Contemporary journalists and English people visiting Ireland blamed laws passed by the British Parliament (intended to help the poor) as part of the problem. "The dole" (as Frank McCourt describes the government’s welfare system in Angela’s Ashes) was not the only source of help. "Property" (that is, landowners) were also responsible. Some of the landowners actually
carried out their responsibilities.
But if a landowner had no tenants on his land, what responsibility would he have to provide for anything? How could "property" be called upon to care for the poor if the "property" had no poor to care for? A way around the Poor Laws was eviction of the people who had worked the land before the potatoes rotted. A letter (August 11, 1849) to the editor of the Illustrated London News makes the point:
By the recent establishment of the Poor-Law, relief was established to the destitute; but, instead of this law benefitting the poor, it is, in reality, desolating the land. Any poor-law, if enacted among a poverty-stricken people, who have no surplus food for themselves, only aggravates the evil. Seizures take place every day for poor-rates. The poor farmer, by this process, is unable to live himself; his land is thrown up, and he, too, is plunged into the vortex of poverty - the poorhouse.
The writer concludes the letter by pleading with
Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, and the British Parliament to do something to alleviate the anguish. If nothing is done, he predicts
...a fearful day of reckoning is at hand.
Months after that prediction, with the Poor Laws still in effect, the Illustrated London News
reported:
The system intended to relieve the poor, by making the landlord responsible for their welfare, has at once made it the interest, and therefore the duty, of the landlords to get rid of them.
As the same issue of the News points out, potato crops had failed and evictions occurred before. What made this time such a calamity? It wasn’t just the Poor Laws. Follow-up government policies like "An Act for the Protection and Relief of the Destitute Poor Evicted from their Dwellings" had serious side effects:
Under such stimuli and such auspices, the clearing process has gone on in an accelerated ratio, with Ireland...now dotted with ruined villages, and filled with a starving population...
And what "a starving population" there was!