Outline the Causes and course of the Irish Famine of 1845-51.

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Outline the Causes and course of the Irish Famine of 1845-51.

Briefly comment on its subsequent impact in Ireland and people of Irish descent.]

The Irish Famine, although a pivotal event in the development of modern Ireland, was for decades marginalised or ignored by Irish historians. Between 1846 and 1851 more than a million Irish people, the famine emigrants, sailed to America. At the same time, the Irish potato famine claimed a million lives. Thus the famine had a huge impact on Ireland and it’s people.

 

“The famine of 1845-9 is a major dividing-line in the history of modem Ireland. Politically, economically and socially, the period that followed it appears sharply distinct from the period that preceded it.” – JC Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, Queen’s University. There are various reasons for the cause of the Irish famine - many historians have summed up the Great Famine’s cause as “Nature caused the potato blight. The British government caused the famine”, which can be supported through the policies that the British government maintained towards the Irish population during the famine years. This is a very anti-British view which many, such as Catholics, agree with. Through the Act of Union in 1800, Ireland had supposedly emerged as a sister nation of England and was to be treated as such but during the Famine and even prior to the famine, Ireland was still regarded by many British as a colony that it once had been. The system of dealing with the poor class in Ireland by the British government were inadequate and half-hearted at the best of times but during the famine period, the system run by the British government was not only ridiculously inadequate but cold and inhumane, based on several racist principles that the British held towards the Irish.

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The major cause nonetheless was that it was a blight, a fungus growth which began to take effect on potato crops in Ireland in September 1845. The blight had visited other European countries, but none of these experienced famine. Ireland's poor depended upon the potato for survival - for over three million people it was their only food. When blight damaged nearly half the crop in 1845, millions of peasants faced a winter of partial famine. Continuous rain until March 1846 provided ideal conditions for the spread of the fungus and the worst conditions for those already succumbing to ...

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