8. The Irish Potato Famine – 1,500,000 People Displaced
In the mid-19th-century, nearly half of the population of Ireland relied on potatoes as their primary source of nutrition. Much of the best farmland in Ireland had long ago been collected into estates which were barred to the Catholic population. The land that remained had been gradually subdivided over generations, due to an Irish practice of splitting up inherited lands amongst all sons of a family rather than leaving the plot intact and passing it on to the oldest son. As a consequence, by 1845 most farmers had no more than fifteen acres of poor land.
Cultivation of potatoes offered these tenant farmers a means to survive. The Irish Lumper strain of potato grew well in nutrient-poor or wet soil, enabling even the smallest plots of land to feed a family – albeit in abject poverty. Then in 1845 a blight of Phytophthora infesta, a parasitic algae not seen before in Ireland, broke out across the island. The blight devastated Irish Lumper potatoes, destroying as much as half of all of the potato crops on which Ireland’s poor depended. The first deaths of starvation were reported the following year.
Over the next four years, famine swept the country as hunger and epidemic disease claimed the lives of between 500,000 and 2,000,000 people. Faced with the catastrophe at home, young Irish men and women fled, touching off a wave of emigration from Ireland. 1,500,000 people left Ireland between 1845 and 1855.
The overwhelming majority came to the United States, though many would go to Canada and Australia as well. Most of these new immigrants had left their families behind in Ireland, but they would attempt to protect them from the worst of the famine by sending money back from their new homes overseas.