57 Fun Facts About Irish Potato Famine

Blight hit potatoes across 1840s Europe, so why did Ireland suffer worst?

Its poor ate little else: millions of people lived on potatoes and almost nothing more, so when blight rotted crops from Belgium to Ireland in 1845, the Irish poor had no second food to fall back on.

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

An Gorta Mór means the Great Hunger, yet in the Irish-speaking west that suffered most, people of the time called it an Drochshaol: 'the bad life', or simply the hard times.

How is the worst year of the famine popularly remembered?

Black '47 earned its name even though government soup kitchens were serving some three million people a day that summer; the scheme was wound up after about six months.

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

About 1,000,000 people died and at least as many again emigrated, cutting the island's population by about a fifth within a decade.

What had happened to Ireland's population by the 1920s, some eighty years after the famine began?

It had roughly halved: emigration became a habit that outlasted the hunger and births stayed low, so the island's population kept falling for decades, to barely half its pre-famine size by the 1920s.

What kind of organism caused the potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845?

A water mould, Phytophthora infestans, caused the blight: it looks and lives like a fungus and was long classed as one, but it is a closer relative of algae than of true fungi.

From where is the potato blight thought to have reached Europe in the 1840s?

North America: blight swept potato fields in the eastern United States from 1843, then broke out in Belgium in 1845 and raced on to Ireland within months; where it first arose is still argued.

In 2013, where did scientists find the DNA that identified the Irish famine's blight strain?

Dried leaves in museums at Kew and Munich, the oldest collected in 1845, still held the blight's DNA; the strain, named HERB-1, matched no modern blight and is probably extinct.

Why did hunger continue in 1847 although that year's potato crop was largely blight-free?

Too little seed was planted: starving families had eaten their seed potatoes or were too weak to dig, so a healthy crop came in at a fraction of the normal size.

Which publication stopped its presses in September 1845 to announce that the potato murrain had reached Ireland?

The Gardeners' Chronicle was a London gardening weekly; its editor, the botanist John Lindley, was then sent to Ireland by the government to investigate the disease.

Why did Irish tenants sell their grain for export while their families went hungry?

To pay the rent: grain was the cash crop and the potato the family's food, so when blight took the potatoes the grain still had to be sold, or the family faced eviction.

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 Irish give the imported relief food that was so hard to grind and digest?

Peel's brimstone was named after the prime minister who ordered it; the rock-hard grain defeated Irish mills and, unless thoroughly cooked, caused severe bowel complaints.

Which laws did Robert Peel repeal in 1846, splitting his party and bringing down his government?

The Corn Laws taxed imported grain to protect landowners; repeal cost Peel his party and his office in June 1846, yet did little for Irish families with no money to buy food.

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

Lord John Russell's new government halted Peel's relief schemes, then put about half a million hungry people on public works that proved impossible to run.

Which economic doctrine guided the Whig government's response to the famine from 1846?

Laissez-faire held that governments should leave markets alone, so ministers closed soup kitchens that were feeding three million people a day after only six months.

What did the government's relief works of 1846 mostly pay starving labourers to build?

Roads: by Christmas 1846 about half a million people were breaking stones on them, paid by the piece at rates too low to buy food at famine prices.

What did the 1847 Gregory clause bar from poor relief?

Anyone holding at least a quarter acre had to surrender the land before getting relief, so families chose between keeping the farm and starving or giving it up to be fed.

Which principle lay behind the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of June 1847?

Irish property must support Irish poverty meant London moved the relief bill onto Irish landowners, and landlords who could not pay it evicted the tenants they were taxed for.

What did the Incumbered Estates Act of 1849 allow?

Indebted landlords' properties to be auctioned: British speculators are often blamed for what followed, yet of about 7,500 buyers in the first eight years more than nine in ten were Irish.

During the famine, what did it mean to say a starving family had 'taken the soup'?

Turned Protestant: a few missions fed the hungry only alongside Bible lessons, and though such cases were rare, 'souper' stayed an insult for generations.

In John Mitchel's famous line, the Almighty sent the potato blight, but who 'created the Famine'?

The English, wrote John Mitchel, whose newspaper urged revolt until he was convicted of treason felony in 1848 and shipped off as a convict; he escaped to America five years later.

Which group, inspired by Europe's 1848 revolutions, staged a failed armed rising in County Tipperary that year?

Young Ireland's rising ended in a skirmish with police at a widow's farmhouse near Ballingarry, but its exiled veterans went on to found the Fenians.

Which Native American nation, 16 years after its own Trail of Tears, sent money to Irish famine relief in 1847?

The Choctaw raised the money while still rebuilding after their own removal; in 2020 Irish donors cited the gift when sending aid to Navajo and Hopi families hit by Covid-19.

What do the nine tall steel shapes of Midleton's memorial to Native American famine donors depict?

Eagle feathers stand in a circle to form an empty bowl, a sign of the hunger the gift answered; the County Cork sculpture is called Kindred Spirits.

Why, according to legend, was the Ottoman sultan's £10,000 famine gift cut to £1,000?

To avoid outdoing Queen Victoria, who had given £2,000: he is said to have offered £10,000 until British diplomats objected, though some historians treat the tale as legend.

Which future president, then a newly elected congressman, gave $10 to Irish famine relief in 1847?

Abraham Lincoln's $10 was a fair sum for a little-known Illinois lawyer: the sitting president, James K. Polk, gave only $50.

Which city of the British Empire sent £14,000, the first large overseas donation to Irish famine relief?

Calcutta raised the money half a world away, and Irish soldiers serving in the army in India were among those who gave.

Which pope urged Catholics worldwide in 1847 to aid famine Ireland?

Pius IX gave money of his own, then issued an encyclical that asked Catholics everywhere for prayers and donations for Ireland.

Which famous banking family hosted the London meeting that founded the British Relief Association for famine aid in 1847?

The Rothschilds: Lionel de Rothschild brought together some of London's richest men, and the association they formed went on to send about £390,000 to Ireland.

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

The Quakers gave out roughly £200,000 in aid with no religious strings attached, and the work cost a number of them their own lives.

Which West Cork town, a byword for famine suffering, gave its name to a well-known ballad of hunger and exile?

Skibbereen's horrors in the winter of 1846 were reported around the world; in the ballad, a son asks his father why he ever left the place he loved.

What usually happened to a famine tenant's cabin straight after an eviction?

It was pulled down, often by hired gangs with crowbars, because an emptied plot cost the landlord no poor rates; historian James Donnelly counts perhaps half a million people evicted.

What happened to Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown in November 1847, after he cleared some 3,000 tenants from his estate?

He was shot dead in an ambush, and bonfires were lit on the hills around his estate to celebrate.

Which Mayo landlord of some 60,000 acres vowed he 'would not breed paupers to pay priests'?

The Earl of Lucan demolished over 300 cabins and evicted 2,000 people in one Mayo parish alone, earning the name the Exterminator; the Lord Lucan who vanished in 1974 was his descendant.

What were the overcrowded, badly provisioned emigrant vessels called?

Coffin ships were the cheapest way across the Atlantic, and the name was earned: on the worst crossings a fifth or more of the passengers died and were buried at sea.

Which quarantine island near Quebec City became the burial place of more than 5,000 Irish emigrants in 1847?

Grosse Isle's small quarantine station was swamped in 1847, with ships waiting days for a doctor, and thousands more emigrants had died at sea before ever reaching it.

Which English port, the main departure point for famine emigrants crossing the Atlantic, later elected an Irish nationalist MP for 44 years?

Liverpool took in so many famine Irish that its Scotland division, with its large Irish vote, returned the Irish nationalist T.P. O'Connor from 1885 until his death.

Which Lake Ontario city of barely 20,000 people saw some 38,000 famine Irish land on its waterfront in 1847?

Toronto took in nearly twice its own population in one sailing season; fares to Canada were far cheaper than to the United States, and many of the newcomers soon moved on south across the border.

Spread by lice among the crowds at soup kitchens and workhouses, what was the biggest recorded killer of the famine years?

Fever, chiefly typhus and relapsing fever, killed far more people than outright starvation did; relief itself helped it spread by gathering the weak into crowds.

Which Irish leader died in Genoa in 1847 while travelling to Rome as famine gripped his country?

Daniel O'Connell, known as the Liberator, was old and ailing when he set out for Rome; at his wish his heart went on to Rome while his body came home to Glasnevin in Dublin.

Historian Joel Mokyr set Britain's famine relief bill against the far larger cost of which 'utterly futile' war soon afterwards?

The Crimean War, fought a few years after the famine, swallowed several times what had been spent on Irish relief; Mokyr's verdict was that Britain could have saved Ireland.

Which British prime minister's message said those who governed in London had failed the Irish people during the famine?

Tony Blair's words were read out by actor Gabriel Byrne at a commemoration in County Cork in 1997; papers released in 2021 showed an aide approved the text because Blair could not be reached.

Ireland's National Famine Memorial, John Behan's bronze ship of skeletons, stands at the foot of which Mayo mountain?

Croagh Patrick draws thousands of pilgrims on the last Sunday of each July, known as Reek Sunday, and some still climb it barefoot as penance.

In the Doolough Tragedy of 1849, starving people died after being made to do what?

Walk miles to a relief inspection or lose their place on the lists: officials sent the crowd on from Louisburgh to a lodge at Delphi, and an annual Famine Walk now retraces their route.

Which American party of the 1850s rose on hostility to Irish Catholic immigrants?

The Know Nothings were sworn to answer 'I know nothing' when asked about their lodges; feeding on alarm at the famine Irish, the party swept Massachusetts in the elections of 1854.

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

Trevelyan's corn points at Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who ran famine relief; Pete St John's lament for a transported husband is now a terrace anthem for Irish rugby and football crowds.

Which playwright's mother, writing as 'Speranza', published the furious 1847 poem 'The Famine Year'?

Oscar Wilde's mother, born Jane Elgee, went further in 1848: when her editor was tried over an unsigned call to arms she had written, she is said to have stood up in court and claimed it.

From which American city did the warship USS Jamestown, lent by Congress, sail for Cork in 1847 loaded with famine food?

Boston's relief committee borrowed the navy sloop by act of Congress, loaded her with food, manned her with volunteers and had her in Cork just 15 days after sailing.

Under the custom of 'tenant right', in which Irish province could a departing farmer expect payment for his improvements?

Ulster's custom let a departing tenant sell his interest in the farm, often for many years' rent, so improving land paid; elsewhere the gain simply passed to the landlord when a lease ended.

Which future prime minister told the Commons in 1844 that Ireland had 'a starving population' and 'an absentee aristocracy'?

Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist as well as an MP, was speaking a year before the blight; he went on to list 'an alien Church' and 'the weakest executive in the world', and concluded: 'That was the Irish question.'

In which mountain range was the potato first cultivated, long before the Spanish carried it to Europe?

The Andes were where Spanish conquerors, chasing Inca riches, found farmers growing potatoes; carried across the Atlantic, the plant thrived in Ireland's cool, damp soil.

Which escaped American slave and famous abolitionist lectured across Ireland in late 1845, just as the potato blight struck?

Frederick Douglass had sailed to escape recapture after his memoir made him famous, and wrote home from Ireland in wonder: 'I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.'

More than 4,000 orphan girls from Irish workhouses were shipped to which part of the British Empire between 1848 and 1850?

Australia was short of women, so Earl Grey, the colonial secretary, offered assisted passages to girls from workhouses in every Irish county; a monument in Sydney now honours them.

Which famine emigrant ship, rebuilt as a floating museum on Dublin's quays, never lost a passenger on her Atlantic crossings?

The Jeanie Johnston, a Kerry-owned ship, made 16 emigrant voyages without a single death; even when she sank in 1858, her crew clung to the rigging for nine days and all were rescued.

What did the Irish call the all-night farewell gathering held for an emigrant about to cross the Atlantic, probably for ever?

An American wake mourned the living as if dead, a custom said to be unique to Ireland: neighbours sat up through the night before the departure, treating the parting as final.

Which American city's Irish Hunger Memorial recreates a sloping Irish hillside, complete with potato furrows and a real abandoned stone cottage?

New York's memorial stands among the towers of Battery Park City, in the port where so many famine Irish landed; visitors enter through the cottage and climb out onto a field of Irish grasses and wildflowers.