The 1879 famine arrived against a backdrop of broader economic distress. The Long Depression - the global slump that began in 1873 and dragged on through the 1890s - had hammered Irish agriculture. Wet seasons and the spread of potato blight, which had never been entirely eliminated since the 1840s, did the rest. The province of Connacht was hit hardest. By the end of 1879 newspapers were reporting severe distress among tenants in all parts of Ireland traditionally dependent on the potato. The 1.4 tons per acre figure from Mayo became the headline of the crisis. Tenants who could not pay rent in cash and could not eat enough to keep their families could see only one possibility ahead: that 1879 was the prelude to another Black '47, the worst year of the Great Famine, when over a million Irish people died and another million emigrated.

The difference, in the end, was time and organisation. Since the 1840s a railway system had been built across Ireland, allowing food to be moved to the west in days rather than weeks. The Home Rule League under Charles Stewart Parnell and the newly formed Irish National Land League under Michael Davitt - a more confrontational organisation than anything that had existed during the earlier Famine - put pressure on the British government and helped distribute aid. Bishop Michael Logue of Raphoe was active among the clergy in famine relief. And critically, the international response came faster. The United States, now home to a large Irish-American population built by the previous Famine, organised relief. The New York Herald collected $200,000 by late February 1880. In March 1880 the U.S. Navy dispatched USS Constellation to Ireland with over 3,300 barrels of food and clothing aboard - the only American warship ever to deliver foreign humanitarian aid.

Something else happened in 1879 that was hard to explain in economic terms. On the wet evening of Thursday 21 August, in a small village in County Mayo, fifteen to twenty villagers gathered at the south gable wall of the parish church to watch what they described as a silent apparition - the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, and Saint John the Evangelist standing in white robes, an altar with a cross and a lamb behind them, the figures motionless, the ground beneath them dry while the rain fell around them. They watched for around two hours. The Archbishop of Tuam set up an inquiry; the inquiry concluded the witnesses were credible. The story went around the world. Within years Knock had become Ireland's great Marian shrine, eventually drawing close to a million pilgrims a year. Historians have noted that religious revivals often accompany famines. The 1879 apparition came in the same months as the worst of the hunger.

The most lasting consequence of the 1879 famine was political. Davitt and his Land League had been pushing for what they called the Three Fs - fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale. The hunger gave the movement urgency. Tenants joined in numbers no previous Irish land movement had seen. The campaign of rent strikes, boycotts (the word itself was coined during the Land War, after Captain Charles Boycott in County Mayo), and mass meetings became known as the Land War. It ran from the late 1870s through the early 1880s and ended in a series of Land Acts that gradually transferred Irish land from absentee landlords to the tenant farmers who worked it. The Forgotten Famine is forgotten as a famine - it caused relatively few deaths, the harvest of 1880 was good, the temporary migration to the cities reversed - but it is impossible to understand modern Irish land ownership without it.

When the 1880 harvest came in, much of the temporary migration that had emptied parts of rural Connacht into the cities reversed itself. People went back to their townlands. The fields filled again. But the country that emerged was not the same one that had entered the crisis. The Land League had organised tenant farmers as a political force. Knock had become a pilgrimage site that would, a century later, justify the construction of its own airport. And the memory of the 1840s - so close that some of the people in Mayo and Galway had still been children when it happened - was reactivated and politicised in a way the British administration of Ireland had not seen before. The Forgotten Famine did not kill many. It quietly remade the country anyway.