Ireland: The Great Potato Famine

In the 1800’s, Ireland experienced a famine that killed thousands of people. Bodies were scattered all over Ireland in mass graves and it is considered one of the greatest tragedies in Irish history. One reason why the people of Ireland were vulnerable to famine was because a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato by 1845. The climate in Ireland is often too wet for crops like wheat to survive so Irish people depended upon a diet full of carbs and protein, oatmeal and cattle. They were able to survive off of the potato so much that by the nineteenth century the Irish poor would eat up to 14 pounds of potatoes a day. This was fine until the September of 1845, when farmers all around Ireland in many different districts found

The European government tried to intervene at first, but science wasn't as advanced as it is today and their suggestions weren't very helpful. Although at first the British government tried to intervene they quickly turned to blaming the Irish for the

In the summer of 1847, government soup kitchens were feeding three million people a day, but by then it was too late for the hundreds of thousands of Irish people that already died. The famine, disease, and lack of support from the British government forced the Irish to emigrate to America. This mass emigration of one and a half million Irish people between 1847 and 1851 was the single most important outcome of the great famine. The Irish immigrants thought this would be the end of their journey, but in many ways it was only just the beginning. The living conditions and discrimination they experienced in America were the same as in Ireland until the American Civil War brought acceptance of Irish immigration and opened up opportunities for them. The pattern of immigration set up by the famine continued with Irish immigrants pouring into the United States through to the second half of the nineteenth century. The immigrants that arrived later on received a far warmer welcome than the famine immigrants, but many of them still felt forced into exile by the British and many of them took this belief into their new