Great Irish Famine

The Great Famine, known in Irish as an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, struck Ireland from 1845 to about 1852, years in which hunger and the diseases that followed it swept the country. Caused by repeated failures of the potato crop, it killed roughly a million people and drove at least as many to emigrate. It reduced the island's population by about a fifth within a decade and left a deep mark on Irish society, politics and memory, and on relations with Britain.

Since 1801 Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom. Its population had grown rapidly, to around 8.5 million by the mid-1840s. Much of the land was owned by a small, mainly Protestant landlord class, many of them absentees, and was let out in ever smaller plots. Millions of labourers and smallholders, especially in the west and south, grew grain or raised cattle to pay their rent and lived almost entirely on potatoes, which yielded a great deal of food from a small patch of ground.

In 1845 a previously unknown disease, potato blight, caused by the organism Phytophthora infestans, spread from the Americas to Europe. It destroyed perhaps a third or more of the Irish potato crop that autumn. In 1846 around three-quarters of the crop was lost. The harvest of 1847 was less affected by blight, but so few seed potatoes had been planted that the yield was tiny, and the blight returned in later years. The winter of 1846–1847, remembered as Black '47, was the worst period, with starvation followed by epidemics of typhus, dysentery and relapsing fever. Cholera added to the toll in 1849.

The Conservative government of Robert Peel bought maize from America to keep food prices down and set up public works so the poor could earn wages. In 1846 Peel also secured the repeal of the Corn Laws, the tariffs on imported grain. The Whig government of Lord John Russell that followed in mid-1846 relied more heavily on the market and on local taxation. Its relief schemes were run under the Treasury official Charles Trevelyan, who believed that too much aid would encourage dependence. Public works employed hundreds of thousands at low wages but could not prevent mass death. In 1847 the government opened soup kitchens to feed the hungry directly, but they were closed after a few months, and the burden shifted to the overcrowded workhouses of the Poor Law system.

Private charity, including Quaker relief committees, the British Relief Association and donors abroad, provided further help. Meanwhile grain, livestock and butter continued to be exported from Ireland, a fact that has caused lasting bitterness, although historians debate how far banning exports would have closed the food gap.

A provision of the 1847 relief law, the Gregory clause, denied public relief to anyone holding more than a quarter of an acre of land, forcing many to give up their holdings. Landlords, facing heavy local taxes for the poor, cleared tenants on a large scale. At least 2.1 million people emigrated between 1845 and 1855, chiefly to the United States, Canada and Britain, often in crowded and disease-ridden ships.

The 1851 census counted about 6.6 million people, compared with over 8 million in 1841, and emigration continued for decades afterwards, so that the population kept falling into the twentieth century. The use of the Irish language declined sharply, as the famine struck hardest in Irish-speaking regions. Anger at the government's response fed Irish nationalism and land reform movements, and remains a subject of debate. A minority of writers have described British policy as genocide; most historians reject that term while criticising the government's ideological rigidity and neglect.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show Ireland as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the core of the British Empire, before and after the famine.