The Famine

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In Ireland, a large section of the population was dependant on agriculture and the potato crop. The Great Famine was the result of successive crop failures and the insufficient and ineffective relief for stopping the outbreak of starvation and disease. The famine is considered by many to be the most tragic and significant event in Irish history and one of the worst human disasters of the nineteenth century. Ireland depended on the potato as a staple crop after 1800. Population increased rapidly and reached eight million by 1841, two-thirds of whom relied on agriculture. The Irish depended on the potato and the failure of the potato crop in 1845 was disastrous. The crop failed again in 1846, 1847, and 1848. By 1851, the population of Ireland had been reduced by more than two million due to starvation, disease, and emigration to Britain and North America.
Potato blight was no stranger to Ireland before 1845. There was a famine in 1741 that killed one quarter of a million people. Ireland struggled through crop failures and subsistence crisis throughout the nineteenth century, including fourteen partial and complete famines between 1816 and 1842. From 1845 until 1848 the people endured one bad harvest after another. The regularity of famine was enough to reduce the population of Ireland by about two-and-a-half million. The wet summers of the Irish climate helped spread the blight. The harvest failed four years in a row and the peasants had no reserve to fall back on (Taylor, 1962). The famine, together with the accompanying plagues, became known as the Great Famine to the British, The Great Hunger to the Irish middle class, and the Great Starvation to the Irish peasantry.
The famine began in 1845 with the blighting and failures of the potato crop, the peoples' principal means of nourishment. The potato blight fungus, phytophthora infestans, attacked potatoes causing them to rot in the ground, rendering them inedible. After the blight st...