The facts about the terrible years between Fall 1845 and Spring 1852, however, are generally agreed upon. Most accounts agree that the fungus which affected the potato crops in Ireland, phytophtora infestans, probably came from America, first to Europe in 1843 and then to Ireland in August, 1845 (in Dublin) with the first notice in the Irish press about the fungus appearing on September 9, 1845. The type of potato grown by most of the poorest cottiers (landless laborers) in the south and west of Ireland was the lumper, a poorer quality potato that was ideally suited for poorer soils, and whose high yields made it attractive and easy to grow in the concentrated growing spaces that were available to these families. Most of these potatoes were grown in makeshift drills or conical mounds (mostly in the North) and in lazy beds in the South and West which required only basic maintenance and could allow for concentrated planting patterns to allow a small cottier to grow enough potatoes to sustain his family for 9-10 months of the year. This exclusive reliance on the potato, while it did constitute a better diet among the poor than in other European states, especially when supplemented with buttermilk or small amounts of meat, did mean that any damage to the potato crop could bring disaster to thousands. And in fact, the failure of the potato crops in the fall of 1845 was at least the fifth in 100 years, with at least one of those—the Famine of 1740--causing suffering and loss of life on a scale approaching the catastrophe of 1845-52. Why this particular disaster is remembered as The Great Famine or The Great Hunger is part of the answer to the question of what the Famine meant. As Michael de Nie described it, this—the “last major Western European famine occurred in a country politically untied with the most economically dynamic nation in the contemporary world” (84). Within a block of European nations with colonial histories that considered itself progressive, this sort of calamity was simply not supposed to happen.

In 1841, the population census for Ireland counted 8.1 million souls, nearly a doubling of the population in less than fifty years, much of it due, ironically, to the relatively rich diet afforded by the potato (Kennedy, Ell, Crawford, Clarkson 26). From 1841 to 1852, the population of Ireland fell over 33% in a pattern of depopulation that continued into the twentieth century, when population levels fell below four million, a figure that has been exceeded only in the past decade or so. Total mortality rates differ among historians, with the more modest estimates for the 5-6 year period when the blight affected crop yields hovering around 1.5 million (Gray, O’Grada) and more radical estimates exceeding 2 million souls. Emigration accounted for another 1.5 million during the years of the Famine, with another million or so in the two and a half decades after the disappearance of the blight. “The Unpeopling of Ireland” (25) is what Liam Kennedy, Paul Ell, E.M. Crawford, and L.A. Clarkson called this process, as though the land itself seemed to conspire in the demise or exile of these millions of unfortunates. One of the surprising elements of this story is the rapidity with which misfortune began to stalk the poorest cottiers. This was largely due to the appalling poverty that these families lived in before 1845, a condition which had been a staple of travel accounts from Ireland for over a hundred years. It’s also important to note that the blight hit with greater severity in Ireland than it did in the rest of Europe (Keating 40). These conditions, compounded by absentee landlordism, cruel land rent practices like conacre which amounted to the harshest form of sharecropping, and the dispossession of Catholic landownership in the two and a half centuries before 1845 set the conditions for a disaster of unparalleled scope.

Most of the key figures in the Famine story belong to the English side, particularly the two prime ministers who presided over the catastrophe—Robert Peel and John Russell, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Wood. In the first eight months after the first reports of widespread crop failures because of the blight, Robert Peel’s Tory government achieved the nearly miraculous by providing Famine relief that reached virtually everyone in need of help. This was accomplished through the purchase of so called “Indian Corn” from The United States to replace the failed potato, the distribution of food depots to distribute food, the establishment of work relief schemes in the hardest hit areas of Ireland, and finally, the repeal of the Corn Laws which had artificially held corn trading prices high to the advantage of English farmers. This last move proved to be Peel’s undoing, and in June 1846, the Tories were voted out of office, to be replaced by John Russell’s Whig government, which had largely opposed Peel’s relief schemes because of their (the Whig’s) adherence to what was called a “laissez-faire” approach to government and economic policy. Laissez-faire politics stood firmly on the principle that it was not the position of the government to interfere in the free enterprise system, trusting in that system to “correct” imbalances in the supply and availability of goods such as overpopulation and crop failures. To say the least, this system favored those who stood to gain most from any fluctuations in the economic process and penalized those least capable of surviving events like crop failures.

In another of the many ironies that abound in this story, the Irish Catholic MP Daniel O’Connell from Derrynane, Co. Kerry, also known throughout Ireland as “The Liberator” because of his role in repealing the anti-Catholic Penal Laws, supported Russell’s appointment, in the hope that Russell would be sympathetic to the sufferings of Ireland. He was wrong. Russell and Trevelyan, anxious to correct what they perceived to be unwarranted interference in the economic processes that had brought great wealth to England, shifted most of the financial responsibility for relief to local landlords, and increased relief efforts in the form of public works, all of which might have still saved many had the blight not come earlier and struck more powerfully in 1846 than in the previous year. This meant that people ate what little potato crop they had been able to set aside as seed in order to save themselves, and in the process doomed themselves to a hard winter season. People who had little energy to work were forced to apply themselves to public works schemes which paid little and were often as deadly as the attendant fevers and diseases that accompanied starvation. October 1846 saw the first public reports of Famine-related deaths in newspapers throughout Ireland, Europe and the United States. The labor that these public works offered was additionally demeaning because it produced little of any real value to the local economy: famine roads, cut out of rocky hillsides, led nowhere, as though the point was to deprive these indigent workers of any meaningful outcome for their labor. Many of these fatal projects can still be seen in parts of the Southwest.

For those sufferers at the end of their resources, the infamous workhouse offered the only recourse (see photos of the Cahirciveen Workhouse on this website). It was for many the sad culmination in a long series of devastations, wherein starving and fever-ridden families were separated by sex and confined to long halls filled beyond capacity with other fever-ridden unfortunates. The children were also separated from their parents, most of them never to be reunited, and the many mass graves near most of the workhouse sites are silent witness to the appalling mortality during the worst years of the Famine. Workhouses that had been commissioned in the early years of the nineteenth century for 800 to 1200 people, after a model already implemented in England, were filled with three and four times that number, with hundreds more being refused admission because there simply was not enough room and food to help them. The Folklore Commission at the turn of the twentieth century collected dozens of stories about mothers and children walking for days only to find that they could not be accommodated, and then turning quietly away to die unattended in ditches and bog holes. The records and minute books of the various Relief Unions in the country tell the story of death and suffering in cold mathematical terms. Many of these can also be found on this website.

Sadly, 1847, “Black ’47,” brought little respite. It was one of the coldest winters on record and the ravages of starvation and disease were as bad as in any year of the Famine. To compound the ills suffered by Famine victims, most were too sick or weak to lay in a store of turf from the local bogs, a free source of warmth and fire to cook with that had sustained them for centuries. Thus the severity of the winter was felt intensely by those too weak to cut and stack turf, and mortality rates rose sharply before the turn of the new year. While reports of the blight fell in 1847, there was little in the way of seed for planting new crops and scattered reports that the 1847 potato crop had been successfully harvested meant little to those without seed or without means to plant what little was left. 1848 brought no relief and reports of the blight indicate that it returned to Ireland with renewed ferocity. By late 1847, early 1848, emigration to the new world began to peak, as the poorest cottiers were forced to accept paid passage to a world they could scarcely imagine. Most of these emigrations were to Grosse Isle, Quebec, Canada, which was still part of England’s colonial empire and therefore required little in the way of official permissions and paperwork for these often ill passengers, and to the United States, where many families had relatives. One of the cruelest chapters in this story was the practice of sending the poorest and most helpless families across the Atlantic in old ships that were no longer seaworthy, in what became notorious as “coffin ships.” The actual number of souls lost at sea is still difficult to determine. The practice of forcibly evicting these cottiers became widespread after financial responsibility for Famine relief was shifted to Irish landowners, and precipitated the single largest emigration from any European nation in modern history. Mortality rates vied with emigration numbers in the winter of 1848-9 as snow fell in some parts of southwestern and central Ireland, and a public inured to constant public appeals for Famine relief contributions began to turn to other issues, like the cholera epidemic that hit both Ireland and Europe at the same time. Christine Kinealy noted with some irony that when Queen Victoria visited Cobh near Cork City in August 1849, her “visit was intended to provide proof that the Famine was finally over, and to attract capital and investment into the restructured Irish economy. These aspirations proved to be illusory. In 1849, the Workhouses were still providing relief of over one million people and, in some areas, mortality in 1849 was higher than it had been in Black ‘47” (145).

By 1850-51, most newspaper reports assumed that the Famine was over, with the virtual disappearance of phytophtora infestans from most of the areas that had been hardest hit. Emigration rates declined from a high of 250,000 in 1847-48, to 200,000 for the next five to six years, and then settled between 70,000 and 100,000 per year thereafter well into the new century. Seventy percent of those emigrations eventually reached The United States, thus helping to write a critical chapter in American history. In Ireland itself, the effects of the Famine and emigration were profound: arable land was reapportioned to take profitable advantage of the now depopulated south and west, and in the same area—the Gaeltacht—the Irish language declined nearly into extinction, since those who spoke the language daily were also the hardest hit by starvation, disease and forced evictions. Irish men and women who survived to start new lives in England had to endure vilification as English racism cast them as part of an “infection” which threatened to throw the English working classes into “degeneration.” Those who made it to America suffered similar vilification, but also eventually managed to establish themselves as an indispensable part of the labor force, most notably as domestics in middle class Eastern cities like Boston, and as physical laborers on the various canal and railroad projects that accompanied westward expansion. The American Civil War also found ready use for Irish men, and several brigades of Irish emigrants distinguished themselves in combat on both sides of the conflict.

In May 1995, then president of The Republic of Ireland Mary Robinson spoke in New York City on the 150th anniversary of The Great Hunger, and in her remarks we can see where some of the debate over the meaning of the Famine for both Ireland and America still simmers:

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Robert A. Smart, Ph.D.
Quinnipiac University, 2005

The Ireland Story, the source of the graphs in this page - used with permission.

http://www.historyireland.com/magazine/features/feat2.html Good article by historian Peter Gray on the ideology of Famine Relief

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/terrace/adw03/peel/ireland/famine.htm Victorian Web site that places the Famine within the context of Victorian English politics and culture

http://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish_famine.html New Jersey School System Irish Famine Curriculum for teachers and students

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/4/1/14412/14412-8.txt John O’Rourke’s history of the Famine, e-text version from Gutenberg, first history of the Famine.

http://www.qub.ac.uk/en/imperial/ireland/famine.htm “Visual Representation of the Famine,” contemporary news accounts and some illustrations

http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/past/famine/index.htm Pretty good in-depth history of the Famine, nationalist slant.