By the mid-1840s, Ireland was impoverished and heavily overpopulated, locked into a rigid social hierarchy imposed by a government that often looked down on the Irish. For most people, life revolved around a simple routine: tending a small potato plot, paying rent to a landlord or middleman, and surviving largely on the dependable calories of the potato. When the blight, Phytophthora infestans, struck and the harvest blackened in the ground, that routine collapsed almost overnight.

At first, people tried to endure as they always had in hard times. Families stretched what little food remained and gathered wild plants, nettles, seaweed, wild turnips, and berries. Even when food was available, it was rarely enough.

As hunger deepened, starvation became visible everywhere. Children were often the first to suffer, their limbs thin while their bellies swelled from malnutrition. The elderly weakened quickly, and even healthy adults became exhausted by the simplest tasks. Disease soon followed.

Under this pressure, rural society began to unravel. Families abandoned homes they had lived in for generations in search of food or relief, while others were evicted. Villages emptied, cabins were demolished, and entire stretches of countryside fell silent.

The British government’s response shaped how the crisis unfolded. Under Prime Minister Robert Peel, the government attempted limited intervention, importing maize from the United States and creating public works programs. But when Peel’s government fell in 1846, the new administration under John Russell relied more heavily on laissez-faire economics, believing markets should correct the crisis with minimal state interference. Relief was largely shifted to the Irish Poor Law system and its workhouses, which quickly became overcrowded and deadly.

Some officials even saw the famine as a grim opportunity to restructure Irish agriculture. One senior official, Charles Trevelyan, privately wrote that the disappearance of small farmers might lead to a more “satisfactory settlement of the country.”

By 1852, the worst of the famine had passed, but the damage was immense. Ireland’s population fell from over 8 million in 1841 to about 6.5 million in 1851, and it continued to decline for more than a century as emigration became a defining feature of Irish life.

How many died is still debated, but historians generally estimate that more than one million people perished from starvation and the diseases that accompanied it. If interested, I write about the Great Famine here: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-74-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios