The Great Irish Famine revisited

The bare statistics of the Great Irish Famine are chilling enough: in 1845-55 more than a million people died of starvation and disease and a further two million emigrated. Ireland’s population fell by more than a third.

John Kelly does an excellent job of sketching the background in The Graves are Walking: massive population growth (the Irish population doubled in the second half of the eighteenth century and almost doubled again in the first four decades of the nineteenth), division of land into ever smaller plots and consequent dependence on the potato, exploitative landlords, resentment at rule by London.

When blight struck the potato crop in 1845, it was not as if the British government was unaware of the danger ‒ ‘If the potato fails . . . famine becomes a fatal certainty’ declared the Home Secretary of the day. And to begin with, disaster was staved off by relief measures and government work-schemes.