Interpretations

It is conventional in the historiography to distinguish two broad phases of response to the Famine – that over which the Conservative Party presided and the period from 1846–52 in which the Whigs were in government. Peel's response is generally viewed favourably by historians, albeit with caveats. Kinealy notes that he was constricted by his assumption of Irish exaggeration and his conviction that the crisis would be short lived. Still, he has generally got off relatively lightly. The Whigs’ period in office under the premiership of John Russell is, by contrast, often viewed with some disfavour. Russell was a believer in the necessity of modernising Ireland in the long term and is accused of having his eyes too much on the distant scene. The passivity of his comment that ‘some kind of hope may be entertained that some ten or twelve years hence the country will […] be in a far better state’ shows a certain lack of urgency, a certain lassitude which did not bode well for those who were in dire straits.

However, instead of regarding the Whigs as the simple villains of the piece, it is necessary to give much more attention to the complexity of their attitudes and to the importance of the civil service as well as the politicians in determining the nature and limitations of the response. It has been a fairly recent development in historiography to consider the systemic and structural flaws of an economic mindset that refused to interfere in the market even in such exceptional circumstances as there were in Ireland.