Why we remember the Great Famine
On Sunday, the Irish government will hold its annual commemoration of the Great Famine. Spanning from 1845 to 1852, this period of starvation, disease, and emigration was a watershed moment for Ireland, forever altering the course of its history.
As the potato blight hit Europe in the 1840s, the majority of the Irish population were poor tenants who could only subsist on a diet of potatoes. Crop failure resulted in a rapid rise in food insecurity. Around 1.5 million people died, and two million emigrated between 1845 and 1855 – adding up to nearly a quarter of the population.
The Famine had lasting consequences on the island. It contributed to the decline of the Irish language as areas that suffered the most were those where it was dominantly spoken. These places also had lower mass attendance, leading the Catholic Church to increase its dominance over the Irish population over time.
More drastically though, the Famine led to one of the greatest exodus from a single island in history. The population of more than eight million in 1841 dropped to 6.5 million people in 1851 and stayed under the five million mark from 1891 to 1971. As a result, 70 million people around the world have Irish ancestry.
Although it was more than 170 years ago, many of the stories you read in The European Correspondent about Ireland have indirect links to the Great Famine. Yet, its memory and understanding went unstated for centuries as a ”great silence”.
Tellingly, Irish singer Sinead O'Connor sparked controversy in 1994 with a song denouncing the nation's reluctance to deal with the Famine's trauma and how the UK had worsened with the crisis. As if to prove her point, she was accused of unnecessarily stirring up an anti-English sentiment that had subsided; yet, an indirect apology from Tony Blair read out in 1997 at a commemoration event was widely seen as a step forward in healing Anglo-Irish relations.