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Portrait of The Irish Famine

History · Revolutions & empires

The Irish Famine

1845–1852

Potato blight, mass death and emigration; Ireland's population never recovered

A water mould that had crossed the Atlantic destroyed Ireland's potato crop from 1845, and with it the food of a rural population that had come to depend on a single variety. About a million people died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated, while food continued to leave Irish ports under a government committed to market solutions and minimal relief. The island's population fell by a fifth in six years and kept falling for a century.

How to spot them

  • ▸A water mould, Phytophthora infestans, and a single dominant potato variety called the lumper
  • ▸Public works, soup kitchens and a quarter-acre clause that forced families off their holdings
  • ▸The worst year known simply as Black '47; crowded vessels nicknamed for their coffins
  • ▸A donation from the Choctaw Nation, repaid in spirit by Irish gifts to the Navajo in 2020

What happened

The oomycete that turned the crop to black slime, first reported in Ireland in the autumn of 1845 (1845)

Not a fungus but a water mould; its Mexican or Andean origin is still debated.

The 1846 repeal that split the Conservative Party and brought down the prime minister who carried it (1846)

Sir Robert Peel had already bought 'Indian corn' from America as emergency relief.

The Treasury official who thought the calamity a judgement of Providence and resisted open-ended relief

As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury he controlled the relief administration.

A clause requiring a family to give up all but a rood of land before they could receive relief (1847)

It drove mass evictions and clearances.

The overcrowded emigrant vessels on which typhus killed thousands before landfall

Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence became a mass quarantine station and graveyard in 1847.

A West Cork town whose starving people were sketched for the Illustrated London News

James Mahony's drawings of 1847 brought the scenes to British readers.

A gift of $170 sent in 1847 by a Native American nation only sixteen years after their own forced removal (1847)

Commemorated by the Kindred Spirits sculpture at Midleton, County Cork.

Quick-fire facts

  • •The blight appeared in 1845, failed the crop almost totally in 1846 and again in 1848; 1847 is remembered as Black '47
  • •About one million people died and about one million emigrated between 1845 and 1852
  • •Ireland's population fell from roughly 8.2 million in 1841 to about 6.5 million in 1851, and continued to decline until the 1960s
  • •Sir Robert Peel's government fell in 1846; Lord John Russell's Whig administration handled most of the crisis
  • •The Soup Kitchen Act of 1847 fed around three million people a day at its peak before being wound up that autumn
  • •Grain, butter and livestock continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the worst years
  • •In Irish it is called An Gorta Mór, 'the Great Hunger'
  • •Tony Blair issued a statement of regret on behalf of the British government in 1997, on the 150th anniversary
  • •Famine memorials stand in Dublin, New York, Boston and Toronto; the National Famine Museum is at Strokestown Park, County Roscommon

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Sources