Soup and Providence: Varieties of Protestantism and the Great Famine

Abstract

In a volume on popular politics in the Great Irish Famine, the author of an essay primarily exploring the role of Protestant clergy must confront a contradiction in terms. ‘Popular politics’ is a term that entered the English language early in the French Revolution1 to describe the politics of the ‘people’ in the sense of ‘[t]hose without special rank or position in society; the mass of the community as distinguished from the nobility or the ruling classes; the populace’.2 The largest component of the Protestant clergy in the Atlantic Archipelago-those of the Church of England and Ireland-were simply incapable of engaging in ‘popular politics’. They were, by definition, members of a ruling class, and if they were involved in protests or riots they were probably trying to minimize the harm that the populace might instigate. One might suppose that the ministers of the Church of Scotland were in the same category, but two years before the Great Irish Famine that institution had its own ‘Great Disruption’. That event, together with the Famine, led directly to important popular politics on the part of the Presbyterian clergy in post-Famine Ireland. So, whereas most of the essays in this volume address popular politics during the Great Famine, in this essay the popular politics prompted by the Famine mostly occur after it. Although I do not emphasize the Roman Catholic clergy in my treatment of the Famine, I do suggest in my conclusion that the difference between their post-Famine popular politics and that of their Presbyterian counterparts can help us understand how the Great Famine contributed to the conversion of Irish politics from largely Anglicans versus non-Anglicans in 1798 to Protestants versus Catholics in 1886.