Buck Mulligan as ‘stately andplump’, Gogarty’s focus was on the wretched and emaciated. Inhighlighting child malnutrition amongst the Irish urban poor,Gogarty criticised Dublin’s poor milk supply, drawing attention tothe plight of the city’s slum dwellers.

Such stories of Irish food poverty and fears of famine were notunique to the First World War period. In wartime economies, as wesee in contexts like Syria today, food supply is always accompaniedby a heightened rhetorical morality around the production,distribution and consumption of food.

What is a very noticeable aspect of the food issue in Ireland duringthe First World War is agrarian radicalism, which is another topicexplored by Borgonovo.

Agrarian radicalism, once again, harked back to the nineteenthcentury Land War and the movement in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries towards a major transition in land ownershipfrom Anglo-Irish landowning elites to formerly peasant proprietors.

Despite the changes wrought by the Land War and the British landacts, land congestion remained. Neither did agrarian ‘terrorism’ dieeasily.

Agrarian radicalism was all about a broader and so-called ‘cowversus plough’ tension at the heart of the Irish agriculturaleconomy, where the large cattle farmer, the grazier, was somethingof a folk devil.

Instances of forcible possession of land by republican agitators,who often openly collided with the police, were described in policereports as cattle drives. Most of these ‘cattle drives’ seemed to bebottom up affairs, often carried out ritualistically with mobscomplete with bands and flags. Land was often forcibly confiscated‘by order of the Irish Republic’ and ‘in the name of God’.

In 1918, though, the Sinn Fein hierarchy called a halt to agrarianagitation. Why? Often, such agitation was considered ‘too radical’

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in its confiscation of property for the liking of seniorrepublicans.

In some cases, too, radicalism was perceived by the leadership aslacking sufficient anti-imperialist sentiment – some were actuallycarried out in the name of British wartime measures aiming atequitable production and distribution.

Here was the British government urging farmers to grow more wheat(to turn from the cow to the plough) and here were mobs targetinglarge cattle farmers – effectively marching in line with Britishcompulsory tillage orders.

A major reason for the decline in agrarian agitation, though, wasthe replacement of this issue by the Irish conscription crisis in1918 and – critically – the healthy harvest of that same year.

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The Interwar Years

I want to park the wartime food issue there for the moment and fastforward to the coming to power of the Fianna Fail party in the 1930sunder the leadership of Eamon de Valera, pictured on the left.

TP O’Neill identified 1925 as the end of the ‘era of famine’, theyear when the Irish government felt confident enough to abandon therhetoric of famine suffering as a political weapon.

But after Fianna Fáil assumed power a few years later, in 1932, thegovernment instituted a number of economic policies derived fromearly, radical Sinn Féin policy.

Much of the party’s support was based on their anti-grazier attitudeto land distribution; the party professed to represent small farmersand labourers and sought to give the small farmer and the landlesslabourer preference in the reallocation of land through the LandCommission.

Shortly after coming to power, de Valera’s government also embarkedon an economic war with Britain. The Irish government withheld landannuities, annual payments due to the British exchequer, and aretaliatory economic war ensued, with the British withholding coal

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and the Irish agricultural produce. An informal slogan – burneverything British but their coal – soon emerged.

Fianna Fail’s protectionist policies of the 1930s brought increasingprosperity to Ireland’s urban centres, where cheaper food and betterjob prospects won the political party Fianna Fáil much working classsupport. The dietary standards of Ireland’s urban population alsoimproved during that decade.

Eamon de Valera’s Fianna Fail were in many ways the ideologicalinheritors of the Sinn Fein movement – they certainly saw themselvesas such in any case – and their intervention in the agriculturaleconomy in the interwar years continued, as they saw it, the broadthrust of Irish agrarian radicalism.

As de Valera put it, Fianna Fail’s mission was to reverse theimperialistic process whereby – quote – ‘the bullock has replacedthe human being’.

A leading member of Fianna Fail, Dan Breen, a trigger-happy hero ofthe revolutionary period, summed up this goal in his swashbucklingmemoir ‘My Fight for Irish freedom’, when he recalled standing atopthe Hill of Tara, the seat of the Irish High Kings before the Normaninvasion of the twelfth century.

Breen, pictured on the right, said - Quote

‘my eyes wandered over the plains beneath my feet. Here and there Isaw a stately mansion or a castle. But I knew that these were notthe homes of the clansmen of our kings. They were the fortresses ofthose who had deprived Irishman of their heritage.

Of farm homes there were none. Her and there a labourer’s cottagemarked the home of the Gael who had survived to be hewer of wood anddrawer of water for the conqueror.

I searched the countryside for the men whom this fair land shouldhave raised; but the roads were deserted, the bullock had replacedthe king and the peasant.’

There was a certain medievalism to this vision, as variouscommentators have pointed out, and de Valera, in his famous 1943Saint Patrick’s Day radio Address, reiterated this.

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In the Taoiseach’s dream of Ireland, her countryside would be –quote - ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villageswould be joyous with the sound of industry, with the romping ofsturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, and the laughterof happy maidens.’

But, as we know, de Valera’s dream of a nation of self-sufficientsmallholders was damned by unemployment and emigration. The removalof the British market led to the state subsidising the strugglingagricultural sector and the mass slaughter of herds.

For the political scientist Tom Garvin, such rhetoric typified theyearning of de Valerite conservatives towards an Ireland ‘pious,disciplined and folksy’, ‘a real-life version of The Quiet Man.’

What it was actually all about was rhetorical escapism from materialhardship. In 1943, as in the interwar years, de Valera repeatedlydeployed the ruralist rhetoric of green dreams to deflect attentionfrom material hardship.

Wrapped up within this rhetoric was a celebration of tillage, of theplough rather than the cow.

So, for both ideological and material reasons it had been governmentpolicy vigorously to encourage wheat-growing in the years precedingthe 1940s, the Emergency.

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WW2

World War came to Ireland on the 3rd of September 1939. At 11am thatday British Prime Minister Neville Chaimberlain declared war onGermany. When the Irish government responded that afternoon,declaring the Emergency Powers Act, Ireland’s independence was justseventeen years old, its constitution two years old, and its controlof the strategic ports barely a year old.

The wartime Ireland that appeared in the letters of the poet JohnBetjeman, pictured, the future British poet laureate and pressattaché to the British delegation in Dublin during the war, was aplace of charm but hardship, anxiously asserting its neutrality asBritain and Europe burned.

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Betjeman summed up the unique condition of wartime Dublin. Writingto his superiors in London he described Dublin as “cold, no petrol,no light, no coal, no trains; Irish language, partition, propaganda,propaganda, propaganda, rumour, counter-rumour, flat Georgianfacades,

Betjeman, who like a drink, went on: “Guinness, double Irish, singleScotch, sherry, Censors, morals, rain.”

If Betjeman was struggling to cope with wartime shortages, how didthe Irish people fare? Well, the Irish people during the SecondWorld War were famously dismissed by the historian FSL Lyons asresembling the cave dwellers in Plato’s analogy of the Cave; asLyons put it they were ‘totally isolated from the rest of mankind’.

Lyons’s articulation of wartime Ireland as Plato’s Cave rapidlygained acceptance at the popular level and histories of this periodtypically offer a survey of social life akin in its depiction ofboredom to Patrick Kavanagh’s Maguire, subject of his 1942 poem TheGreat Hunger, whose only antidote to the tedium of rural life was tooccasionally ‘sin’ over the warm ashes of the cottage fire.

‘O he loved his ploughs

And he loved his cows

And his happiest dream

Was to clean his arse

With perennial grass

On the bank of some summer stream’

The Irish people of the Second World War, when mentioned at all insubsequent histories, resembled the inhabitants of Plato’s Cave:metaphorically, they were placed closer to Maguire’s cottage firethan ‘the fire of life’.

These material circumstances fed in to what the historian ClairWills describes as an overwhelming ‘narrative of absence’surrounding Ireland during the Second World War – absence ofeverything – of food, of fun, of contact with the outside world.

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There was also state censorship - ‘propaganda, propaganda,propaganda’ as John Betjeman put it.

Historian Donal O’Drisceoil has described the suffocating Irishstate propaganda of the 1940s as ‘moral neutrality’ – in otherwords, the government persuaded people to put up with materialhardship by painting Ireland as a virtuous neutral, staying out of aconflict in atrocity and upholding spiritual – as opposed tomaterial - values.

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So, just why did Ireland undergo such material shortages during theSecond World War?

The short answer is the obstinacy of Irish neutrality in the face ofBritish bullying.

In an attempt to coerce Ireland onto the Allied side, British PrimeMinister Churchill oversaw the throttling of the Irish economy,which commenced in late 1940. Éamon de Valera’s Ireland, stillwithout its own merchant navy and perilously reliant on British foodand fuel supplies, was now subjected to the full force of Britisheconomic warfare.

This was to send the Irish food system into turmoil.

Between 1940 and 1941, the British cut the vital annual supply ofagricultural fertilisers to Ireland from 100,000 tons to zero.

Likewise, the British supply of feeding stuffs was slashed from sixmillion tons to zero.

Petrol, too, was cut. At Christmas 1940, pumps across the statesuddenly ran dry.

Trains soon stopped running as the supply of British coal stalled.Crime rocketed as people baulked against the resulting foodshortages.

With bellies rumbling and the centenary of Ireland’s Great Hungerapproaching, there were reports of the deer in the Phoenix Park andeven Dublin zoo animals going missing.

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Dublin prostitutes asked for payment not in cash but in sought-aftercommodities like tea.

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Soon, the problem of bread again reared its head.

As wheat production waned, the Irish government desperatelyintroduced the 100% black loaf (which in turn inhibited calciumabsorption, leading to a massive increase in childhood rickets)

It was claimed in the Irish parliament, Dáil Eireann, that quote‘the poor are like hunted rats looking for bread’.

To top it all, stray German bombs rained down, Dublin Castle wasravaged by fire and, most ominously, Ireland suffered a serious Footand Mouth outbreak. 1941 truly was Ireland’s wartime AnnusHorribilis, ushering in a wartime experience of hardship andabsence.

With the Irish economic situation aggravated by a booming blackmarket and the belated introduction of rationing, the situationdarkened. Famine soon became a realistic fear.

The shortages were starting to get to the increasingly inebriatedJohn Betjeman too, Betjeman wrote to Whitehall in 1943, describingconditions in Ireland: “No wine. No coal. No petrol. No gas. Noelectric. No paraffin. No bread’ But noted ‘Guinness good. Sherrygood”.

Food profiteering was rife and, as the satirical magazine DublinOpinion put it, the black market had prevailed over the white hopeof Sean Lemass, Minister for Supplies. As the 1945 Irish StatisticalAbstract noted, ‘criminal proceedings have shown a very seriousincrease generally since the outbreak of the war.’

In a 1944 article in The Bell, the literary magazine, columnistSheila May recounted a visit to two slums on either side of theLiffey. In the first she found some inhabitants who had never eatenfruit or vegetables and in the second she observed that wheninhabitants defecated it was from a third floor window into thestreet below.

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Decaying Georgian Dublin mirrored the shabbiness of the once-grandcapitals of the Iberian neutrals, Lisbon and Madrid, with theirpeeling plasterwork and cracked tiles. The sheer dirtiness of Dublinwas noted.

‘The children ran around in droves’, wrote another Bell contributor,of the Dublin tenements: ‘closed up in this dark alley, all in tornclothes’, ‘women sitting on doorsteps with sickly little childrenclose to their bosom, trying to enjoy the sun that broke through thegap on the opposite side of the street’.

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Now, the conspicuousness of the urban black market and urban povertytied in neatly with the hegemonic political discourse of the time.

This was the rhetoric of political ruralism – of the nobleploughman, a rhetoric which held the agrarian smallholder aloof andpitied those described by one Catholic commentator as ‘city dwellerswith harassed minds and dejected hearts’.

The problem of urban vice was paramount in the Irish wartime publicsphere. We find the buffoonish General Eoin O’Duffy – he ofIreland’s fascist Blueshirt movement – unsuccessfully attempting tolead a mass popular national movement against urban bicycle theft.

When you think about the prevalence of bicycles in Flann O’Brien’s‘The Third Policeman’ and the shortage of petrol, it’s clear whybicycles were of such paramount importance in wartime Ireland –especially for transporting food around.

As the wartime shortages ground on, Flann O’Brien lampooned them inthe pages of the Irish Times, but nonetheless anxiety about thebread supply rose. Soon, the Irish state’s role was transformed intothat of moral economic guarantor.

What do I mean by moral economic guarantor? Well, on the one hand,there’s the economic imperative of ensuring no one starved andenough bread was produced.

On the other, there’s the issue of moral neutrality which Imentioned previously, of the intensely moral state propaganda ofIreland in the 1940s.

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In terms of the food economy, the state relied on tip-offs fromvarious self-appointed guardians of public morals about numerousalleged criminal activities.

Anonymous tip-offs about such outrageous moral infractions such asthe display of ladies corsets in shop windows led to awkwardinspectors investigating the illegal sale of ladies’ undergarmentsacross the country. It was food, though, which received the mostattention and the most complaints about overcharging andprofiteering.

Indicative of this heightened morality, as the British supplysqueeze tightened, the state looked to the Catholic church tobolster its moral crusade against hunger and profiteering. Thebishops, as I’ll go on to mention, responded wholeheartedly.

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Compulsory tillage

In addressing the food issue in Ireland in the 1940s, compulsorytillage is again key.

A key tenet of Irish nationalist ideology associated land with theessence of the nation.

Established under the 1881 Land Act, the Irish Land Commission,which I mentioned earlier, oversaw the transfer of agriculturalholdings from landlords to tenants. Its work in acquiring andredistributing untenanted land continued after independence but thehistoriography of this body largely departs after the 1923 Land Act.

That act not only completed land purchase begun under the Britishacts, but gave the Land Commission powers to compulsorily acquireand redistribute land to the small man.

Although it possessed the power of land confiscation, the LandCommission rarely did so. If it did, it was usually to confiscatelarge swathes of land from big farmers. This represented a form ofinterventionism that was popular amongst landless labourers andsmallholders, who stood to gain most from it.

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But its work was halted by the government during the Second WorldWar as the production of food became the priority. And inparticular, the production of wheat.

Most significantly, before the harvest of 1940, Irish Minister forAgriculture James Ryan announced that he had instructed his officers‘to enter on to and take possession of holdings’ in the case of anyfarmer who failed to comply with the quota.

This empowered the department’s inspectors to act as bailiffs indispossessing farmers considered unproductive and to seize theirland for the state. After confiscation, the department would let theland to tenants considered more reliable.

This is highly significant. Up to this point the Irish state hadinterfered with private land by subdividing large estates ratherthan smaller holdings. Compulsory tillage of the Second World War,by contrast, raised the prospect of a widespread derogation ofproperty rights in the opposite direction.

Those affected by compulsory tillage during the Emergency weredisproportionately members of the lower socio-economic band of Irishfarmers.

Rural Ireland remained a nation of smallholders working unmechanisedfarms. According to the 1936 census half of Ireland’s workingpopulation was employed in agriculture and the prevailing size offarms was small: as much as 60% of Irish farms were 30 acres orless.

In a parliamentary debate of 1944 the Monetary Reform Party’s OliverJ. Flanagan, pictured, claimed that the compulsory tillage schemehad not affected the ‘ordinary farmer’, but had succeeded intargeting the ‘rancher’, quote ‘one of the greatest enemies that wehave in this country’. On the contrary, evidence of courtproceedings overwhelmingly demonstrates that ‘ordinary’ farmers -generally those whose farms were unmechanised and under 30 acres -were those punished under the legislation.

With its eviction of small farmers the Irish government’s Compulsorytillage of the Second World War was, then, a large nail in thecoffin for the rustic smallholder, and moreover for some of the

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central cultural conceptions about the essence of Irishness that hadpersisted from the Gaelic Revival.

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To force through these controversial measures, the government usedthe impending centenary of the Great Famine.

The state’s ‘Grow More Wheat!’ campaign became ubiquitous: theslogan was repeated on the radio, in political speeches from townsquare platforms, in newspapers, and even on the franking of postagestamps.

The rhetoric used was often highly emotive; a widely used propagandaposter depicted children in a field of wheat above the words ‘theydepend on you’.

‘We have no army in the fighting line to feed’, said Minister forAgriculture James Ryan, pictured on the left, in 1939, ‘but we havethe old, the infirm, the children, the masses’. It was the farmers’duty, he continued, ‘to supply their fellow men’.

The Catholic Church was on message too. In February 1942 CardinalJoseph MacRory, pictured on the right, Archbishop of Armagh andCardinal Primate of All Ireland, declared ‘the farmers, and theyalone, stand between us and famine.’

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There was more this, admittedly, than merely the cynicalmanipulation of historical memory.

By the end of 1941 Ireland was importing 1,000 tons of grain a week,but consumption was 1,000 tons a day. This was clearlyunsustainable.

After the Fall of France in June 1940 grave concerns arose about thepossibility that Ireland would run out of food and other essentialsupplies.

Just look at what was happening in the wider world - Faminesoccurred in Leningrad (1941/1942) and Bengal, pictured, (1942/1943).More worrying for the Irish government, western Europe saw famine inGreece (1941/1942), the Netherlands (1944/1945) and Poland (1944).

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In February 1944 reports of the 1943 Chinese famine landed on deValera’s desk. They vividly depicted the erosion of a progressive,hard-working social system by hunger. First, people sold clothingand bedding to make money to buy food.

Next, houses were torn down to sell timber. A desperate populationthen resorted to digging up crops half-grown, and eating roots andleaves. Finally, banditry reigned and over one million perished.

According to the report, there were two main reasons for thisdescent into death and barbarism: firstly, not enough rice had beengrown and secondly, the province was over-reliant on imports. Thesubstitution of the word ‘rice’ with ‘wheat’ provided a chillingparallel with Ireland’s supply crisis at the time.

Although most accounts of starvation in Europe were censored andnever reached the Irish public, some reports were allowed to filtertheir way into the national consciousness. In 1945, for instance, areport on the ‘menace of starvation’ was published which claimedthat ‘half of Europe, to mention nothing of Asia, is facing faminesuch as the world has not known since the Black Death’.

Radio and press propaganda depicted farmers as the shock troops inthe war against such apocalyptic possibilities. Minister forAgriculture Ryan repeatedly stressed the ‘very important position’of farmers and their responsibility to ‘prevent any want or faminein this country.’

Appealing to farmers in 1941, Minister for Supplies Lemassreiterated this message, urging farmers to increase production as amatter of urgency, revealing that ‘outside sources of supply arevirtually cut off’, reserves ‘insufficient’, and insistingdesperately that ‘people need bread’.

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And what of the church?

Well, the censored Irish newspapers publicised the catholichierarchy’s support for the state. ‘Bishops Remind People of Duty inCrisis’ ran one headline from 1941, accompanied by the bishops’joint appeal to the public to ‘place the common good above every

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private interest’ and to ‘support loyally the measures which theauthorities may deem necessary’.

Now, that the church were so willing to support state interferencemay raise some eyebrows. Once again, this illustrates the gravity ofthe food situation but also the power of the rhetoric of moralneutrality.

Although the Irish bishops were nervous about the increasing degreeof state interventionism, they generally subscribed to the anti-materialist rhetoric of neutrality.

Prominent Catholic intellectual Alfred O’Rahilly, pictured, used thepress to affirm Ireland’s right to stay out of what he called ‘acompetition in atrocity in which victory goes to the competitor whokills and destroys most.’

Similarly rustic sentiments appeared frequently in Irish newspapersat the time. A report from the same year in the Irish Pressdescribed mourners at the funeral of three women killed by Germanbombs in county Carlow: ‘Men, smoking, not talking – pure, mountainymen, whose feet are on the earth, to whom planes and bombs andcalibres of guns are a strange, strange language’.

Typically, pronouncements from the Catholic hierarchy and the clergychimed with this anti-materialist message. A Lenten pastoral of1941, for example, celebrated the ‘comparative poverty’ of Irelandas having saved her from war.

Compared with the other neutral Catholic states, the rhetoricalcloseness of the Irish government and the bishops on this issue wasstriking, illustrating the power and influence of the Church inIreland at this time.

Falling back on the famine theme, senior civil servants wrote to theCatholic bishops warning of quote ‘a return to the hardships enduredduring the forties of the last century’ unless the bishops joinedwith the state in urging greater wheat production.

De Valera wrote to Dublin Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, picturedon the right, to solicit his assistance ‘in bringing the acuteseriousness of the situation before the people.’

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The apogee of coalescence between church and state on this issuecame in an extraordinary crossing of the boundary between church andstate later in the Emergency when the Mayo county surveyor, FiannaFáil’s Seán Flanagan, himself issued a ‘pastoral letter’ to be readat all churches in the county calling for a ban on emigration sothat more wheat would be produced.

The bishops’ endorsement of the state’s productivity drive wasannounced as headlines in many daily newspapers. ‘Speed The Plough!Bishops Support “More Wheat” Drive!’; ‘Bishops Stress Farmers’Duty’;

‘every root of ground must play its part’ declared the Bishop ofRaphoe. ‘This is not exactly a subject for the altar or the pulpit’admitted the Bishop of Cork, ‘but the circumstances of the time arevery exceptional’ and the quote ‘threat of famine’ requires ‘mutualhelp and co-operation’; in his Lenten pastoral of 1942 the Bishop ofClonfert thanked the farmers for ensuring ‘starvation will not stalkour land again.’

John Betjeman, by this stage increasingly wearying of shortages,flippantly instructed his masters in Westminster to forget Irishgovernment ministers and to instead deal directly with those whoreally held the reins of power in Ireland - quote ‘the bishops,MacRory, McQuaid, and the papal nuncio’

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Albeit specific to Emergency scarcity, the rhetoric which I’ve justmentioned was a continuation of the post-independence nationalistidealisation of the small farmer and the ruralist ethic, embodied inthe ploughman - back hunched, tilling the soil with his horsesbeneath a beaming sun - depicted on the Irish pound note from 1929.

This concept was not depicted as a complex social or theologicalissue, but an all-embracing embodiment of the very spirit ofIrishness.

But the ruralist rhetoric masked an uncomfortable material reality.

With food prices rocketing in Ireland but wages stagnant, hundredsof thousands turned their back on what church and state urged was

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their moral economic duty and instead took the boat to the higherwages of the British war economy.

Perhaps the ultimate snub to the iconic Ploughman was the revelationthat a young farmer, who happened to be the all-Ireland ploughingchampion, had been forced from the land by compulsory tillageregulations and had instead taken to selling gravel in Dublin.

While church and state were celebrating the purity of the Irishrural smallholder, economic circumstances were forcing him off theland.

Resentment grew among rural dwellers that they were breaking theirbacks to produce enough bread for what political rhetoric encouragedthem to view as an idle urban poor, hungry, pathetic and depravedthanks to the corrupting influence of the urban environment.

Compulsory tillage, targeting small and unproductive farm units, wasaggravating the issue.

Because Ireland was neutral, the Allies denied the country modernproductive aids. Without these modern fertilisers, chemicals ormachinery, the smallholder was simply unable to meet the state’swheat production quotas and many found themselves evicted as aconsequence.

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The food situation was worst in the West of Ireland, where parallelswith the famine of the 1840s were most striking.

Liam O’Flaherty’s novel Famine, published in 1937, was a best-selling read during the Emergency. It tells the story of farmers inthe west of Ireland struggling to cope with the potato blight, andI’d like to read you a passage:

The stench was of active corruption. The old man seized the stalks that were marked withspots and began to pull them. The leaves withered when he touched them and the stalkssnapped like rotten wood.

The old man was pulling feverishly and shouting but was now surrounded by a wideninglake of spots.

Its flying all over the garden, said Thomsy. Look, man. Its all round you. You cant stop it.

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Whats that? said the old man, raising his head.

He looked all round him pathetically. Then his mouth fell open and he stood up straight. Hishands dropped to his sides.

Thereupon he crossed himself and bowed his head.

The wailing was now general all over the Valley.

O’Flaherty was a native of the Aran Islands and it was on thewestern seaboard that food shortages during the Second World War hithardest, forcing emigration and further eroding and undermining thatstaple of the imagined Ireland of the Gaelic revival: the purity oflife in the Irish West.

In correspondence written over two decades, Eibhlís NíShúilleabháin, a resident of theGreat Blasket Island, conveyed howwartime inflation had forced her off the islands. In 1931 shedescribed the island as a place where one might marry and raise afamily. By February 1940 she complained ‘meat and food and flour areall gone up in prices and they with other hardships of Islandstogether leave no hope atall for islanders.’ In June 1940 shereported ‘shillings are far and scarce at the moment’ and thatrabbit meat was their staple.

By April 1942 she revealed how Emergency shortages had tipped thebalance in favour of migration to the mainland. Islanders’ trips tothe mainland and back had become unfruitful: ‘no sugar is there, nosoap, no tea, no tobacco and the worst of all no flour nor bread norbiscuits nor paraffin oil for light nor a candle’. Such conditionsdid for the Blaskets and most emigrated to the mainland during the1940s, with the final evacuation of the islands occurring in 1953.

Ní Shúilleabháin’s correspondence demonstrates that Irish governmentrationing based on the release of small quantities from the localshop proved unsuitable to people in the most remote areas. Inoutlying communities in the west, men were expected to return ladenwith supplies for the community as a whole.

Hurried to a remote Irish-speaking area in west Mayo in 1943 by anaide, a senior Irish civil servant recalled the eerie spectacle ofemaciated people moving down from the hills towards his car,carrying sacks. It became clear that the villagers expected the

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sacks to be filled with flour. Disappointed men and women haranguedÓ Broin in Irish, angry that telegram messages to Dublin officialscomplaining of near-starvation had gone unanswered and claiming thatthey feared a recurrence of the Famine.

This recollection is supported by comparable contemporary reports ofconditions in the Irish West. In May the Dáil heard that in parishesin west Cork there were eight ounces of flour per head - the peoplethere were ‘practically on a black fast’. In Connemara, also inearly 1942, there were reports of a ‘three week bread famine’ inClifden because the local trader had had his petrol allowance cut.A rare entry in de Valera’s 1943 pocket diary reads simply ‘Kilrush:no bacon, no potatoes, no butter, no work’.

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But although famine fear was omnipresent and material conditionsharsh, the Irish people of the 1940s did not simply cross themselvesand bow their heads in resignation.

As mentioned, the black market in food boomed in Ireland of the1940s and provided an antidote, albeit a selfish one, to statepropaganda about food consumption and production and state pricecontrols on food.

Similarly, smuggling provided an antidote to shortages for borderdwellers thanks to the disparities in the rationing system on eitherside of the border.

Butter, bacon, eggs, sausages, ham, beef and jellies were lapped upby hungry northerners. In the opposite direction flowed soap,wireless batteries, candles, white bread, paraffin oil, sugar, cycletyres, contraceptives and, most commonly, tea and flour.

Illegal actions in the purchase and consumption of food were oftenlegitimated by a popular dislike for the state’s action in the foodeconomy, itself perhaps underpinned by an older ‘agin thegovernment’ mentality – another legacy of colonial rule.

These concerns fed into a very serious theological debate raging inthe normally sedate pages of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. Oneeminent theologian stressed that Catholics were not bound to obeystate law if it was excessive.

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Therefore, it was not sinful to go against the ration and overchargeon the controlled price for goods, quote, ‘provided that the excessis within reasonable limits’.

Charging twenty shillings for a pound of tea was wrong, therefore,but charging a shilling or two over the controlled price was morallyjustified. After all, he reasoned, – and I quote – ‘there’s nothingin the world like a nice cup of tea’.

The Irish people then, unlike the image of Plato’s Cave, did not allbow their heads in a spirit of resignation and subservience to statediktats.

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Ultimately, though, no one starved to death in Ireland during theSecond World War, although nutritional standards declined seriously.

Unlike in the 1840s, the spectre of famine was banished. How?Amazingly, and ultimately, through Guinness.

With hundreds of thousands of thirsty British and American troopsstationed in Northern Ireland in the long run-up to D-Day, demandfor Guinness from south of the border hit new heights.

Entering into a dangerous game of barter, the Irish governmentperiodically withheld Guinness supplies, demanding food aid inreturn.

Faced with a massive, demoralised and thirsty garrison in NorthernIreland, the British and American governments reluctantly andsecretly responded by sanctioning the release of much-neededfertilisers, tractors, feed, and food to the Irish government.

So, it’s no exaggeration to say that the black stuff saved Irelandfrom starving during the Second World War. So, as Flann O’Briensaid, ‘a pint of plain is your only man’.

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To conclude, Ireland of the 1940s was marked by a scarcity of staplefoodstuffs and the fear of hunger was omnipresent.

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It was in 1943, after Bengal was ravaged by mass starvation, that deValera first proposed that a history of the Great Famine be writtento mark its centenary.

But despite the church, state and even literary rhetoric of Hungerharking back one hundred years, it was evident that hunger andmaterial deprivation were concerns very much of the here and now.

With the pressure of mass food production weighing down on thestate, it was clear that the revered, hallowed rural smallholder –the embodiment of a less anglicised, less modern, more spiritualIreland - was often unable to meet the demand for wheat and incertain circumstances the land of these small farmers wasconfiscated by a government desperate to grow more food throughbigger, more efficient holdings.

Quite clearly, the Irish state was celebrating the rural smallholderand at the same time strangling him.

To emphasise this point, and to finish, I’d like to return toPatrick Kavanagh’s 1942 poem The Great Hunger.

Patrick Kavanagh, pictured, personified an atmosphere of decline,boredom and stasis in Emergency Ireland through Maguire, theprotagonist of his long poem. But Maguire should not be taken asevidence of Plato’s Cave providing an apt analogy for EmergencyIreland. Some were trapped in Plato’s Cave, perhaps, but througheveryday acts such as smuggling or engaging the black market somewere clearly able to escape.

Rather, I’d argue that Maguire was the product of a literary turnfrom romanticism toward a socio-realist aesthetic, a transitioninextricably linked to social and economic conditions in Irelandduring the Emergency.

Kavanagh’s Maguire may be the embodiment of a tedious lifestyle thathas been wrongly generalised as the norm, but through him the poetremoulded the ethic of moral neutrality into what he called an‘apocalypse of clay’: in doing so he trumpeted a representative andsymbolic victory of materialism over spirituality.

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It was to this new, and overwhelmingly materialistic reality that,with the threat of hunger removed, Ireland faced into in the post-war period.

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