An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine)

1845 - 1849 — A catastrophic failure of the potato crop led to mass starvation and emigration, fundamentally changing Ireland's demographics and culture.

An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) was the single most defining event in modern Irish history. By the 1840s the potato had become the sole food of about a third of the population — the poorest cottiers and labourers, who lived on tiny plots and paid their rent with their labour. When the blight Phytophthora infestans rotted the crop in the ground in successive years from 1845, that one food simply vanished, and the destitute had nothing to fall back on.

Through the worst years, Ireland went on exporting grain, cattle and butter to Britain — often under armed guard — while its own people starved. Government relief was shaped by a rigid faith in 'laissez-faire' economics and a fear of fostering dependence, an outlook associated with the Treasury official Charles Trevelyan that turned a natural disaster into a human catastrophe.

Rather than simply feed the hungry, the authorities set them to work for a wage on public schemes run by the Board of Works. Half-starved men, women and children broke stones and built roads, drains, piers and walls — but the projects were deliberately kept useless, so they would not compete with or enrich private landlords. To this day there are 'famine roads' that climb a hillside and stop at nothing, and walls that enclose nothing. The pay was a pittance, frequently handed out late, and the brutal labour in the freezing winter of 1846–47 killed many of the weakened workers where they stood. By early 1847 some 700,000 people depended on these works.

As tenants fell behind on their rent, landlords evicted them in their hundreds of thousands. The notorious Gregory 'Quarter-Acre' Clause of 1847 denied all relief to anyone holding more than a quarter-acre of land, forcing families to surrender their holdings — and their homes — just to qualify for aid. Once a family was put out, 'crowbar brigades' would tumble the cottage, pulling down the roof and knocking in the walls so no one could creep back. Turned out onto the road in the depths of winter, the homeless huddled in ditches, in holes scraped in the earth ('scalps') or in rough lean-tos built against the ruins ('scalpeens'), and countless numbers simply froze or starved to death by the wayside.

For many the last refuge was the workhouse. Built under the Poor Law and designed to be as forbidding as possible so that only the truly desperate would enter, these institutions split families apart at the door — husbands, wives and children housed in separate quarters. During the Famine they became hopelessly overcrowded, and 'famine fever' (typhus), dysentery and cholera tore through them, so that for many the workhouse was not a shelter but a place to die. Disease, in the end, killed far more people than outright hunger.

Over a million people died, and at least another million fled on the overcrowded, disease-ridden 'coffin ships' to America, Canada and Britain. Ireland's population — over eight million before the Famine — would keep falling for generations. Because the rural west was hit hardest, the Famine gutted the Irish-speaking heartland and hastened the decline of the language. It scattered a vast diaspora across the world and left a deep, lasting bitterness towards British rule that would feed the movement for independence.