The Great Famine

The Great Famine In 1800, some five million people lived in Ireland. By the autumn of 1845, when the Great Famine struck Ireland, there were more than eight million. Many of them were wretchedly poor, eking out a precarious living on tiny plots of land, and dependent on each year's potato crop Hunger was no novelty to peasant families, for there had been partial failures of the potato crop in other years. However, these had always been …

…continued to decline, not only through emigration but through later marriages, lower birth rates and an end of the subdivision of farms which had made Ireland so vulnerable to crop failure. The famine was to prove a watershed in Anglo-lrish relations, for the inadequacy of government measures left an enduring legacy of bitterness in Ireland and among those thousands of and among those thousands of Irish emigrants who found a new life across the Atlantic.