An Gorta Mór: The Great Hunger in Ireland, 1845-1852

The Famine seen through the hardships of one Irish tenant family.

The O’Donnels

The O’Donnel family consists of a mother, father, and eight children—five girls and three boys.

They are Irish Catholic.Catholics made up 80% of the population of Ireland in 1847.

They are tenant farmers—they don’t own their land, they rent it from absentee landlords for large sums.

They are entirely dependent on the potato crop for their own survival.

A Brief History, 1641-1852

Conquered, re-conquered, and oppressedIreland was repeatedly conquered by neighboring Britain, but the re-conquest by Oliver Cromwell in 1641 was particularly brutal, leading to a mass genocide of the Irish people and a range of laws stripping them of their rights.

Until the final years of the 18th century, the Irish were forbidden access to education, land ownership, and even the vote.

Even after the restrictions were lifted, the landlords still held all the land and rented it to Irish farmers in small parcels, keeping them dependent on the potato

What’s a Tenant Farmer?

Tenants were ordinary Catholic Irish families who had been long forbidden to own their own property.

Irish land had been given away to English Protestant families, who acted as landlords, renting the land back to Irish farmers for exorbitant prices.

Since the English landlords often went for decades without visiting their land, brutal middlemen oversaw the process and collected rents.

If an Irish family made any improvement on their rented land, it belonged to the landlord, not the family, and could be taken away.

Why Potatoes?

The O’Donnels and other Irish families were so dependent on potatoes because they had very little land on which to farm.

Average farms were between 1 and 5 acres, which is too small to plant a diverse range of crops, and too small to support herds of livestock.

Potatoes provided dense, high-calorie, high-carbohydrate food that grew in a small place.

Blight? What’s a Blight?

Potato blight was a disease that made the potato crop inedible. That potato at the right is a victim of potato blight, also known as Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like disease.

The O’Donnel Family Home

The O’Donnels live in squalid conditions without enough food to feed their children. Infant and child mortality during the Famine was very high, and malnutrition was the norm.

How can you escape such crushing poverty?

Survival Strategies

1. Wait it out. Things can only get better, right?

2. Emigrate to another country to escape the blight.

3. Find work in the city (Dublin, Cork, Belfast, etc.)

1. Waiting It OutThe O’Donnels were one of the poorest tenant families, so their landlord might have “cleared” them from their land to install wealthier tenants.

Diseases like cholera took as heavy a toll as starvation.

After eviction, the O’Donnels are lucky enough to be accepted into a workhouse, where they toiled in exchange for subsistence-level rations.

When the An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) finally began to draw to a close, the O’Donnels moved into Dublin to work in factories—farmers no more.

2. Emigrate to another country.

The O’Donnels join the Irish diaspora, risking their luck on one of the coffin ships bound for the American port of Boston. They have a 20% chance of losing one of their number to disease on the voyage.

Upon arrival in Boston, they are too poor to travel anywhere else, and so the O’Donnels become part of an Irish population that made up a quarter of the city.

They experience a great deal of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigotry, but within a couple of generations they are thoroughly assimilated into the American Melting Pot.

More than 250,000 Irish citizens emigrated each year during the Great Famine.

3. Find Work in a City

The O’Donnels are skilled farmers, but unskilled in the trades and crafts that give them a shot at a prosperous life in the Industrial-era cities of Ireland

Jobs in the great, sprawling, unregulated factories are hard to come by, and living conditions are squalid, crowded, and unsanitary.

Mr. O’Donnel and two of his oldest children find low-paying factory jobs that keep a roof over their head, but they are now part of a permanent underclass of low-income Irish city-dwellers.

After the Hunger

Ireland lost between 20% and 25% of its population.

During the Hunger, Ireland was still forced to export food to England—only the potato was blighted, other crops still thrived, but the Irish weren’t allowed to keep them.

This policy fueled a long, bloody rebellion by the Irish against the English, which only ended with Irish independence in 1922.

Today, Ireland’s economy is once more devastated. The “Celtic Tiger” boom of the early 2000s shattered with the international financial crisis.