Near the tail end of the famine that would claim a million Irish lives and drive twice as many overseas, James Ryan and his wife sailed for America, where they eventually earned enough to buy a farm in Wisconsin. Four generations later, his great-great-grandson, Paul Ryan, would be the GOP’s nominee for vice president.
For most people, a family’s rise from desperate immigrant to contender for the nation’s second-highest office is the story of America. Not, alas, for The New York Times. And when the family is Republican and Irish, it becomes a chance to use St. Patrick’s Day to suggest Paul Ryan is so mean, he would’ve starved his own great-great-grandpa.
Here’s how columnist Timothy Egan puts it: “You can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.”
The Timesman has something of an obsession with the Tea Party, variously calling it “unpatriotic,” “extremist” and a “Frankenstein monster.” Elsewhere, he reaches for the overwrought historic metaphor. This time he settled on the Great Hunger, though earlier he has called the Tea Party heirs to the nativist and anti-Catholic Know Nothings.
With one disclaimer: “There’s no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.” How gracious. For these words come right after he’d imagined Rep. Ryan transported back to 1840s Ireland, where Egan has him “wagging his finger at the famished.”
Now, it’s true the British were inept and incoherent in their response to the blight (though government incompetence seems an argument for, rather than against, the Ryan philosophy). It’s also true the official charged with administering the relief Britain did send, Charles Trevelyan, expressed the idiotic idea that the famine was God’s way of correcting a defect in the Irish character.
But in his determination to link Ryan with perhaps the most hated man in Irish history, Egan misses not only the larger economic causes that led to the Great Hunger but the far more compelling Paul Ryans of that drama.
Notwithstanding the prevailing orthodoxy, what elevated a potato blight into a human catastrophe was not a rigid adherence to free trade but decade upon decade of the opposite. This helps explain why the great emancipator of the Irish people, Daniel O’Connell, found himself in common cause with the champions of free trade.
O’Connell saw that the degradation of his people was the bitter harvest of centuries of British policies that had long restricted Irish trade, fostered Irish dependence on the potato and kept the Irish insecure, cashless tenants on plots they worked but could not own.
Certainly anti-Catholicism was a large factor. But the primary levers for keeping the Irish down were economic, rooted in a system of landed estates birthed in confiscation and sustained by monopoly. The landowners used their influence in Parliament to pass restrictions that enriched them at the expense of everyone else, including the English laborer as well as the Irish tenant farmer.
Arguably the most notorious of these were the Corn Laws, import tariffs designed to keep the price of grains high. In a speech in 1814, O’Connell pointed out that the names of all those supporting these distinctly un-Ryanite laws constituted a virtual roll call of those who have “most distinguished themselves against the liberty and religion” of the Irish people.
When the Corn Laws became an issue three decades later, two Ryanlike leaders — Richard Cobden and John Bright — would found the anti-Corn Law League, itself modeled on O’Connell’s Catholic Association. In speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, these men would press the moral as well as economic case for free trade. In 1846, they finally succeeded in having the Corn Laws repealed, though it came too late to save the Irish from hunger.
In part that’s because the system of land ownership, which kept the Irish out, cultivated the over-dependence on the potato, deprived the Irish of cash to buy grain and left the Irish tenant ever-vulnerable to eviction. “Almost every crime and outrage in Ireland is connected with the occupation or ownership of land,” wrote Cobden.
And he had a very Ryanesque solution: property rights. “I would give Ireland to the Irish,” said Cobden.
Around St. Patrick’s Day, we forgive a bit of blarney, even from the Times. The reality, however, is that had the British adopted Paul Ryanlike prescriptions for poverty in the decades before the famine — e.g., property rights and free trade — it’s likely John Ryan’s great-great-grandson would be a member of the Irish Dáil rather than the US Congress.