Irish Potato Famine Trivia
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57 free Irish Potato Famine trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Irish Potato Famine trivia quiz covers the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852, the catastrophe that halved Ireland's population and reshaped Irish America. The easy questions are ones anyone who paid attention in history class can attempt: what destroyed the crop, roughly how many died and how many left, which year was Black '47, and what the coffin ships were. From there it moves into how Ireland got so dependent on one vegetable, the Lumper, the middlemen and absentee landlords, and how the governments of Peel and Russell responded and failed to respond. The harder end is for history buffs and readers of Woodham-Smith and Ó Gráda: Peel's brimstone, the Corn Laws, Charles Trevelyan and laissez-faire, the Poor Law and the quarter-acre Gregory clause, the Encumbered Estates Act, souperism, Skibbereen, the Doolough walk, Grosse Isle, Liverpool as Ireland's second capital, the Choctaw donation and the sultan's £1,000, John Mitchel's famous sentence, the Blair message of 1997, the genocide debate and the memorials at Murrisk and Midleton. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the famine, its causes and its aftermath before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Irish history, Victorian Britain and 19th-century history quizzes next.
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Q 01Blight hit potatoes across 1840s Europe, so why did Ireland suffer worst?
Poor ate little else
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.
Q 02What is the Irish-language name for the famine, meaning the Great Hunger?
An Gorta Mór
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.
Q 03How is the worst year of the famine popularly remembered?
Black '47
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.
Q 04Roughly how many people died during the famine, by the most widely accepted estimate?
1,000,000
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.
Q 05What had happened to Ireland's population by the 1920s, some eighty years after the famine began?
It had roughly halved
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.
Q 06What kind of organism caused the potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845?
A water mould
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.
Q 07From where is the potato blight thought to have reached Europe in the 1840s?
North America
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.
Q 08In 2013, where did scientists find the DNA that identified the Irish famine's blight strain?
Dried leaves in museums
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.
Q 09Why did hunger continue in 1847 although that year's potato crop was largely blight-free?
Too little seed was planted
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.
Q 10Which publication stopped its presses in September 1845 to announce that the potato murrain had reached Ireland?
The Gardeners' Chronicle
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.
Q 11Why did Irish tenants sell their grain for export while their families went hungry?
To pay the rent
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.
Q 12What did Peel secretly buy from America for £100,000 in November 1845?
Maize and cornmeal
Baring Brothers acted as his agents; the first shipment did not arrive until February 1846.
Q 13What nickname did the Irish give the imported relief food that was so hard to grind and digest?
Peel's brimstone
Q 21During the famine, what did it mean to say a starving family had 'taken the soup'?
Turned Protestant
Turned Protestant: a few missions fed the hungry only alongside Bible lessons, and though such cases were rare, 'souper' stayed an insult for generations.
Q 22In John Mitchel's famous line, the Almighty sent the potato blight, but who 'created the Famine'?
The English
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.
Q 23Which group, inspired by Europe's 1848 revolutions, staged a failed armed rising in County Tipperary that year?
Young Ireland
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.
Q 14Which laws did Robert Peel repeal in 1846, splitting his party and bringing down his government?
The Corn Laws
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.
Q 15Which Whig leader succeeded Peel as prime minister in June 1846?
Lord John Russell
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.
Q 16Which economic doctrine guided the Whig government's response to the famine from 1846?
Laissez-faire
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.
Q 17What did the government's relief works of 1846 mostly pay starving labourers to build?
Roads
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.
Q 18What did the 1847 Gregory clause bar from poor relief?
Anyone holding at least a quarter acre
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.
Q 19Which principle lay behind the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of June 1847?
Irish property must support Irish poverty
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.
Q 20What did the Incumbered Estates Act of 1849 allow?
Indebted landlords' properties to be auctioned
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.
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.
Q 24Which Native American nation, 16 years after its own Trail of Tears, sent money to Irish famine relief in 1847?
The Choctaw
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.
Q 25What do the nine tall steel shapes of Midleton's memorial to Native American famine donors depict?
Eagle feathers
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.
Q 26Why, according to legend, was the Ottoman sultan's £10,000 famine gift cut to £1,000?
To avoid outdoing Queen Victoria
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.
Q 27Which future president, then a newly elected congressman, gave $10 to Irish famine relief in 1847?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln's $10 was a fair sum for a little-known Illinois lawyer: the sitting president, James K. Polk, gave only $50.
Q 28Which city of the British Empire sent £14,000, the first large overseas donation to Irish famine relief?
Calcutta
Calcutta raised the money half a world away, and Irish soldiers serving in the army in India were among those who gave.
Q 29Which pope urged Catholics worldwide in 1847 to aid famine Ireland?
Pius IX
Pius IX gave money of his own, then issued an encyclical that asked Catholics everywhere for prayers and donations for Ireland.
Q 30Which famous banking family hosted the London meeting that founded the British Relief Association for famine aid in 1847?
The Rothschilds
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.