Echoes of the Great Famine in the Covid Era
Echoes of the Great Famine in the Covid Era
by Robert Billard at Brownstone Institute
In Spring 2020, supposedly “civilized” nations of the world tackled the prospects of how best to subjugate their domestic populations. At this time I was struck by seemingly obvious parallels to another sad chapter in the history of human misery: the Irish Potato Famine. There are many core similarities marking the two calamities.
Both evolved from real biological threats that did actually exist (a potato blight in Ireland and a novel coronavirus globally); yet government choices (rooted more in ideology and control) amplified the suffering far beyond anything naturally inflicted. British policies during the famine prioritized exports and landlord profit over human lives (Irish landlords at this time were a gentry class called the “Protestant Ascendancy” that exercised social, political, and economic domination over the subject population). Likewise, lockdown mandates favored top-down edicts over personal choice and community resilience, which only favored the social elite who could afford to sequester. Both eras saw freedoms trampled: the Irish lost access to their own food and land, while Covid restrictions silenced dissent, shuttered churches, and confined people to their homes, all under the guise of public safety.
The Irish Potato Famine’s Man-Made Roots
The Irish catastrophe of 1845-1852 killed over a million and forced another million to emigrate, but it stemmed from more than crop failure. British governance enforced a system where Irish tenant farmers grew cash crops for export, leaving potatoes as their sole staple. When the blight hit, food ships sailed out of Irish ports laden with grain and livestock, bound for England, while locals starved. Relief came too late and too stingy, burdened on absentee landlords who evicted families to cut costs. This was no act of God, but rather policy as punishment and tied to centuries of colonial disdain.
Covid’s Echo: Control Over Cure
Fast-forward to 2020, and a similar script unfolded. The virus was indeed deadly for the vulnerable, but the response (in the form of indefinite shutdowns, mask mandates, and travel bans) created a cascade of harms far worse than the thing it was trying to mitigate. Economies ground to a halt, mental health crises surged, and children lost years of schooling, all while leaders preached “Follow the science” from their insulated bubbles. Freedom of speech crumbled under censorship of dissenting doctors, religious gatherings faced police raids, and personal autonomy yielded to tracking apps and vaccine passports. These toxic measures (sold as temporary) corrosively lingered, forever eroding trust in institutions.
Lessons in Liberty
In both tragedies, the state positioned itself as savior, only to wield power that prolonged the pain. Ireland’s famine could have eased with halted exports and more directed aid; Covid’s toll would have been lessened through targeted protection as opposed to blanket coercion. The common thread? Governments that view people as subjects, not sovereigns.
In the raw opening of her 1995 single “Famine,” Sinéad O’Connor cuts straight to the bone: “Okay, I want to talk about Ireland. Specifically, I want to talk about the ‘famine.’ About the fact that there never really was one. There was no ‘famine.'” She wasn’t denying the horror of the emaciated bodies, the coffin ships, and ghost towns left behind. O’Connor was calling out the lie at its heart: what history labels a natural disaster was, in truth, a deliberate starvation engineered by a distant elite ruling class. Her words hang over us today, a stark reminder as we sift through the wreckage of the Covid years. Another real affliction, another cascade of misery, another round of officials who turned crisis into catastrophe through sheer force of misguided (at best), nefarious, and illegal edicts.
Fall, 1845, Ireland. The potato fields, lifeline for nearly half the population, withered under a fungal blight imported from the Americas. It was a brutal blow, to be sure. But the dying didn’t start with the agricultural rot; it accelerated with the ships that kept sailing. Under British rule, Ireland produced vast surpluses of beef, butter, and oats (enough to feed its people ten times over). Yet those goods flowed out to British markets, guarded by bayonets if locals dared protest.
Prime Minister John Russell’s government clung to a dogma disguised as “free-market,” refusing to interfere with trade even as warehouses brimmed and ditches filled with corpses. Landlords, many being English absentees raking in rents from afar, got the green light to clear estates, evicting hundreds of thousands to make way for grazing sheep. Soup kitchens opened, but only after months of delay, and they shut down when the optics soured. By 1852, a nation of eight million had shrunk by a quarter. This wasn’t famine by fate; it was famine by fiat.
Now shift to March 2020. Alarms blared about a respiratory virus jumping from Wuhan labs or wet markets (take your pick), hitting lungs and hospitals hard. Early deaths mounted, fear gripped the airwaves, and something had to give. But what followed wasn’t nimble adaptation; it was a sledgehammer to the natural human order. Governments worldwide, from Washington to Whitehall, rolled out “Two weeks to slow the spread” that stretched into years of house arrest for the healthy. Businesses boarded up windows, not from the virus, but from edicts that deemed that a haircut was more perilous than a supermarket run. Churches and schools padlocked their doors while big-box corporations, liquor stores, and strip clubs stayed open as “essential.” Protesters waving signs about bodily choice faced rubber bullets; online voices questioning the data got shadow-banned or worse.
The parallels scream if you listen. Both crises fed on vulnerability. The Irish poor crammed into potato-dependent hovels, the elderly and immunocompromised isolated in a world suddenly too risky for touch. But officials in each era chose paths that deepened the divides. In Ireland, colonial overseers treated the Irish as expendable, their pleas dismissed as the whining of inferiors. During Covid, experts and politicians lectured from podiums about equity, yet their rules spared the powerful: governors dining maskless at French Laundry feasts while the plebeian class queued for rations. Victim-blaming threaded both narratives. “Lazy Micks” hoarding relief in 1847 or “Covidiots” dodging vaccines in 2021. The result was famine not just of food or movement, but of dignity.
Dig deeper, and the toll on liberties binds these stories tight. The Irish famine stripped the right to sustenance and soil. Farmers who tilled the land for generations found themselves shipped off like chattel, their homes torched to prevent squatters. British laws like the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1838 funneled aid through workhouses that broke families apart, all to enforce moral reform on the “idle.” Echo that forward: Covid mandates fractured spiritual assemblies, the lifeblood of faith and fellowship. Synagogues emptied, Easter services streamed to empty pews, and priests were fined for offering last rites. Speech? Forget it. Platforms throttled surgeons and statisticians who pointed to Sweden’s lighter touch or the Great Barrington Declaration’s call for focused protection. Personal liberty morphed into a privilege for the compliant, with apps pinging your compliance score like some dystopian tally.
I am not the first to make this connection, either. Writing at the height of the hysteria, in March 2021, Kristina Garvin eloquently made a very similar connection. In her piece, she described Irish sentiment towards the famine as tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Modern observers have likewise recognized that global Covid lockdown measures were part of a broader “great reset” designed to reframe the world order into a more globalist and centralized system.
The avoidability of it all is a giant gut punch. Historians tally what might have been in Ireland: halt the exports, stockpile grain locally, invest in crop diversity years earlier. The blight hit Belgium too, but deaths there numbered in the thousands, not millions, thanks to saner stewardship. For Covid, the data piles up post-mortem. Lockdowns saved few lives net, per Oxford’s own models, but wrecked supply chains, spiked suicides, and ballooned debt that future generations will shoulder. Sweden’s schools stayed open, their kids unscathed; Florida’s beaches drew crowds, their curves no steeper than New York’s iron-fisted grip. Choice worked where coercion faltered.
O’Connor’s song ends on a note of inherited rage, the kind that simmers across generations. “We must learn to love each other,” she pleads, but first, reckon with the architects. The Irish famine birthed a diaspora that seeded revolutions and songs of defiance. Covid’s lockdowns? They’re forging a quieter revolt, one ballot at a time, as parents grapple with lost educations, military service members fight for reinstatement, and workers try to recover from careers ruined by the carnage. All these examples remind us: threats are real, but so is resilience. When states step in as wardens, they don’t just manage risk but rather manufacture ruin.
The lesson is simple. Trust people with their lives, their choices, their communities. Governments have formal responsibilities to their people, and micromanaging breathing or bread consumption are not among them. Let crises teach humility, not hubris. Otherwise, the next blight will find us just as brittle.
Echoes of the Great Famine in the Covid Era
by Robert Billard at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society