Q 01/05

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

A) Deadlier blight

B) Poor ate little else

C) Ports were closed

D) Harvest came later

Answer · why

B) 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, t...

Q 02/05

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

A) An Gorta Mór

B) Tír na nÓg

C) Erin go Bragh

D) Céad Míle Fáilte

Answer · why

A) 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...

Q 03/05

How is the worst year of the famine popularly remembered?

A) The Hungry Forties

B) Red '46

C) The Year of Sorrows

D) Black '47

Answer · why

D) 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...

Q 04/05

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

A) 100,000

B) 300,000

C) 1,000,000

D) 3,000,000

Answer · why

C) 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 05/05

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

A) It had fully recovered

B) It had roughly halved

C) It had barely changed

D) It had roughly doubled

Answer · why

B) 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,...