The Story of the Great Famine
by Pat Liddy
Ireland is probably the only country in the world with less population today than it had 175 years ago. In 1845, thanks to advances in medical science, the population had risen to around 8.5 million on the whole island. Then in the late 1840s, the disastrous Great Famine, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, struck down the more vulnerable, deprived sectors of Irish society and within a few years resulted in well over a million deaths followed by vast numbers leaving mostly rural Ireland for the distant shores of America, Canada, South America and Australia - around 40 million Americans today claim Irish descent. Many more left for England, the county then seen as the oppressors of the emigrants’ native country.
T
he numbers on the island of Ireland sunk to about four million by the 1950s. Since then, thanks to net immigration and a higher than European-average birthrate, the population is now close to 7 million and still rising. However, if we compare ourselves to England we still have a lot of ground to make up! In 1845 the population of our neighbour was about 16 million (double Ireland’s) but is now around 56 million (8 times that of Ireland!). So what then was this awful famine that had such a
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profound and devastating effect on our demographics? Following its eventual conquest of the whole of Ireland, a process which began in the late 12th century, England dispossessed the majority of the native Irish from their own landholdings. By the 18th century the Irish peasantry, especially in the west and south of the country, were reduced to the status of impoverished tenant farmers, wandering craftsmen or unemployed beggars. Large families, whose able-bodied male members worked as little better than
slaves on the vast estates of the rich gentry, lived in atrocious conditions in mud cabins or tiny thatched cottages on the periphery of the great properties. They were given a tiny acreage to grow what crops might sustain them and the staple food of choice was the potato. Originally imported from Peru in the 16th century the potato is one of the richest sources of vitamins, fibre, minerals and carbohydrates. But this very dependency on mostly a single crop was what led to the downfall of this very fragile society. In 1845, a plant disease called potato blight spread from South America and then North America and across the Atlantic to Europe. It spread rapidly destroying both leaves and the edible tubers of the growing and stored potatoes and wiped out people’s main sustenance within weeks. To make matters worse the blight reappeared with ferocious intensity over the next six years. People died in their hundreds of thousands from hunger and resultant illnesses such as typhus and cholera. All
