60 Fun Facts About Irish Potato Famine

In which years did the Great Famine take place?

In Irish it was known as an Drochshaol, the bad life or the hard times.

What is the Irish-language name for the famine, meaning the Great Hunger?

Contemporaries more often called the period an Drochshaol, the bad life.

How is the worst year of the famine popularly remembered?

Seed potatoes were so scarce that year that hunger continued despite average yields.

Roughly how many people died during the famine, by the most widely accepted estimate?

At least as many again emigrated, and the population fell by 20 to 25 percent between 1841 and 1871.

What was Ireland's population on the eve of the famine, and what was it by 1901?

At least 2.1 million people left the island between 1845 and 1855, one of history's greatest exoduses from a single island.

What organism caused the potato blight?

Phytophthora infestans is often called a fungus but is actually more closely related to brown algae.

The blight pathogen has been traced to a valley in which country?

From the Toluca Valley it spread through North America and then to Europe.

Which strain of blight caused the 1845-46 outbreak, according to modern analysis?

Experts think it reached Europe probably in 1844, possibly on potatoes carried to feed passengers on clipper ships.

Which single potato variety made up a disproportionate share of Ireland's crop, leaving it genetically vulnerable?

By 1800 the potato was a winter staple for one in three Irish people.

Who is often credited with introducing the potato to Ireland after 1586?

He is said to have planted it at Myrtle Grove in Youghal, County Cork.

What fraction of the potato harvest was lost to blight in 1846?

The 1845 loss had been between a third and a half; the first starvation deaths came in autumn 1846.

Which newspaper announced on 13 September 1845 that the potato Murrain had unequivocally declared itself in Ireland?

It stopped the press to run the report.

Who was British prime minister when the blight first struck in 1845?

He wrote that there was always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news, but acted within weeks.

What did Peel secretly buy from America for £100,000 in November 1845?

Baring Brothers acted as his agents; the first shipment did not arrive until February 1846.

What nickname did the unpopular yellow cornmeal acquire?

Irish mills could not grind it, and it had to be very much cooked or it caused severe bowel complaints.

Which tariffs did Peel move to repeal in October 1845, splitting his party and eventually bringing down his government?

Repeal in 1846 did little to help the starving Irish.

Which Whig leader succeeded Peel as prime minister in June 1846?

His administration assumed the market would provide food.

What economic doctrine guided the Russell government's response, leading it to halt Peel's relief works?

They refused to interfere with the movement of food to England.

Which civil servant in charge of government relief wrote that if small farmers went, Ireland would reach a satisfactory settlement?

His name became a byword in Ireland for official callousness.

What did the 1847 Gregory clause of the Poor Law bar from relief?

Farmers had to give up all their land to qualify, and it drove some 90,000 people off the land in 1849 alone.

What principle, popular in Britain, was embodied in the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of June 1847?

The cost of relief was transferred to local rates in Ireland in April 1847.

What did the Incumbered Estates Act of 1849 allow?

British speculators bought cheaply, raised rents and cleared tenants for cattle grazing.

What was Souperism?

Those who converted for food were called soupers or jumpers and said to have taken the soup.

Which nationalist wrote that the Almighty sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine?

He was convicted under the Treason Felony Act and transported to Bermuda for 14 years.

Which group staged an unsuccessful armed rebellion in County Tipperary in 1848?

William Smith O'Brien had helped found the Irish Confederation the year before.

What did the Choctaw people of Oklahoma send for Irish relief in 1847?

It was just 16 years after the Choctaw had walked the Trail of Tears.

What is the name of the 2017 stainless-steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers in Midleton, County Cork, thanking the Choctaw?

Choctaw representatives have led the annual Doolough famine walk in Mayo.

According to legend, why did Sultan Abdulmecid I reduce his donation from £10,000 to £1,000?

Queen Victoria herself gave £2,000, and Tsar Alexander II also sent funds.

How much did Congressman Abraham Lincoln donate to famine relief in 1847?

President James K. Polk gave $50.

Which city is credited with the first large overseas donations in 1846, around £14,000?

Irish soldiers and East India Company employees there contributed.

Which encyclical did Pope Pius IX issue in March 1847 calling the Catholic world to aid Ireland?

He also gave 1,000 scudi personally, about £213.

Which banker co-founded the British Relief Association on 1 January 1847?

Backed by a Queen's Letter appeal, it raised about £390,000 in all.

Which religious group's Central Relief Committee tried to fill the gap when government relief ended?

Several British initiatives, including the soup kitchens, were inspired by efforts begun in one West Cork town.

Which West Cork town, one of the hardest hit, has famine burial pits holding an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 victims?

The best-known surviving famine folk song is named after the town.

How many people were officially recorded as evicted between 1849 and 1854?

Historian James Donnelly thinks the true figure including forced surrenders exceeded half a million.

Strokestown House's Mahon family evicted 3,000 people in 1847 yet still dined on what?

Major Denis Mahon was shot dead that same year; Strokestown Park has housed the National Famine Museum since 1994.

Which peer, owner of over 60,000 acres in Mayo, said he would not breed paupers to pay priests?

He cleared more than 2,000 tenants from the parish of Ballinrobe alone.

What were the overcrowded, badly provisioned emigrant vessels called?

They sailed from small unregulated harbours in the west of Ireland in breach of British safety rules.

Over 5,000 Irish emigrants died in 1847 at which quarantine island in the St Lawrence River?

About one in five of the 100,000 Irish who sailed to Canada that year died of disease and malnutrition.

Which English city was at least one-quarter Irish-born by 1851 and became known as Ireland's second capital?

It was the only place outside Ireland to elect an Irish nationalist MP, T. P. O'Connor, in 1885.

Which Canadian city, with fewer than 20,000 citizens, was flooded by 38,000 Irish in 1847 alone?

The 1851 census found more than half its inhabitants were Irish.

Which disease, according to the 1851 census, was the biggest killer during the famine years?

Fever accounted for 222,021 recorded deaths, against 21,770 recorded as outright starvation.

What population did the 1841 census record for Ireland?

The 1851 census counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in ten years.

Historian Joel Mokyr compared the £9.5 million spent on famine relief with the £63.9 million Britain soon spent on what?

He wrote that there is no doubt that Britain could have saved Ireland.

Which actor read out Tony Blair's 1997 message acknowledging that London had failed the Irish people?

Documents released in 2021 showed the message was actually approved by Blair's private secretary, not Blair himself.

Which US state added the famine to its schools' Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum in 1996?

Most historians, including Cormac Ó Gráda, reject the genocide label while accepting a case of neglect.

Ireland's National Famine Memorial at Murrisk, County Mayo, depicts what?

John Behan's sculpture stands at the foot of Croagh Patrick and was unveiled by President Mary Robinson in 1997.

The Doolough Tragedy of March 1849 saw starving people die after being made to do what?

Officials of the Westport Poor Law Union had moved the inspection to a hunting lodge 19 kilometres away.

Who wrote The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849, the influential 1962 history of the famine?

She wrote that no issue embittered Anglo-Irish relations more than food exports during the starvation.

The 1979 ballad The Fields of Athenry tells of a man transported for stealing whose corn?

Pete St John wrote it, and it has become a sporting anthem.

Who directed the 2018 famine-era revenge film Black '47?

It takes its title from the worst year of the famine.

Which Royal Navy officer's Cork squadron ran relief operations along the Irish coast in 1846-47?

Trevelyan ordered every available steamship to Ireland in December 1846.

The 1843 Devon Commission found the only place tenants were compensated for improvements, under tenant right, was which province?

The commission credited tenant right with Ulster's superior prosperity and tranquillity.

Which British statesman in 1844 described Ireland as having 'a starving population' and 'an absentee aristocracy'?

He added that it had 'an alien established Protestant church' and 'the weakest executive in the world'.

The blight pathogen was traced to which region of Mexico?

It spread through North America and reached Europe probably in 1844, hitting the eastern US crop in 1843 and 1844.

On what estate did Walter Raleigh reputedly plant Ireland's first potatoes after 1586?

His Lismore estate in County Waterford is also mentioned, though other planters have been credited too.

How many failures of the Irish potato crop since 1728 did the 1851 census commissioners record?

General failures through disease or frost were noted in 1739, 1740, 1770, 1800 and 1807.

Which Oxford economics professor said the Famine 'would not kill more than one million people'?

He added that this 'would scarcely be enough to do any good'.

How many landlords were shot, six of them fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847?

Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown, who evicted thousands, was among those killed.

Which shipping company carried many famine emigrants across the Atlantic to the Americas?

Of more than 100,000 Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847, about one in five died of disease and malnutrition.