Great Irish Famine (1845-1852): The Potato Blight and Exodus

The Great Irish Famine, known in Irish as An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), was a catastrophe that struck Ireland between 1845 and 1852 after a disease destroyed the potato crop on which millions depended. About one million people died and well over a million emigrated, and Ireland’s population fell from about 8.2 million in 1841 to about 6.6 million in 1851. It was the worst peacetime disaster in nineteenth-century western Europe and transformed Ireland, Britain and the United States.

Background: dependence on the potato and the coming of blight

In the early nineteenth century Ireland was part of the United Kingdom under the Act of Union of 1801. Most of the land was owned by a small, largely Protestant landlord class, many of them absentees, and was rented out in ever smaller plots. At the bottom of rural society were cottiers and labourers who held a patch of ground in return for work or rent.

The potato made this system possible. A single acre of potatoes could feed a family for most of a year, and the crop grew well in poor, wet soils. By the 1840s around three million people, about a third of the population, ate almost nothing else, mostly a high-yielding but vulnerable variety called the Lumper. Partial crop failures had caused local hunger before, but nothing had prepared the country for the loss of the crop several years in a row.

Potato blight is caused by Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like water mould that rots both leaves and tubers. It appears to have reached Europe from the Americas in the early 1840s and struck Belgium, the Netherlands and other countries in 1845. It was confirmed in Ireland in September 1845.

About a third to a half of the 1845 crop was lost. In 1846 the failure was almost total. In 1847 the blight was lighter, but so few seed potatoes had been planted that the harvest was tiny. The crop failed badly again in 1848, and hunger and disease continued in many western and southern districts until about 1852.

Relief and British government policy

The Conservative prime minister Robert Peel responded in November 1845 by secretly buying around £100,000 worth of Indian corn (maize) from the United States, to be sold cheaply to keep food prices down. He also set up a Relief Commission and public works schemes. The crisis helped persuade him to push through the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, a decision that split his party and ended his government.

The Whig government of Lord John Russell that followed from mid-1846 was strongly committed to laissez-faire, the belief that the state should not interfere with markets. Charles Trevelyan, the senior Treasury official who directed much of the relief, argued that Irish property must pay for Irish poverty and was wary of creating dependence. The government refused to stop food exports or to sell food directly on a large scale.

Relief came mainly through public works, such as road building, paid for by loans to be repaid by local taxes. At the peak in March 1847 more than 700,000 people were employed, often doing heavy labour in winter while already weak from hunger, and wages frequently failed to keep pace with food prices. In early 1847 the government switched to soup kitchens under the Temporary Relief Act. By August 1847 they were feeding about three million people a day, showing what direct relief could achieve.

The soup kitchens were closed in September 1847, and responsibility was shifted to the Irish Poor Law and its workhouses, funded by local rates. The Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 included the so-called Gregory clause, which denied relief to anyone holding more than a quarter of an acre of land. Desperate families had to give up their holdings to receive food, which accelerated the destruction of the smallholder class.

Disease, death and eviction

Most famine deaths were caused by disease rather than starvation alone. Typhus and relapsing fever, together known as “famine fever”, spread through crowded workhouses and among people on the roads. Dysentery was common, and a cholera epidemic struck in 1849. Doctors, clergy and relief workers died in large numbers alongside the poor.

Mortality was worst in the west and south-west, in counties such as Mayo, Galway, Clare, Cork and Kerry. Places like Skibbereen in County Cork became known across Britain through newspaper reports and engravings. Landlords, facing falling rents and heavy poor rates, cleared tenants from their estates; recorded evictions ran into the tens of thousands of families between 1846 and the early 1850s, and many more people were pushed out informally.

Emigration and the “coffin ships”

Between 1845 and 1852 roughly 1 to 1.5 million people emigrated, and the outflow continued for decades. Most went to the United States, particularly New York, Boston and Philadelphia, while others sailed to British North America or crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, Glasgow and London. Some landlords paid for tenants to leave.

Conditions on many ships were terrible. In 1847 typhus spread among emigrants to Canada, and thousands died at sea or in quarantine at Grosse Île in the St Lawrence River and in fever sheds at Quebec and Montreal. Overcrowded and badly supplied vessels earned the name “coffin ships”. Irish immigrants in American and British cities often faced poverty and hostility, but they also built communities that later had great political influence.

Charity and private relief

Private charity played an important role. The Society of Friends, the Quakers, ran soup kitchens and distributed food, clothing and seed, and its members later published detailed reports. The British Relief Association, founded in January 1847, raised large sums in Britain, with Queen Victoria among its donors. Money also came from Irish emigrants, from American cities and churches, from Catholic communities across the world, and from the Choctaw Nation, which in 1847 sent a donation of about $170, a gift still remembered in Ireland today.

By the numbers

Consequences and memory

The famine changed Ireland permanently. The population continued to fall through emigration and later marriage, reaching about 4.4 million by 1911. The class of cottiers and labourers was largely destroyed, and farms became larger and more focused on cattle. The use of the Irish language, strongest among the rural poor who suffered most, declined sharply.

Politically, the famine deepened hostility to British rule. It formed the background to the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, and later Irish nationalists, including the Fenian movement founded in 1858, drew heavily on its memory. In the United States the Irish diaspora became a source of money and support for Irish nationalism for generations.

For many decades the famine was relatively neglected by professional historians, but from the 1990s its 150th anniversary prompted major research and public commemoration. Memorials stand in Dublin, Boston, New York, Toronto, Sydney and many other cities, and the Irish government established an annual National Famine Commemoration Day in 2008. In 1997 the British prime minister Tony Blair issued a statement acknowledging that those who governed in London at the time had failed the Irish people.

Myths and facts

“There was no food in Ireland.” Ireland continued to produce and export grain and livestock, especially early in the famine. The problem was that the poorest had lost their only food and had no money to buy anything else.

“Britain did nothing.” The government spent several million pounds on relief and the soup kitchens fed millions in 1847. Historians argue, however, that relief was too limited, too late and too tied to ideas about markets and self-reliance, and that ending direct relief in 1847 cost many lives.

“The Ottoman sultan’s gift was cut from £10,000 to £1,000.” Sultan Abdülmecid I did donate £1,000, but the story that he was asked to reduce a larger offer to avoid embarrassing Queen Victoria is not supported by firm contemporary evidence.

Timeline

• 1845, September: Potato blight is confirmed in Ireland.
• 1845, November: Peel orders the secret purchase of American maize.
• 1846, June: The Corn Laws are repealed and Russell replaces Peel.
• 1846, autumn: The potato crop fails almost completely.
• 1847, January–March: Public works peak; Black ‘47 begins.
• 1847, August: Soup kitchens feed about three million people a day.
• 1847, September: Soup kitchens close; relief moves to the Poor Law.
• 1848: The potato crop fails again; the Young Ireland rising is crushed.
• 1849: A cholera epidemic adds to the death toll.
• 1851: The census records a fall of about 1.6 million since 1841.

Why it matters

The Great Irish Famine was one of the deadliest famines of modern Europe and a turning point in Irish history. It reshaped Ireland’s society, language and politics, created one of the world’s largest diasporas, and remains a central example in debates about how governments should respond to food crises.