Qualla: Great Famine (Ireland)

Great Famine (Ireland): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Winnie45, CC BY-SA 4.0. An Drochshaol, the people called it - the bad life, the hard times. The Irish words carry what English cannot: that this was not weather, not accident, not simply hunger. It was a way of living and dying that wore down a country until the country was unrecognizable. In 1841, the census counted 8,175,124 people on the island of Ireland. By 1901, the population had fallen to 4.4 million. One million died. Two million fled. And the green hills that travelers still cross today are quieter than they should be, because the people who once filled them never came back.

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Image: Winnie45 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Famine (Ireland): Black '47

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The blight arrived from America - probably on a ship's load of potatoes, carried by ocean to feed passengers and crew. By August 1845, it had reached the Isle of Wight. By September, The Gardeners' Chronicle stopped the press to announce that "the potato Murrain has unequivocally...

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Image: Public domain

Great Famine (Ireland): The Ships at the Quays

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Léna, CC BY-SA 4.0. While people died on the roads, ships continued to leave Irish ports loaded with grain. Nicholas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, watched fifty dray-loads of meal roll past one milling establishment in a single night - bound for Drogheda, then to England. He wrote that he could no...

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Image: Léna | CC BY-SA 4.0

Great Famine (Ireland): The Workhouse and the Road

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Searle, CC BY-SA 2.0. Relief came as workhouses, public-works schemes, soup kitchens. None were enough. The Poor Relief Act of 1847 included the Gregory clause: anyone holding more than a quarter-acre of land could receive no aid. To eat, you first had to give up the land - which meant giving up the o...

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Image: Mike Searle | CC BY-SA 2.0

Great Famine (Ireland): Coffin Ships

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Edward Doyle, Public domain. Those who could leave, left. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people fled Ireland - one of the greatest exoduses from any single island in history. They sailed from small western harbors on vessels so overcrowded and disease-ridden they were called coffin ships. Of the...

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Image: Henry Edward Doyle | Public domain

Great Famine (Ireland): Kindness from Strangers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felix O, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1847, sixteen years after their own forced march along the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma collected $170 and sent it to Ireland. They had known starvation themselves. Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical calling the whole Catholic world to give. Queen Victoria con...

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Image: Felix O | CC BY-SA 2.0

Great Famine (Ireland): What Was Lost

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jmchugh1962, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Famine fell hardest on the west and south, where the Irish language was still the daily tongue. Drumbaragh in County Meath lost 67% of its people. In Springville, fifty houses became eleven. Folk memory carries what no statistic can: the empty cabins on the hillsides, the laz...

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Image: Jmchugh1962 | CC BY-SA 4.0