Great Famine (Ireland)

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a time of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. It was a major social crisis and had a big effect on Irish society and history. In Irish, it is called an Gorta Mór (see the pronunciation guide). Other famines in Ireland are covered on Irish famine (disambiguation). The book by Cecil Woodham-Smith about this period is called The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849.

The areas hit worst were in western and southern Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant. For this reason, people who spoke Irish called the period an Drochshaol, which means "the bad life" and loosely means "the hard times". People still disagree about what the event should be called, such as "Famine", "Potato Famine" or "Great Hunger".

The worst year was 1847, known as "Black '47". Before the famine, about 8.5 million people lived in Ireland. Many people died during the Great Hunger, and over one million more emigrated. Over the next few decades, the population became much smaller, and some towns lost many of their people. Between 1845 and 1855, many people left Ireland, one of the largest movements of people from a single island in history.

The proximate cause of the famine was a disease called blight that infected potato crops throughout Europe. The loss of food caused many deaths outside Ireland and added to the unrest that led to the Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term reasons for the famine's large impact included absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Early government help was useful but limited, and a new Whig government in London ended it. That government followed a laissez-faire approach, meaning it let the economy run with little government control. Many people in the British upper class, including many in the government, believed the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character. Help only started again later. Large amounts of food were sent out of Ireland during the famine. London refused to stop this, as it had on earlier occasions, and this caused lasting anger. The anger added to the Irish issue in British politics, increased anti-British sentiment, strengthened Irish nationalism and the campaign for independence. The famine also led to the eviction of many families from their homes. This was made worse by a rule that denied workhouse aid to anyone who owned more than one-quarter acre of land.

The famine is seen as a turning point in the history of Ireland. It permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape. It forced many people to leave as refugees and started a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and the people of the diaspora, the famine became part of folk memory. Relations between many Irish people and the British government, which then ruled Ireland, became more strained. This increased tensions between groups and boosted nationalism and republicanism in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. When the potato blight returned in the 1879 famine, the Land League boycotted "notorious landlords", and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers. This meant fewer families lost their homes, and fewer people died.

Causes and contributing factors

See also: Chronology of the Great Famine

In 1801, Ireland became part of the United Kingdom after the Acts of Union. The British government found the country hard to govern. In 1844, Benjamin Disraeli said Ireland had a poor population, landlords who did not live there, an established Protestant church that many people did not belong to, and a weak government. Most land was owned by landlords, and many of them lived in England as absentee landlords. Tenants had little security and could be forced to leave their homes. Only in Ulster, under "tenant right", were tenants paid for the improvements they made to their land.

The population grew a great deal, from about 2 million in 1700 to 8 million by the time of the Great Famine. Farms were divided into smaller and smaller pieces. Many families could only feed themselves by growing potatoes. The potato had become a staple food, and most of the potatoes grown were the Irish Lumper. Because so many plants were alike, they were more easily harmed by disease.

A disease called blight, known scientifically as Phytophthora infestans, reached Ireland around 1844. In 1845, it spread quickly through Europe. Diseased potatoes may have been brought from American ports such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York City. Irish newspapers reported the blight in September 1845. In 1845, many fields used for growing crops were damaged. In 1846, about three-quarters of the harvest was lost. Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, hoped the reports were exaggerated. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, the first people to die from hunger were recorded in the autumn of 1846. Millions of Irish people relied completely on potatoes for food, so hunger spread widely.

Reaction in Ireland

In early November 1845, a group of citizens from Dublin met with the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury. The group included the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, Daniel O'Connell and the Lord Mayor. They suggested opening the ports to foreign corn, stopping grain from being used to make alcohol, banning the export of food, and creating jobs through public works. Lord Heytesbury told them not to worry. He said their ideas were "premature" and that scientists were studying these matters.

John Mitchel, a well-known Irish nationalist, wrote one of the first widely read books about the famine. It was called The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) and was published in 1861. It includes a sentence that people still remember today: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine." In 1848, Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings. The charge was dropped, but he was later found guilty by a packed jury under the newly passed Treason Felony Act. He was sentenced to 14 years of transportation to Bermuda.

According to Charles Gavan Duffy, The Nation argued that the right response was to keep the food grown in the country until the people living there had been fed. Other parts of Europe had used this method, and even the parliaments of the Pale had used it in hard times, before the union with Great Britain in 1801.

At the time, people called the event An Drochshaol. This name appears in letters from the period and was passed down through spoken stories. In the older writing style of the time, which used Gaelic script, it was written as Droċ-Ṡaoġal. Today the name always begins with a capital letter because it refers to a special historic event.

The years of the potato blight, from 1845 to 1851, were also a time of political conflict. In July 1846, a more radical Young Ireland group broke away from the Repeal movement. In 1848, they tried an armed rebellion, but it did not succeed. In 1847, William Smith O'Brien, leader of the Young Ireland party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation. He helped organise the short-lived Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in County Tipperary.

Government response

When Ireland faced food shortages in 1782–1783, Britain stopped food from leaving Ireland so that local food would stay there. Food prices quickly dropped. Historian F. S. L. Lyons described the British government's early response to the famine as "prompt and relatively successful." In November 1845, Prime Minister Robert Peel secretly bought £100,000 worth of cornmeal from America. Baring Brothers acted as his agents. The shipment arrived late, and the maize was hard to prepare, so people called it "Peel's brimstone." Peel tried to end the Corn Laws, which were tariffs that kept bread prices high. His party split over the plan. In June 1846, the second reading of the government's Irish Coercion Bill was defeated in the House of Commons. Whigs, Radicals, Irish Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives voted against it together. Peel resigned, and the Whig leader, Lord John Russell, became prime minister.

Russell's government followed the idea of laissez-faire. This meant it believed the market would supply the food people needed. It stopped the earlier relief works, so many people lost their jobs, money, and food. Charles Trevelyan, who managed government relief, limited food aid. In a private letter to Edward Twisleton, he suggested the famine might benefit England. In January 1847, the government began giving direct relief through workhouses under the Irish Poor Laws and through soup kitchens. However, most of the costs fell on local landlords. Some of them evicted tenants or used Souperism as a way to offer relief. In June 1847, the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. c. 31) was passed. It said that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The Incumbered Estates (Ireland) Act 1849 (12 & 13 Vict. c. 77) allowed landlords' estates to be sold at auction. Many families lost their homes as a result. The Royal Navy, under Rear-Admiral Hugh Pigot, carried relief supplies to Irish ports. Trevelyan ordered every available steamship to Ireland to help. Despite these efforts, many people died from hunger and disease.

Food exports

The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that people were very angry. Huge amounts of food were being sent from Ireland to England while people in Ireland were going hungry. Under the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838 (1 & 2 Vict. c. 56), the Poor law union workhouses were paid for by rates charged to local property owners. In the worst-hit areas, tenants could not pay their rent, so landlords could not pay the rates. Selling food, some of which was sent abroad, was seen as a way to make money. This money was meant to pay the rents and rates and to run the workhouses. However, the workhouses could not manage the size and length of the famine.

In October 1845, Nicolas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, warned that many families would soon have no potatoes left. He said food was leaving the country while people faced hunger. In the 5 May 2020 issue of the Dublin Review of Books, editor Maurice Earls wrote that politics turned a disease of potatoes and tomatoes into a famine. According to historian James Donnelly, the picture of Irish people going hungry while food was sent abroad became the most powerful image in the nationalist view of the Famine. Grain imports increased after the spring of 1847.

Charity

See also: Souperism

People gave about £1.5 million to help during the famine. About £856,500 of this came from outside Ireland. It is hard to know how much people in Ireland gave, so the Irish total was probably more than the £525,000 given in Britain.

Many groups and people gave large sums. Calcutta made the first big donations in 1846, about £14,000. Irish soldiers and Irish workers for the East India Company helped raise this money. Russian Tsar Alexander II sent money, and Queen Victoria gave £2,000. A story says that Sultan Abdülmecid I of the Ottoman Empire first offered £10,000. He was then asked by British diplomats or his own ministers to lower it to £1,000, so that he would not give more than the Queen. U.S. president James K. Polk gave $50. In 1847, Congressman Abraham Lincoln gave $10, which was about £5. Pope Pius IX gave 1,000 Scudi (about £213). On 25 March 1847, he also wrote the letter Praedecessores nostros, which asked Catholics around the world to give money and support. Paul Cullen, rector of the Pontifical Irish College, and Jules Gossin, president of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, were important leaders in Catholic fundraising. Groups that were not religious also helped. The largest was the British Relief Association. It was started on 1 January 1847 by Lionel de Rothschild, Abel Smith, and other bankers and wealthy people. It raised about £390,000 in total. Private groups, such as the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers), tried to help when the government stopped its relief work. People in the United States also raised thousands of dollars. A group of Choctaws gave $170 in 1847. Judy Allen, editor of the newspaper Biskinik of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said that only 16 years had passed since the Choctaw people went through the Trail of Tears. Senator Henry Clay asked Americans to give, and he said that helping others was one of the kindest things people could do.

Eviction

Landlords had to pay the rates for tenants whose yearly rent was £4 or less. Many landlords with crowded land removed poorer tenants from their small plots. They then rented the land out in larger plots. Most evictions happened in 1847. Historian James S. Donnelly Jr. says it is hard to know exactly how many people were evicted. The police began counting in 1849. Their records show a very large number of people were evicted, though Donnelly thought the real number was even higher. West Clare was one of the worst areas, and County Mayo was the next worst. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, was among the worst landlords there, and he evicted many tenants in one parish alone.

In 1846, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, reported that many Irish families had been forced out of their homes in a single year. In 1847, the Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty, wrote about many people being driven from their homes in one day. The population of Drumbaragh, a townland in County Meath, dropped sharply between 1841 and 1851. Some tenants fought back against their landlords, and several landlords were attacked in the autumn and winter of 1847. In West Roscommon, Major Denis Mahon evicted thousands of tenants, and some parishes lost a large part of their people. Lord Clarendon asked for special powers to stop the violence, and the Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise.

Emigration

Main articles: Irish diaspora and Typhus epidemic of 1847

At least a million people are thought to have left Ireland because of the famine. Many made long journeys between 1846 and 1851, mainly to North America. Many more moved shorter distances, mainly to Britain. The famine caused a large rise in emigration, but it was not the only cause. People had been leaving Ireland for settlement in the New World since the mid-1700s. Younger family members often left first, and the money they sent home helped other relatives leave. Many people heading to the Americas travelled with the McCorkell Line. By 1851, at least a quarter of the population of Liverpool was born in Ireland. This strongly shaped the city's identity and culture, and it became known as "Ireland's second capital."

In 1847, more than 100,000 Irish people sailed to Canada. Many became sick, and many did not survive. Many died at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River where ships were kept in quarantine near Quebec City. Crowded, poorly kept ships called coffin ships carried many of these travellers. In America, most Irish settled in cities. By 1850, they made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The famine also marked the start of Ireland's population falling in the 19th century, after it had grown in earlier decades. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish people had left their country because of evictions, hunger, and hard living conditions.

Death toll

It is not known exactly how many people died in the famine. It is believed that more people died from disease than from hunger. Records are incomplete. The state did not yet register births, marriages, and deaths, and records kept by the Catholic Church are incomplete. Some older registers were destroyed in 1922. A census taken in 1841 counted 8,175,124 people. The census in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. The census workers estimated that the population could have grown to just over 9 million by 1851 if the famine had not happened. A resource from the Geography department of University College Cork says it is now generally believed that over 8.75 million people lived in Ireland before the famine. The 1851 census recorded many deaths from hunger and from disease in the previous decade. The main diseases were fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, and influenza. Officials admitted their figures were incomplete, and later historians agree they probably missed many deaths.

Historians give different estimates. S. H. Cousens's figure of 800,000 is now seen as too low. Modern historian J. J. Lee says "at least 800,000." R. F. Foster estimates "at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera in the latter stages." Joel Mokyr's estimates range from 1.1 to 1.5 million deaths between 1846 and 1851, and the most widely accepted estimate is one million. Detailed population statistics are available at Irish population analysis. The diseases fell into two groups. One group was caused by the famine. The other was caused by a lack of food, called nutritional deficiency. Examples include marasmus and dropsy (oedema), which is linked to kwashiorkor. Many people died from illnesses such as measles, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, respiratory infections, whooping cough, intestinal parasites, and cholera. Fever caused the most deaths. Crowds gathered at soup kitchens and overcrowded workhouses, which helped spread typhus, typhoid, and relapsing fever.

After the famine

Main article: Legacy of the Great Irish Famine

In 1830, Irish women married on average at about 23.8 years old, and men at about 27.5. By 1840, these ages had risen a little. In the decades after the Famine, women married at around 28 to 29, and men at about 33. Many Irish men and women never married at all, because wages were low and the economy had long-lasting problems.

A 2025 anthropometric study looked at the long-term health of more than 14,500 people born before, during and after the Famine. In the areas hit hardest, the survivors did not show the expected stunting in adult height. The researchers suggested that the most vulnerable people had died or moved away, which partly balanced out the lasting harm of hunger early in life.

The potato blight returned to Ireland in 1879. By then, poor farmers and labourers had already begun the "Land War," one of the largest agrarian movements in nineteenth-century Europe. The Land League, led by Michael Davitt, encouraged a mass boycott of "notorious landlords," and some members physically blocked evictions. Davitt was born during the Great Famine, and his family was evicted when he was only 4 years old. The policy was soon suppressed. Close to 1000 people were held under the 1881 Coercion Act for suspected membership.

As homelessness fell and networks grew that weakened the landlordism system, the severity of the following shorter famine was limited. The linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux noted that only a small number of folk songs can be traced back to the Famine. He suggested that poorer people avoided the subject for decades because it brought back too many sad memories. The best known of the surviving songs is Skibbereen.

See also: Genocides in history (1490 to 1914) § Great Irish Famine

Many people at the time strongly criticised the Russell government's response. Sir James Graham, a former Home Secretary, believed the government did not understand how big the problem in Ireland was. In 1849, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, urged Russell to offer more help, and the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest. According to Peter Gray, the government spent £7 million on relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850. This was less than half of one per cent of the British gross national product over five years. In the 1830s, £20 million had been paid to West Indian slave-owners. John Mitchel, a leader of the Young Ireland Movement, argued that the English "created the famine". Others linked the government's response to its attitude toward the so-called "Irish Question". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, shared his own views on the Famine. In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the poet Edmund Spenser. Civil servant Charles Trevelyan, who was most directly responsible for the famine response, described it as a stroke of Providence.

Historians have also debated the causes. Christine Kinealy wrote that the famine could have been avoided, and that a weak government response made it worse. Joel Mokyr argued that Britain could have saved Ireland, comparing the famine relief spending with the money spent on the Crimean War. James Anthony Froude wrote that England governed Ireland for its own interest, and Irish-American historian Dennis Clark said the famine was the result of many years of neglect. In 1997, the actor Gabriel Byrne read a message from Prime Minister Tony Blair that admitted the government had failed its people. Documents released in 2021 showed that Blair had not written or approved the message. It was instead approved by his principal private secretary, John Holmes. Most historians reject the claim that the famine was a genocide, arguing that there was no intent to commit genocide. In 1996, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" of its secondary schools after pressure from lobbying groups. Law professors Charles E. Rice and Francis Boyle later concluded that the famine was genocide under the Hague Convention of 1948. Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda disagreed. He said that people in Whitehall hoped things would get better for Ireland, and that neglect is easier to prove than genocide. Genocide Watch director Nat Hill said the famine deserves serious attention as a crime against humanity, even if it does not fit the legal definition of genocide.

Memorials

Main article: List of memorials to the Great Famine

Further information: Legacy of the Great Irish Famine

Ireland's National Famine Memorial is in Murrisk Millennium Peace Park, a park by the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Murrisk, County Mayo. The park is at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain. Irish artist John Behan designed it. It is a bronze sculpture of a coffin ship, with skeletons woven through its ropes. They remember the many people who died on the journey across the ocean. President Mary Robinson unveiled it on 20 July 1997, when she was president. The group that led the project chose this site because they felt it was "entirely fitting" to put the memorial in the west, which was hit hardest by the Famine. The National Famine Commemoration Day is held every year in Ireland, usually on a Sunday in May. The Famine is also remembered in many places in Ireland and overseas. This is especially true in cities with many people of Irish descent, such as New York City. One American memorial is the Irish Hunger Memorial near the Manhattan waterfront. In the Irish town of Midleton, County Cork, a large steel sculpture called Kindred Spirits was put up in 2017. Artist Alex Pentek made it to thank the Choctaw people for their help during the famine.

Since 1988, an annual Great Famine walk has been held from Doolough to Louisburgh, County Mayo. Well-known people have led it, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and representatives of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma. The walk is organised by Afri. It takes place on the first or second Saturday of May. It connects the memory of the Famine with today's human rights issues. In 1994, Sinead O'Connor released the song "Famine." It looks at how the Famine has been shown in history and the role of the English government. She performed it on Later ... with Jools Holland in 1996.