When Ireland Starved: An Gorta Mór, The Great Famine

“In all countries paupers may be discovered, but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen until it was shown in Ireland”. Gustave de Beaumont was one of the many who commented on the severe state of Ireland in the 19th century.

Michael Buerk alerted the world to the crisis in Ethiopia in 1985 with television pictures. In 1846 the journalist of the London News played the same role for the Irish Famine.

John Mitchell claimed that during all the Famine years, Ireland actually produced sufficient food, wool, and the flax to feed and clothe not nine but eighteen million people. Was the Irish Famine the result of mismanagement?

“If crosses and tombs could be erected on the water, the whole route of the emigrant vessels from Europe to America would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery” So wrote an American emigration official in the middle of the 19th Century. Emigration wasn’t an escape from death and destruction for everyone.