The Causes of the Famine (Ireland)

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                                        The Causes of the Famine                   Jennifer Brankin 10-7

In 1845 there were eight million people living in Ireland and the fast majority of them lived on the land. There was scarcely enough land to support the rapidly expanding population. Family farms had been subdivided so many times that they were often too small to be profitable. One hundred and thirty five thousand families had patches of less than one acre.

The typical Irish peasant existed almost entirely on potatoes   which he grew himself on his on patch. To him the potatoes were as life itself. One acre of land could provide enough potatoes to feed a family of five for the best part of a year. He enjoyed no luxuries, nor did his family. In his day-to-day life he rarely, if ever, handled money. He had no means of buying food if his store of potatoes ran out. He was well accustomed to hunger and poverty. In his lifetime he had hardly known anything else.

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In the early decades of the 19th century there had been a population explosion in Ireland with the number of people rising from four million to eight million. Yet the amount of land available to them had not increased. The land simply could not sustain such an alarming increase in the population. Except in Ulster, there were no industrial towns which could absorb the surplus population from the countryside as had happened in Britain.

Perhaps, if the British Government had done more to encourage the growth of industry in Ireland and enticed people to leave the land and ...

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