An Gorta Mór - The Impact and Legacy of the Great Irish Famine

Lecture delivered by Mr. Éamon Ó Cuív, TD, Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, at St. Michael's College,

University of Toronto, Canada, on Friday 8 May 2009

A dhaoine uaisle

I am very pleased to be here with you to deliver this lecture on An Gorta Mór - the impact and legacy of the Great Irish Famine as part of a programme of events here in Canada to mark the commemoration of the Irish famine and I would like to thank the authorities here in St Michael's College and the University of Toronto for their assistance in facilitating this event this evening. Over these few days, I will be participating in other events in Ireland Park here in Toronto and in Grosse Ile near Quebec. The events here in Canada are being paralleled in Ireland by a national commemoration next weekend, centred in Skibbereen, Co Cork. In future years, we hope that the famine commemorations will be held in other provinces of Ireland and in other countries that have a significant Irish diaspora.

The Irish famine of 1845-50 was the greatest social calamity - in terms of mortality and suffering - that Ireland has ever experienced. It was also the worst social calamity based on crop failure experienced in Europe (indeed, in the 'developed' world) in modern times. The terms in which it is described hint at its complexity, and at the different ways in which historians and the people at large have sought to describe and come to terms with the calamity: it has been referred to as 'the great Irish famine', the 'great hunger', the 'Irish potato famine', an Gorta Mór and, in some Irish-language communities,'blianta an droch-shaoil' [meaning: the years of the bad life].

The salient facts of the calamity are not in dispute. From late summer 1845 a hitherto unknown fungus, to which there was then no known antidote, attacked and partially destroyed the potato crop in Ireland. In 1846 the blight was more severe and destroyed virtually the entire potato crop. The ravages of starvation and various diseases in 1847 earned for that year the grim description 'Black '47'. Though the blight was less severe in 1847, the potato harvest was poor, as seed potatoes had either been consumed during the scarcity in 1846 or had simply not been set, due to panic and the disruption of normal life. The blight was again severe in 1848, especially in the areas of greatest poverty and population pressure in the south and west. The partial failure of the potato in 1849 and 1850 prolonged the crisis and the suffering into the early 1850s.

During the crisis years, it is estimated that over one million Irish perished, from hunger or, more commonly, from hunger-related diseases. In the decade following 1846 - when the floodgates of emigration opened to a population fleeing a stricken land - more than 1.8 million Irish emigrated, with more than half of these fleeing (more as refugees than as emigrants, as the historian Peter Gray has remarked) during the famine years of 1846-50. The population of Ireland, which was close to 8.5 million in 1845, had fallen to 6.6 million by 1851. It would continue to fall - due to the relentless drain of emigration - for many decades to come.

How did it happen that the failure of a single root crop - the potato - in successive seasons produced such a terrible calamity in a country that was then an integral part of the United Kingdom, the state with the most advanced and developed economy in the world at the time? The general state of Irish agricultural produce in Ireland in the 1840s was healthy and developed: there was no general shortage of food. Might the crisis have been averted, or, at least, better dealt with? Could the mortality and suffering have been curtailed? Specifically, might more have been done by the government of the day to deal with the crisis, to save lives and ameliorate the suffering?