The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline.
The famine was a watershed moment in the history of Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, whose capital was London, from 1801 to 1922. Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. From 1846, the impact of the blight was exacerbated by the British Whig government's economic policy of laissez-faire capitalism. The proximate cause of the famine was a potato blight which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, causing an additional 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influencing much of the unrest in the widespread European Revolutions of 1848. Ī potato infected with late blight, showing typical rot symptoms Between 18, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barks-one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history. During the Great Hunger, about 1 million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 18. The worst year of the period was 1847, known as "Black '47". 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, loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). The Great Famine ( Irish: an Gorta Mór ), also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland), was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. See list of memorials to the Great Famine Permanent change in the country's demographic, political, and cultural landscape
Population fell by 20–25% due to death and emigration Scene at Skibbereen during the Great Famine by Cork artist James Mahony, The Illustrated London News, 1847Ĭorn Laws, Gregory clause, Encumbered Estates' Court, Crime and Outrage Bill (Ireland) 1847, Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, Three Fs, Poor Law Amendment Act