Learn About the Great Hunger at Ireland's Great Hunger Museum (2024)

The land taken from the Irish-Catholics in Ulster was offered to Protestants from Scotland and England to entice them to relocate to Ireland. This policy created a sizeable group of Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland loyal to the British government. In 1695, England enacted a series of Penal Laws that denied civil and human rights to Irish-Catholics, and for all practical purposes outlawed the Catholic religion in Ireland, the religion of more than 90 percent of the Irish population. Ireland’s Gaelic language also was outlawed.

Finally, the 1801 Act of Union abolished the independent Irish Parliament and officially made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. As a result, all of Ireland was governed by the British parliament in London during the Great Hunger (1845–52) and the years following, until 1921 when the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided Ireland. Of the 32 counties that make up the island of Ireland, 26 eventually became the independent Republic of Ireland in the wake of 1948 legislation, while the 6 counties that make up Northern Ireland, remain part of the United Kingdom.

In 1845, the blight had been localized and variegated, but from early reports in 1846 it was obvious that blight had affected the potato crop throughout Ireland. While it had been difficult to obtain an accurate estimate of the damage caused by the blight in 1845, as its appearance was spread over a number of months, in 1846 the destruction of the potato crop was as rapid as it was comprehensive. The nutritious potato had been the mainstay of the agricultural laborers and cottier class and dominated the diets of at least two-thirds of the population. No other country in Europe depended on the potato as extensively as Ireland.

When the blight hit the first year, it was a disaster for those who depended on the potato. When the blight returned in the following years, it meant death for many of those who were already living precariously at subsistence level, and emigration for those who had the resources to flee disease, death and poverty.

The British Response

The Famine was a disaster of major proportions, even allowing for statistical uncertainty as to its estimated effect on mortality. Yet the Famine occurred in a country that, despite concurrent economic problems, was at the center of a still-growing empire and an integral part of the acknowledged workshop of the world. There can be no doubt that, despite a short-term cyclical depression, the resources of the United Kingdom could have either completely or largely mitigated the consequences of consecutive years of potato blight in Ireland.

Within Ireland itself there were substantial resources of food that, had the political will existed, could have been diverted, even as a short-term measure, to feed the starving people. The policy of closing ports during periods of shortages in order to keep home-grown food for domestic consumption had on earlier occasions proved to be effective in staving off famine within Ireland. During the subsistence crisis of 1782–84, an embargo was placed on the export of foodstuffs from the country. The outcome of this humanitarian and imaginative policy was successful. The years 1782–84 are barely remembered as years of distress. By refusing to allow a similar policy to be adopted in 1846–47, the British government ensured that Black ’47 was indelibly associated with suffering, famine, mortality, emigration, and to some, misrule.

Cecil Woodham-Smith, noted scholar and author, wrote in “The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849” that “…no issue has provoked so much anger or so embittered relations between the two countries (England and Ireland) as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.”

In History Ireland magazine (1997, issue 5, pp. 32-36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer and Drew University professor, relates her findings: “Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.”

The Society of Friends, or Quakers, first became involved with the Irish Famine in November 1846. The Quakers collected mostly American food, flour, rice, biscuits and Indian meal, along with clothes and bedding. They set up soup kitchens, purchased seed, and provided funds for local employment. During 1846–47, the Quakers gave approximately £200,000 for relief in Ireland.

The British Relief Association, founded in 1847, also raised money in England, America and Australia. They received about £400,000. This money included donations from people who were themselves poor and marginalized. The Choctaw Indian Nation, in the United States, fresh from their own “trail of tears,” sent over $170.

Many major cities in America and Britain set up relief committees for Ireland. Churches of all denominations made collections on behalf of the Irish poor. Jewish synagogues in America and Britain also contributed generously.

The donors included the rich and the famous—President Polk, of the United States, Queen Victoria, Pope Pius IX—while people in Italy, Antigua, France, Venezuela, Hong Kong and Barbados were among those who sent contributions.

We do not know the names of all the people who gave to Ireland during the Great Hunger, nor do we know their motivation, but we do know that their generosity saved lives.

Emigration and “Coffin Ships”

Between 1845 and 1855, nearly 2 million people emigrated from Ireland to America and Australia, and another 750,000 to Britain. The Poor Law Extension Act, which made landlords responsible for the maintenance of their own poor, induced some to clear their estates by paying for emigration of the poorer tenants. Although some landlords did so out of humanitarian motives, there were undoubtedly benefits to them, especially those who wanted to consolidate their land holdings or change from the cultivation of land to beef and dairy farming. Emigration soared from 75,000 in 1845 to 250,000 in 1851. This chaotic, panic-stricken and unregulated exodus was the largest single population movement of the 19th century.

Thousands of emigrants died during the Atlantic crossing. There were 17,465 documented deaths in 1847 alone. “Coffin ships,” plying a speculative trade, were often little more than rotting hulks. Thousands more died at disembarkation centers. On August 4, 1847, The Toronto Globe reported on the arrival of emigrant ships: “The Virginius from Liverpool, with 496 passengers, had lost 158 by death, nearly one third of the whole, and she had 180 sick; above one half of the whole will never see their home in the New World. A medical officer at the quarantine station on Grosse Île off Quebec reported that “the few who were able to come on deck were ghastly, yellow-looking spectres, unshaven and hollow-cheeked…not more than 6 or 8 were really healthy and able to exert themselves.” The crew of the ship were all ill, and 7 had died. On Erin’s Queen, 78 passengers had died and 104 were sick. On this ship the captain had to bribe the seamen with a sovereign for each body brought out from the hold. The dead sometimes had to be dragged out with boat hooks, since even their own relatives refused to touch them.” 

The Catholic Church was relatively small and a minor institution in America until Irish immigrants, following the Great Hunger, swelled its ranks and helped develop it into one of the largest and most influential religious institutions in the country. Irish immigrants of the post-Great Hunger period also were instrumental in building the country’s infrastructure and in developing the parochial school system, which stands today as a model for education.

Among her first acts as Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson instituted a perennially lit candle in a window of her official residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, to honor the Irish diaspora worldwide.