Qualla: Irish Famine (1879)

Irish Famine (1879): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In County Mayo at the end of 1879, the potato yield came in at 1.4 tons per statute acre. It was less than half of what the previous year had produced. It was the lowest the county had seen in a decade. For most of Europe that figure would have meant economic distress. For the west of Ireland, where the potato was the staple food of the poor, it meant something closer to terror - because the adults reading those numbers had been children during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. They remembered. The mini-famine - an Gorta Beag, the little hunger - did not kill in the millions like the Famine that had broken Ireland thirty years before. It is sometimes called the Forgotten Famine. It changed the country anyway.

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Irish Famine (1879): What Caused It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 elimina...

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Irish Famine (1879): Why It Did Not Become Black '47

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Leag...

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Irish Famine (1879): The Vision at Knock

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 appa...

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Irish Famine (1879): The Land War

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 h...

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Irish Famine (1879): What Remained

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Th...

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