Overview
The Irish Famine was triggered by a series of social, biological, political and economic conditions that coalesced to form a catastrophe resulting in the deaths of between 500,00 to one million people, two million refugees, and two million émigrés to Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. The social conditions to enable such a disaster were already in place. Ireland was overpopulated because of Catholic social values that did not countenance any form of birth control. The Irish also followed a practice of subdividing the land that created small parcels which limited crop diversity and maximized the risk of failure.
The catalyst for this disastrous event was biological in nature. In the fall of 1845 a fungus attacked the primary food source for Ireland’s people. Wind and water transported the spores of the blight across the island at a rate of fifty miles a day. This event in turn unleashed a series of economic conditions and political decisions that proved disastrous to all those effected. First, the farmers who grew and used potatoes as legal tender to pay their rents were unable to do so. They were summarily evicted from their property and with their extended families condemned to roam the countryside seeking shelter and food wherever they could find it. Many lived in bog holes, ditches, and caves. The lack of shelter and food made thousands susceptible to malnutrition, cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.
Several economic factors also added fuel to an already dire situation. Most Irish already had an extremely low standard of living. Their existence, for example, was almost hand to mouth. They lived in one room huts which they frequently shared with the animals they raised. They had virtually no savings to tide themselves over during rough times. Since they were skilled only in agrarian work, they went in search of it only to find that the landlords had converted their land to grazing farms and no longer required their labor.
Political conditions were no better. There were no forms of legal redress for people who were unable to pay their rent. Foreclosure and eviction without a hearing was immediate. Although hearings and investigatory committees were formed to discover the causes and possible solutions for the problem, government relief in the form of public works jobs and soup kitchens was meager and arrived too late to help many Irish. By 1851 Ireland’s population had dropped from 8,000,000 to 6, 500,000. They had lost more than 18 percent of their population to starvation, disease, and emigration.
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