IRISH FAMILY HISTORY
The Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, comes quickly to the minds of family history researchers when thinking about events that may have influenced their Irish ancestors to migrate. At that time there was much internal migration within Ireland, and sadly, many left Ireland for another country – such as Australia - to escape the devastating effects of the Great Hunger on their family.
COVID-19 and Ireland
Like the current COVID-19 pandemic,0 there were historical epidemics too which affected many countries, including Ireland. They had a huge impact on Irish families, on Irish communities and even on historical record keeping. Just as COVID-19 is affecting families and communities across the world, accounts of the various plagues in Ireland suggest some parallels with our current situation.
You can’t have missed the news coverage of the current COVID -19 pandemic in Australia, but you may be wondering how Ireland and other countries are doing. The website Worldometers1 provides an up to date record of statistics in the over 200 countries affected by COVID-19. But unlike many news reports, here they analyse the raw numbers, taking account of the population size. For example, here are the numbers for 23 April 1.40pm (WAST). Day from GMT+0.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
TOTAL CASES
NEW CASES
TOTAL DEATHS
NEW DEATHS
TOTAL RECOVERED
ACTIVE CASES
SERIOUS, CRITICAL
TOTAL CASES / M
TOTAL DEATH / M
TESTS
TESTS / M
+1
5,045
1,547
45
261
3
466,659 18,300
+25
9,233
7,580
147
3,566
161
111,584 22,598
+638
N/A
118,996
1,559
2,034
276
583,496
+18 75 AUSTRALIA 6,667 17,607 +936 794 IRELAND 138,078 +4,583 18,738 UK
8,595
On this date Ireland had more than twice the number of confirmed cases (column 1) as Australia, but column 8 shows that, once you take account of the different population sizes, Ireland has a total cases per million 13 times that in Australia, and nearly twice the rate in UK. But these differences are likely to be affected by many other things, including each governments’ restrictions, how well they are observed in each country, the population age structure, and testing rates (see column 10). Ireland tests far more people per million population than UK and a little more than Australia. 1Data is drawn from releases in each country
Ireland and the Plagues
Historical plagues and epidemics have had a huge impact on our ancestors and on the availability of records about them. The state of medical knowledge at the time affected how the plagues were treated and spread, and how we interpret the medical conditions described in the records. From pre-history in Ireland there were accounts of plagues, well before the Great Hunger began in the middle of the 1800s.
PRE-HISTORY Published in 1906, The Smaller Social History of Ireland, by Irish historian P W Joyce (1827-1914) described concepts of disease and plague in ancient Ireland. Joyce recounts the belief that was common in both pagan and Christian times that a plague could not travel over more than “nine waves”.
So, during the “yellow plague” St Colman of Cloyne fled with his followers to an island off the coast of Cork so they could be saved from this plague. This yellow plague (Blefed or Buide Connell) swept through Ireland twice - in the sixth and the seventh centuries. The yellow plague was thought to have been caused by a solar eclipse and affected people right across
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