The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór)
Potato blight and a failed government response kill about a million people and drive more than a million to emigrate.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
On the eve of the Famine, Ireland was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, with about 8.2 million people in 1841. Around a third of them, mostly labourers and small tenants in the west and south, depended almost entirely on the potato, which grew well on tiny plots of poor land. Many rented from landlords, often absentee, who had little stake in their welfare.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
What happened
In September 1845 a new fungus-like disease, Phytophthora infestans, reached Ireland and destroyed perhaps a third of the potato crop. In 1846 it destroyed almost all of it. 1847, “Black ‘47”, was the worst year of death, and blight and hunger continued into the early 1850s.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
People died less of outright starvation than of the diseases that came with it: typhus, relapsing fever, dysentery. Workhouses filled far beyond capacity. Whole families were evicted and their cabins tumbled so they could not return. Towns like Skibbereen in west Cork became bywords for horror.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
How the government responded
Sir Robert Peel’s government bought Indian corn from America and set up public works in 1845–46, which limited deaths in the first year. His successor Lord John Russell’s Whig government, with Treasury official Charles Trevelyan as a key figure, was more committed to free-market principles. It refused to interfere with the grain trade, relied on public works that paid starvation wages, and then, in 1847, after briefly running soup kitchens that fed some three million people a day, shifted the burden onto Irish ratepayers through the overstretched workhouses.
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
The 1847 Gregory clause denied relief to anyone holding more than a quarter of an acre, forcing many to give up their land to eat. Some landlords helped their tenants; others cleared them or shipped them abroad.
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
The toll
About one million people died, and between 1845 and 1855 more than two million emigrated, over a million of them during the Famine years themselves. Many crossed the Atlantic on overcrowded “coffin ships”, and thousands died at sea or in quarantine stations such as Grosse Île in Canada.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
What it left behind
The Famine hit the Irish-speaking poor of the west hardest, and it hastened the decline of the Irish language. It swept away the class of cottiers and labourers and made consolidated family farms, late marriage and emigration of non-inheriting children the norm. It created Irish America, which would fund and inspire later nationalist movements.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- Modern Ireland 1600–1972 — R. F. Foster, Allen Lane (1988)
- The American Irish: A History — Kevin Kenny, Longman (2000)
It also became the strongest argument in the nationalist case against the Union: if Ireland had been part of the richest country in the world, why had a million of its people died? Ireland now holds an annual National Famine Commemoration, and memorials stand in Dublin, Boston, New York, Toronto and Sydney.
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
A catastrophe made by British policy: food was exported while people starved, and some, following the nineteenth-century nationalist John Mitchel, have called it genocide.
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
Blight caused the crop failure, but government choices turned it into mass death: relief was inadequate, shaped by free-market dogma, providentialism and prejudice, and cut back too soon. Most reject "genocide" because there was no intent to destroy, while holding the state culpable.
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Atlas of the Great Irish Famine — John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Cork University Press (2012)
Officials such as Charles Trevelyan saw the Famine as a chance to reform Irish society and insisted Irish property must pay for Irish poverty. In 1997 Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged that "those who governed in London at the time failed their people".
- This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52 — Christine Kinealy, Gill and Macmillan (1994)
- Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory — Cormac Ó Gráda, Princeton University Press (1999)
Why it matters today
The Famine is the hinge of modern Irish history. It emptied the countryside, made emigration a way of life, created the global Irish diaspora and hardened nationalist anger at British rule. Treating it as a mere natural disaster, or joking about it, deeply offends many Irish people.