The Great Irish Famine: 1845-1849

Originating in Belgium sometime during the 1830s, the potato blight (otherwise known as Phytophthora Infestans) reached Ireland in 1845. Right up until the disease broke out over a third of the Irish population were exclusively dependent upon the potato for their sustenance. Even the poorest households had a cauldron and a griddle upon which many potato dishes were created. Florence Irwin describes within her cook book: Cookin' Woman, The -Irish Country Recipes & Others (1949) how those lucky enough to live on the coast would boil their potatoes in water from the sea so that the skin wouldn't fall off the potato! (Irwin, 1949). Clever thinking! Today we can simply add a little sea salt to our potatoes on the boil and get the same result.

Children grew up with the tuber being the main commodity in their diets and in some cases the only nutrition they got. From Olive Sharkey's 'Old Days, Old Ways' (1987) we learn of the importance of survival in those times. She states that "[i]t was essential that everyone learned to peal their potatoes quickly or they might miss out, the greedy, skillful peelers hoarding up little caches of spuds on their plates before actually tucking in" (Sharkey, 1994). Eating potatoes was as natural as breathing but if you didn't eat fast, you didn't eat.

Then, in 1845 disaster struck the island. The potato crop failed along with other crops leaving farmers and potato growers with rotten, pungent, inedible potatoes. For a country so reliant upon the tuber, the people starved. 


Rotten Potato

Nationwide devastation occurred. Before the famine broke out the workhouses were a place for the extremely poor and starving, which everyone avoided. During the famine however, they were over populated. Quakers set up soup kitchens around the land for people to travel to on foot; many died on the roads along the way. Through random and scarce selection, some people were lucky enough to receive a ticket aboard ships delivering the Irish to other parts of the world taking their love for spuds everywhere. The people were packed in steerage in their hundreds for up to nine weeks of travelling where many died along the way. Nearly a third of ships didn’t reach their destination either and received the ‘nick-name’ The Coffin Ships.  



Turning to John Reader again and The Untold History of the Potato (2009), we gather further insight into the wide-spread devastation the disease had upon Europe. Reader argues that “[a]t its maximum range, the disease had infected an area that streched 1,600 kilometers from the western shores of Ireland to northern Italy, and 1,800 kilometers from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden - potato farms across more than 2 million square kilometers of land laid waste in just four months” (Reader, 2009 p. 195). Most of Europe had been hit by the blight, but Ireland was hit the hardest. Ireland lost over a fifth of its population due to starvation and another fifth to emigration. This highlights the dangers of a single crop-driven diet as well as putting crop diversity into perspective. Reader argues that “[n]othing like it had been known before. Neither the Vandal hordes nor the bubonic plague had penetrated Europe so deeply and so fast” (Reader, 2009 p 195).

 

Today of course the potato is still loved among the Irish and is a huge influence upon our diet – we “remain the highest per capita consumers of potatoes in the European Union” (Davidson, 1999 p. 407). ‘You can take the potato away from the Irish but you can’t take the Irish away from the potato’.

There is literature of all sorts on the Irish Potato Famine both factional and fictional, as well as many documentaries. I recommend reading the The Great Hunger (1991) by Cecil Woodham-Smith which I read in high school. It describes the effect the potato famine had upon Ireland and England, and it also takes a look at emigration to America. For the younger reader I highly recommend Marita Conlon-McKenna’s trilogy: Under the Hawthorn Tree: Children of the Great Famine (1997-1998), which I couldn’t get enough of as a child. The collection proved so popular in Ireland during the 90s that they were made into a film. Check it out if you can!

Davidson, A. The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Irwin, F. Cookin' Woman, The -Irish Country Recipes & Others. Dublin: Oliver and Boyd, 1949.

Reader, J. The Untold History of the Potato: ‘Woe the Sons of Adam!’. London: Vintage Books, 2009.

Sharkey, O. Old Days, Old Ways. Dublin: Syracuse Uni Pr, 1987.

worcesterjonny, (2008) The Irish Famine set to 'the Pogues' - Thousands are Sailing. [Youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEz5mS_XQcQ April 5th 2012.