Another half-million excess deaths occurred during the remaining Famine years, 1848-50. Relatively few died of literal starvation: hunger-induced infectious diseases did most of the damage.
Although Britain declared that the Famine was over, in 1848 nearly 1.5 million Irish people depended on the Poor Law for existence, despite the harsh regulations governing the provision of relief; three-quarters of the destitute were on outdoor relief; over 40 per cent of the workhouse inmates were paupers or abandoned children. Desperate people clamoured for admission to pestilential poorhouses, which guardians no longer inspected for fear of infection. Mass graves filled pauper cemeteries.
The Gregory quarter-acre clause of the Poor Law Amendment Act acted as a spur to the clearance policy of many landlords and facilitated the eviction of probably half a million people. Killarney board of guardians observed that the clause had introduced a "spirit of ejectment" into the country.
The increased Poor Law taxation placed a heavier burden on landlords whose estates were subdivided, thus providing an incentive to clear them of smallholders. In October 1848, the Marquis of Sligo, who had hitherto shown leniency to his tenants, said he was now "under the necessity of ejecting or being ejected".
Evictions peaked at 20,000 families - over 100,000 children, women and men - in 1850. In 1847 there were almost 730,000 farms in Ireland; by 1851 the number had fallen to 570,000.
British officials and Irish landlords insulated themselves mentally against the inhumanity of mass evictions by taking the view that clearances were essential for economic progress. The dispossessed cottiers and labourers paid the price.
Lord Palmerston, an Irish landlord and the Foreign Secretary, considered "it is useless to disguise the truth that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation, and that this change necessarily implies a long, continued and systematic ejectment of small-holders and of squatting cottiers."
The gap between how the Famine was perceived in London and Dublin widened. London saw the crisis as a means of ridding Ireland of its less viable holdings.
Edward Twistleton, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, reminded Trevelyan in February 1848: "It is wished that the Irish should not come upon the national finances for the relief of their destitute. It is also wished that deaths from starvation should not take place. But these wishes are as unreasonable as if you ask us to make beer without malt, or to fly without wings."
In July, the stench of rotting stalks returned. The potato crop was destroyed by the end of the month. The failure broke the will of many who had survived Black '47.
Key members of the Whig administration believed that, to transform Ireland from a subsistence to a wage-earning economy, it was necessary to consolidate small-holdings. After 1847 the Poor Law was used increasingly to encourage not only paupers but also small ratepayers to emigrate.
Trevelyan refused Twistleton's request for assistance for bankrupt unions because "I do not know how farms are to be consolidated if small farmers do not emigrate, and by acting for the purpose of keeping them at home we should be defaulting at our own object. We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital, we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country."
Chancellor Wood admitted: "What we really want to obtain is a clearance of small farmers." The prime minister summed up lamely: "It is better that some should sink, than that they should drag others down to sink with them."
When the Poor Law system teetered on the brink of collapse in 1849, the Rate-in-Aid Act introduced to assist western unions still confined the burden of providing relief to Ireland, not the UK. With the debts of the unions mounting to £500,000, Twistleton resigned. "He thinks that the destitution here is so horrible" - the Lord Lieutenant, Clarendon, explained to Lord John Russell - "and the indifference of the House of Commons to it so manifest, that he is an unfit agent of a policy that must be one of extermination."
While increasingly critical of Russell for having lost authority over his cabinet, Lord Clarendon blamed Wood, Trevelyan and Grey: "C. Wood, backed by Grey, and relying upon arguments (or rather Trevelyanisms) that are no more applicable to Ireland than to Loo Choo, affirmed that the right thing to do was to do nothing - they have prevailed and you see what a fix we are in."
He urged the prime minister: "Surely this is a state of things to justify you asking the House of Commons for an advance, for I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination."
Instead, Trevelyan offered the Quakers £100 to restart direct aid. They declined, pointing out the support that Ireland needed was "far beyond the reach of private exertion, the government alone could raise the funds and carry out the measures necessary in many districts to save the lives of the people".
The Asiatic cholera pandemic of 1848-9 added to the physical and mental agony. In the early months of 1849, mortality again reached about 2,700 a week. A report from western unions in June described the peasantry as having "Famine unmistakably marked on their brows". In the same month, alleged cannibalism was reported from Clifden.
A select committee inquiry into the administration of Kilrush union concluded that a neglect of public duty "has occasioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilised age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England".