The Great Hunger And The Irish Potato Famine

In the early 1800s life in Ireland wasn’t easy, Irish citizens got by day to day by farming and relying on the potato. The potato was their main source of food and money. With out the potato the Irish would have nothing. No one was prepared for what was about to happen in 1845, the beginning of the Great Irish Potato Famine.

     Nineteenth-century Ireland was the most densely populated country in Europe: in 1800, its population was 4.5 million, and by 1841, it had risen to eight million (Kinealy 15). Yet much of this population existed in condition of sorrow and misery lay in the dependence of the peasantry on just one staple crop, the potato; in western countries like Mayo and Galway, nine-tenths of the people ate nothing else (MacManus 602). Here was a disaster waiting to happen, made worst by the rapid rise in population in the first half of the century which forced the peasants to subsist on smaller plots of land (O Grada, The Great Irish Famine 63).

K.H. Connell, in his paper “Land and Population in Ireland, 1780-1845”, describes and explains the significant population growth in Ireland prior to the famine of 1845 and how the uses of the Irish land changed with the population growth.

The Irish people would have freight, terror, death and eventually peace with these changes. The potato famine started with blight being discovered by European farmers. The Irish government started to export potatoes and grains to continental Europe to help the Europeans avoid a famine (Smith, 2011). By the end of August of 1845, Ireland was freighted to find out that blight had found its way to their produce (Smith, 2011). The blight in Ireland set off a chain of events that led to the Irish people dying in more ways to get out of Ireland. The government started trying to feed their people by importing corn and grains for food (Smith, 2011). This was not enough to help the young, old and sick. Many of theIrish people were led to complete financial ruin. By the end of 1851 more than a million Irish had died due to hunger and disease exacerbated by malnutrition(Smith, 2011).The only answer for many Irish families was to take a risk and get on a coffin boat and flee to another country. North America was a safe haven for many Irish people. They dreamed of the life they would live in the U.S.A. Nearly 1 million people arrived in many cities which include New York, and Boston (Smith, 2011). When the Irish people arrived, it was a sad reality they did not think they would face. The conditions were despicable. Many families were moved into small rooms with no sanitation, ventilation, day light or electricity (Smith, 2011). The families were charged about $1.50 per week to live in extreme poverty (Smith, 2011). This led to unsanitary conditions for the communities. Diseases were able to thrive in those conditions and one of the more common disease was cholera . The Irish people usually stayed in close proximity to each other and would make a small Irish community. The Irish community strived to make money. They were only hired for unskilled jobs

The Irish began immigrating to North America in the 1820s, when the lack of jobs and poverty forced them to seek better opportunities elsewhere after the end of the major European wars. When the Europeans could finally stop depending on the Irish for food during war, the investment in Irish agricultural products reduced and the boom was over. After an economic boom, there comes a bust and unemployment was the result. Two-thirds of the people of Ireland depended on potato harvests as a main source of income and, more importantly, food. Then between the years of 1845 and 1847, a terrible disease struck the potato crops. The plague left acre after acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. The failure of the

The literacy rate and life expectancy there were very low. Most houses were mud huts with only one room. They relied heavily on crops grown by Catholic tenant farmers. Tenant farmers are farmers that farm on rented land. In Ireland 80% of the land was owned by Protestant owners that lived far away from their land called absentee owners. The absentee owners rented their land out to middlemen who rented it to tenant farmers who sometimes would let people called cottiers live on their land. Cottiers worked for the tenant farmers and in exchange they were allowed to subsistence farm on the tenant farmers land. Tenant farmers and cottiers constantly lived in fear of being thrown off their land.

Nearly 41 million immigrants lived in the United States in 2012. A historical high for a country that has been a major destination for immigrants throughout history. Immigration from the mid-1700's to modern day has greatly impacted the United States. This essay will inform you about how, why, and the impacts of immigration from the 1700’s up until today.

1) Immigration (Irish) Potatoe's were a staple in the Irish diet but in the 1840's the potato crops were mysteriously rotting and dying. This spread all across the fields of Ireland causing a famine. The famine lasted for about six years and killed over a million men, women, and children in Ireland. It also caused many of the Irish to immigrate to America to survive.

In the early 1800’s, Ireland was primarily rural. Most farmers worked on rented land from wealthy landlords. All of the corn and crops that they raise go to the landlords which are later exported to England. Potatoes are the main food of the impoverished Irish farmers who grew potatoes and other grains. The potato originated in South America but wasn’t brought to Ireland until later in the 16 century. Potatoes were so loved that they replaced barley and oats that poor people previously ate. This was really devastating because barley and oats were among the few things that poor people could afford. Poor people might have been able to get at least three potatoes every week. By the mid 1800’s, a fungus infected the potato crop. Plants became black

During the years after the Revolutionary War and the earliest days of the republic there was, on average, 6000 immigrants per year. The earliest versions of Congress didn’t have much power to control immigration as they left that power to state governments. However in 1790 they passed the first Naturalization Act, which stated "…any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States..." effectively ending any hope at the time for free black people, indentured servants, or Native Americans of becoming citizens. It also provided for citizenship for the children of U.S. citizens born abroad,

When the winters were harsher in the 1700s the Irish would use them for food in the winter, when all other sources of food were scarce. Thanks to Ireland’s weather conditions the potato was very easily grown and could be produced in mass amounts. By the end of the 1800s the potato was a main staple for the Irish and they would eat the potato as part of their daily lives. Eventually, the poor people of Ireland would rely on the potato as their only food source.

With its ability to grow in even the worst soil conditions, potatoes were in abundance in the early nineteenth century in Ireland. A visit to the countryside would mean seeing endless rows of potato bushes in fields as far as the eye could see. The potato became the staple of Irish diet, with one-third of the population depending on the root by 1844. But within a year, more than half of the potato crops were destroyed by the blight and thus began the Irish Potato Famine. The failure of the potato crop and its subsequent starvation was attributable to one thing: monocropping. Ireland actually wasn’t alone in fighting blights leading up to the Great Famine. In fact, much of northern Europe was met with the same disease in their potato crops. The difference was that other countries fought off the disease by cultivating different varieties of potatoes and other crops whereas Ireland was left vulnerable to the blight due to its dependence on one strain of the potato, the Irish Lumper. Along with crop failure and starvation, monocropping leads to numerous other environmental and nutritional damages, solvable with one easy solution: grow different crops! But as the saying goes: money is the root of all evil, and in the case of monocropping, the economic profits take control of the business.

The Great Famine occurred in Ireland between 1845 and 1850 (Gray 2004). The famine was caused by infectious diseases to potato crops and to humans, but also by structural issues in Ireland at the time of the occurrence (Gray 2004). The demography of Ireland changed drastically during the span of less than a decade. Prior to the famine, the Irish population was at 8.4 million in 1844 but as a result of the famine, a decline of 2.2 million people left Ireland with only a population of 6.6 million people in 1951 (Mokyr 2016). Research from the 1980s indicates the famine and accompanying diseases killed approximately 1.1 million people and the other half became emigrants (Gray 2004).

One quarter of Irish land was unused but unavailable for farming by the Irish. The Woollen, Poplin, Linen and Furniture and Glass industries disappeared. Fishing was reduced due to a lack of capital for boats and storage; “Free trade” caused sixty percent unemployment. In 1829 The Duke of Wellington wrote “There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.”

Ireland 1845, food was suddenly scarce, money was hard to earn, and what little was earned was immediately spent for survival. The people of Ireland had grown up used to missing meals due to crop failure. However, previous crop failures couldn’t compare to the potato famine of 1845. For the next five years, the blight destroyed nearly all the potato crops and killed many Irish. About one million people died during this time in Ireland because of the starvation and disease. About two million fled the lands of Ireland in hopes of escaping the starvation, disease, death, and poverty that had taken over Ireland since the famine. The tenant farmers, who suffered would farm land that belonged to the absentee landlords. They would grow many crops, most of which were very successful. They were only allowed to keep the potato crops for their own; the rest of the crops would be harvested and exported to England. The absentee landlords lived like kings while the tenant farmers were forced to sell everything they owned so they could have money to purchase food to stay alive. When they ran out of things to sell they were then forced to scavenge for food scraps just to escape death for a while longer. The starvation and struggle of the Irish tenant farmers could have been avoided if the absentee landlords hadn’t been so greedy with collecting the rent. England could have come to the aid of the Irish people sooner than they did if they weren’t so interested in staying true to their