~Irish Potato Famine~

In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease, and immigration between 1845-1852. It is also known, mostly outside of Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language, it is called the GortaMor - meaning the Great Hunger. During the Famine, approximately 1 million people died, and and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the population to fall between 20% and 25%. The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly called Potato Blight. Although Blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland - where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food - was exacerbated by a host of political, social, and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate. Starting in 1801, Ireland had been directly governed, under the Act of Union, as part of the United Kingdom. Executive power laid directly in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, both of whom were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners. In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Desralie put it in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world." One historian calculated that between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland and that "without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low." This was a contrast to Britain, which was beginning to enjoy the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial ages. Laws against education of Irish Catholics and possession of land had made such a progress impossible until the penal laws were repealed only 50 years before the Famine, but the economic recovery was slow because the landlord families still kept their land. The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for various nationalist movements. Modern historians regard it as a dividing line in the Irish historical narrative, referring to the preceding period of Irish history as "pre-Famine".