The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—and hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times". The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". The population of Ireland on the eve of the famine was about 8.5 million, by 1901 it was just 4.4 million. During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died and more than 1 million more 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.
Daniel(I) O’Connell, hailed in his time as The Liberator, was the acknowledged political leader of Ireland's Roman Catholic majority in the first half of the 19th century. His mobilisation of Catholic Ireland, down to the poorest class of tenant farmers secured the final instalment of Catholic emancipation in 1829 and allowed him to take a seat in the United Kingdom Parliament to which he had been twice elected.
A soup kitchen, food kitchen, or meal center is a place where food is offered to the hungry and homeless, usually for no cost, or sometimes at a below-market price. Frequently located in lower-income neighborhoods, soup kitchens are often staffed by volunteer organizations, such as church or community groups. Soup kitchens sometimes obtain food from a food bank for free or at a low price, because they are considered a charity, which makes it easier for them to feed the many people who require their services.
A coffin ship is a popular idiom used to describe the ships that carried Irish migrants escaping the Great Irish Famine and Highlanders displaced by the Highland Clearances.
The Lancashire Cotton Famine, also known as the Cotton Famine or the Cotton Panic (1861–1865), was a depression in the textile industry of North West England, brought about by overproduction in a time of contracting world markets. It coincided with the interruption of baled cotton imports caused by the American Civil War and speculators buying up new stock for storage in the shipping warehouses at the entrepôt. It also caused cotton prices to rise in China, in which trade had been steadily increasing following the Second Opium War and during the ongoing Taiping Rebellion. The increase in cotton prices caused the textile trade to rapidly lose two-thirds of its previous value of exports to China from 1861 to 1862. The worldwide cotton famine also produced a boom in cotton production in Egypt and Russian Turkestan.
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of the island seceding from the United Kingdom, becoming the Irish Free State, with only the six northeastern counties remaining within the United Kingdom.
The Highland Potato Famine was a period of 19th-century Highland and Scottish history over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands saw their potato crop repeatedly devastated by potato blight. It was part of the wider food crisis facing Northern Europe caused by potato blight during the mid-1840s, whose most famous manifestation is the Great Irish Famine, but compared with its Irish counterpart, it was much less extensive and took many fewer lives as prompt and major charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom ensured relatively little starvation.
Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas William Parish Labalmondière CB was the first Assistant Commissioner (Administrative) of the London Metropolitan Police and acted as Commissioner for three months in 1868–1869.
The Irish Conservative Party, often called the Irish Tories, was one of the dominant Irish political parties in Ireland in the 19th century. It was affiliated with the Conservative Party in Great Britain. Throughout much of the century it and the Irish Liberal Party were rivals for electoral dominance among Ireland's small electorate within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with parties such as the movements of Daniel O'Connell and later the Independent Irish Party relegated into third place. The Irish Conservatives became the principal element of the Irish Unionist Alliance following the alliance's foundation in 1891.
Edward Turner Boyd Twisleton was the son of Thomas Twisleton. He was educated at Winchester and he matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford in 1826. He became a scholar at Trinity College and graduated with a first class honours. He was called to the bar but did not practice, instead serving on government commissions. He was a British Poor Law Commissioner serving in Ireland between 1845 and 1847. He tackled his work assisting the relief effort with enthusiasm but argued with Charles Trevelyan and Charles Wood over taxes. He resigned his office because he objected to rate-in-aid legislation that he regarded as unfair to the north of Ireland, making them in effect pay for relief twice.
Events from the year 1847 in Ireland.
The Panic of 1847 was a major British commercial and banking crisis, possibly triggered by the announcement in early March 1847 of government borrowing to pay for relief to combat the Great Famine in Ireland. It is also associated with the end of the 1840s railway industry boom and the failure of many non-bank lenders. The crisis was composed of two phases, one in April 1847 and one in October 1847, which was more serious and known as 'The Week of Terror'.
The Irish poor laws were a series of acts of Parliament intended to address social instability due to widespread and persistent poverty in Ireland. While some legislation had been introduced by the pre-Union Parliament of Ireland prior to the Act of Union, the most radical and comprehensive attempt was the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838, closely modelled on the English Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. In England, this replaced Elizabethan era legislation which had no equivalent in Ireland.
The Second Reformation was an evangelical campaign from the 1820s onwards, organised by theological conservatives in the Church of Ireland and Church of England.
Souperism was a phenomenon of the Irish Great Famine. Protestant Bible societies set up schools in which starving children were fed, on the condition of receiving Protestant religious instruction at the same time. Its practitioners were reviled by the Catholic families who had to choose between Protestantism and starvation. People who converted for food were known as "soupers", "jumpers" and "cat breacs". In the words of their peers, they "took the soup". Although souperism did not occur frequently, the perception of it had a lasting effect on the popular memory of the Famine. It blemished the relief work by Protestants who gave aid without proselytising, and the rumour of souperism may have discouraged starving Catholics from attending soup kitchens for fear of betraying their faith.
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.
The Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1847, also known as the Irish Poor Law Extension Act 1847 or the Poor Law Amendment Act 1847 was an 1847 act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which altered the Irish Poor Law system. The passing of the act meant that the full cost of the Irish Poor Law system fell upon Irish property owners.
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.
Robert Traill or Trail (1793–1847) was a clergyman in the established Church of Ireland. He was rector of Schull, County Cork from 1832 until his death and part-owned a copper mine in the area. Traill complained of losing tithes from the Roman Catholic population due to the 1830s Tithe War but was recognised for his compassion during the Great Famine in Ireland from 1846. He was depicted in an Illustrated London News article of the time and was the subject of a letter published in several newspapers.
Asenath Hatch Nicholson was an American vegan, social observer and philanthropist. She wrote at first hand about the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s. She wrote about the life of Ireland both before and during the crop failures that caused famine as she walked the country distributing copies of the Bible, food and clothing.
