the Famine

Famine, the (‘the Great Hunger’) (1845-1848), a national disaster caused by the devastation of the potato crop by the fungus phythopthera infestans, reducing yields to two-thirds of normal levels in 1845 and to about one-fifth in 1846. The 1847 crop was healthy but only one-tenth of the pre-famine acreage had been planted, while the fungus reappeared in 1848. Failure on this scale wiped out the main food supply of well over half the population, pushed up the price of other foods, and caused the collapse of a tillage economy based on the intensive use of labour paid for with small plots of potato ground. Sir Robert Peel's Tory administration was able to respond effectively to the partial failure of 1845 by importing maize (‘Indian meal’) for sale at controlled prices. The Whig Government that took office in June 1846 sought to meet the much greater losses of the next year with public works, replaced from Spring 1847 by the distribution of free food from soup kitchens; but these measures proved wholly inadequate. Best estimates are that around one million people died, mainly from typhus and other diseases, while over a million emigrated between 1845 and 1851. To later nationalists, the Famine was proof of the failure of the Act of Union. John Mitchel's The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) (1861) accused government not only of indifference to Irish misery but of actively pursuing a genocidal policy. The Famine is a central component of the historical self-awareness of the Irish people and a recurrent theme on which William Carleton, Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O'Flaherty, Walter Macken, and others have all founded works in English. Writings in Irish memoirs reflecting the experience of the Famine include Peadar Ó Laoghaire, Mó Scéal Féin (1915).