The Irish Potato Famine, or as it is also known the Great Famine or the Great Hunger, occurred in Ireland over a period of nearly a decade from the mid-1840s onwards. The cause of it was a blight or disease that impacted the potato crops across Ireland, a staple food that this deeply impoverished and over-populated country was reliant on for subsistence during British rule. The famine reached its worst point in the years between 1847 and 1849, leading to the deaths of approximately one million people. It also triggered a wave of enormous migration from Ireland, with around two million people fleeing from the country between 1845 and 1855. Most of these went to the United States, but there were other destinations as well, leading the Irish diaspora to become one of the largest overseas migrations in modern history.[1]
Chronology of events
The Irish Potato Famine occurred owing to the arrival of Phytophthora infestans, a destructive potato blight to Europe in the 1840s as the advent of the steamships increased the speed at which diseases like this could cross the Atlantic, allowing the blight to survive the trip from its native Mexico for the first time. It struck much of Europe in the mid-1840s, but Ireland was worse impacted than any other region.[2] This was because the Irish agrarian economy was wholly dependent on the potato crop for the subsistence of a population that had swelled to over eight million people by the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1847, a year memorialized as Black ‘47 in Irish history, the famine which resulted from the potato blight had begun to kill thousands of people every week across the country, particularly so in the west and south of the island.[3]
The difficulties presented by the potato blight were compounded by the British colonial government at the time which failed to put in place relief measures to prevent the famine from worsening. Indeed in many instances, the government actually made the situation worse by exporting other foodstuffs as cash crops to Britain and Europe which otherwise might have been used to reduce the level of starvation which was occurring. This meant that foods like rabbits, peas, beans, and fish continued to be sent overseas even as the deaths clocked into the hundreds of thousands in 1847 and 1848. Some English administrators such as Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan even claimed that it might be best to let the famine wipe out large sections of the Irish population so that their lands could be given to new, more ambitious farmers.[4]By the time the famine abated and the potato crop began to recover in 1852 and 1853 at least one million people had died in Ireland from starvation. But the demographic impact of the famine on the country was greater still as it led well over a million people to leave Ireland between 1845 and 1855. Moreover, this level of emigration would continue for decades to come, and by 1930 approximately four and a half million men, women, and children left Ireland for the United States alone, with hundreds of thousands more heading to other countries.[5]
Extent of migration
The extent of the migration from Ireland as a result of the potato famine must be viewed in context; for centuries, Ireland’s population had been growing, not just owing to natural increases in family size, but also as newcomers arrived to Ireland from England, Scotland and Wales as part of the colonial projects undertaken in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, while the population of the country had expanded to a sizeable eight million people by the 1830s, few people were emigrating from Ireland by that time. For instance, only 200,000 people left Ireland to migrate to the United States in the 1830s. This all changed as a result of the Irish Potato Famine. 780,000 people left the island and headed for the US in the 1840s, most of them doing so in the final years of the decade as the famine became brutal. Then in the 1850s, this figure expanded again to 914,000 people, an enormous chunk of the Irish population. More people left the island in the middle decades of the nineteenth century than had done so in the preceding quarter of a millennium. Moreover, the pattern might have reduced once the famine ended in the mid-1850s, but migration overseas still remained considerably high for decades to come. Approximately 450,000 people left Ireland for the US in the 1860s, a similar number in the 1870s, an enormous 650,000 in the 1880s, and nearly 400,000 each in the 1890s and 1900s. This pattern of leaving Ireland began because of the Great Famine and continued for decades thereafter.[6]
Demographic impact
The demographic impact of this Irish migration was greatest in the United States where we have seen millions of Irish migrants arrive in the period during and after the famine, which transformed the demographic landscape of the United States. Approximately 31 million people in the United States, or just under 10% of the population, are believed to have some Irish ancestry, making Irish Americans one of the most substantial groups in the country.[7] Such was the flood of Irish immigrants into the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century that in the 1860s Karl Marx's intellectual co-conspirator, Frederick Engels, stated of the US that ‘if this goes on for another 30 years, there will be Irishmen only in America.’[8] A great proportion of these people migrated to a handful of cities, with New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia being the most common locations. But this was not the only region where the Irish left for. Many headed to other parts of the world, some heading for Australia and New Zealand or other parts of Europe. The city of Glasgow in Scotland, for instance, became a major hub of Irish settlers from Ulster in the north of Ireland from the late 1840s onwards. Later, this pattern of Irish overseas migration would extend to South America and there are a huge number of people with some level of Irish ancestry in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile today.[9]
Explore More
- Exploring Irish Genealogy in the Aftermath of the Great Potato Famine on the MyHeritage Blog
- Irish historical record collections on MyHeritage
- Search Passengers arriving in New York from Ireland 1846 - 1851 on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Irish Ancestors: Beyond the Basics on Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Irish Potato Famine. History Channel
- ↑ The Irish potato famine pathogen Phytophthora infestans originated in central Mexico rather than the Andes. National Academy of Science
- ↑ BRIA 26 2 The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America. Constitutional Rights Foundation
- ↑ Ancestor’s Irish famine role could merit compensation, says Laura Trevelyan. The Guardian
- ↑ Black '47: Ireland's Great Famine and its after-effects. Embassy of Ireland to the United States of America
- ↑ Patrick J. Blessing, ‘Irish’, in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.), Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980), p. 528.
- ↑ Happy St. Patrick’s Day to the One Out of 10 Americans Who Claim Irish Ancestry. United States Census Buraeau
- ↑ Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Marx and Engels on Ireland (London, 1971), p. 271.
- ↑ The Irish road to Argentina. History Ireland