The Great Famine, also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis which subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, literally translated as "the bad life". The worst year of the period was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.
The legacy of the Great Famine in Ireland followed a catastrophic period of Irish history between 1845 and 1852 during which time the population of Ireland was reduced by 50 percent.
Charles Wood, 1st Viscount Halifax, known as Sir Charles Wood, 3rd Baronet, between 1846 and 1866, was a British Whig politician and Member of the British Parliament. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1846 to 1852.
Terence Bellew MacManus was an Irish rebel who participated in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. Sentenced to death for treason, he and several other participants were given commuted sentences in 1849 and transported for life to Van Diemen's Land in Australia. Three years later in 1852, MacManus escaped and emigrated to the United States.
Young Ireland was a political and cultural movement in the 1840s committed to an all-Ireland struggle for independence and democratic reform. Grouped around the Dublin weekly The Nation, it took issue with the compromises and clericalism of the larger national movement, Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, from which it seceded in 1847. Despairing, in the face of the Great Famine, of any other course, in 1848 Young Irelanders attempted an insurrection. Following the arrest and the exile of most of their leading figures, the movement split between those who carried the commitment to "physical force" forward into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and those who sought to build a "League of North and South" linking an independent Irish parliamentary party to tenant agitation for land reform.
Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone was a British banker and politician.
The Young Irelander Rebellion was a failed Irish nationalist uprising led by the Young Ireland movement, part of the wider Revolutions of 1848 that affected most of Europe. It took place on 29 July 1848 at Farranrory, a small settlement about 4.3 km north-northeast of the village of Ballingarry, South Tipperary. After being chased by a force of Young Irelanders and their supporters, an Irish Constabulary unit took refuge in a house and held those inside as hostages. A several-hour gunfight followed, but the rebels fled after a large group of police reinforcements arrived.
Patrick O'Donoghue (1810–1854), also known as Patrick O'Donohoe or O'Donoghoe, from Clonegal, County Carlow, was an Irish Nationalist revolutionary and journalist, a member of the Young Ireland movement.
Events from the year 1845 in Ireland.
Events from the year 1847 in Ireland.
Events from the year 1845 in the United Kingdom.
Events from the year 1852 in Ireland.
The chronology of the Great Famine documents a period of Irish history between 29 November 1845 and 1852 during which time the population of Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 percent. The proximate cause was famine resulting from a potato disease commonly known as late blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food but which also produced an abundance of other food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
Ireland–Turkey relations are the bilateral relations between Ireland and Turkey. Formal relations were established in 1972. Ireland's embassy in Ankara was opened in 1998. Turkey has had an embassy in Dublin since 1973. Both countries are full members of the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Union for the Mediterranean and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Furthermore, Ireland is a member of the European Union while Turkey is a candidate.
The Irish Poor Law Extension Acts were a set of 1847 Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which altered the Irish Poor Law system. The passing of the Acts meant that the full cost of the Irish Poor Law system fell upon Irish property owners.
Carl Paul Janensch, Jr. is the former executive editor of The Courier-Journal, based in Louisville, Kentucky. He is also co-author of a play that has had several stagings. Since 2009 Janensch has been a professor emeritus of journalism at Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut, where he began teaching in 1995 and led the effort to create the graduate journalism program. He writes and delivers weekly commentaries and essays on media and other issues for commercial and public radio. He is the former president of the Associated Press Managing Editors (1989), a board member of the American Society of News Editors, and a Pulitzer Prize juror.
Ireland's Great Hunger Museum was founded in 2012 in Hamden, Connecticut as part of Quinnipiac University to document and educate the public on the Irish Great Famine of 1845–1852, as well as its causes and consequences. In addition to literature and artifacts, the museum contains the world's largest collection of Great Hunger-related art by both contemporary and 19th-century Irish and Irish-American artists.
The British Association for the Relief of Distress in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, known as the British Relief Association (BRA), was a private charity of the mid-19th century in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Established by a group of prominent aristocrats, bankers and philanthropists in 1847, the charity was the largest private provider of relief during the Great Irish Famine and Highland Potato Famine of the 1840s. During its brief period of operation, the Association received donations and support from many notable politicians and royalty, including Queen Victoria.
Stephen Edmund Spring Rice, styled The Honourable from 1839 until his death, was an Anglo-Irish civil servant and philanthropist. He served as the Secretary of the British Relief Association between 1847 and 1848.
The islands of Newfoundland and Ireland, in addition to sharing similar northern latitudes and facing each other across the Atlantic Ocean, also had in common, during the middle of the 19th century, a heavy dependence on a single agricultural crop, the potato--a dependence that allowed the same blight that precipitated the Great Famine in Ireland to wreak havoc on this former British colony as well. Though acute, and the source of great suffering, the famine in Newfoundland lasted for fewer years than its Irish contemporary, which extended from 1845 to 1849. Beginning a year later, in 1846, it ended with the return to prosperity of the local fisheries in the spring and summer of 1848.
