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An Ghorta Mor -- Crossroads of A People
From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin'd masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we'll stand,
And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.
-- Lady Jane Francesca Wilde ("Esperanza"), The Nation, 1847
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Department of Irish folklore, University College Dublin
"The Discovery of the Potato Blight in Ireland,"
by Daniel McDonald. A stunned family looks over their ruined potato crop.
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Mary McAleese, Ireland's eighth president, once called it "a colossal heart-rending fault line in the story of Ireland."
She referred, of course, to An Ghorta Mor, in English, "The Great Hunger" or "The Great Famine," and recalled how her grandfaather told of the bodies his grandmother had seen piled six deep in a ditch.
In 1845, a large percentage of the Catholic population of Ireland faced great, unseen peril. For centuries, an inequitable land system caused by massive confiscations and the passing of numerous anti-Catholic restrictions on land use had been pressing the Irish down the road to abject poverty.
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Illustrated London News, 1847
Searching the blighted ground in the hope of finding anything edible during "Black '47," the worst year of The Great Hunger. |
Forced to live on ever smaller plots of land, they turned to the potato, which, combined with milk, provides the vitamins and minerals to sustain good health. By the mid-1840s, more than a third of the Irish population, mostly in the South and West, were relying on that diet.
The potato arrived from the New World in the late 1500s. In 1845, the New World sent a less-welcome gift -- a fungus called phytophthora infestans, the Potato Blight. From 1845 through 1850, the blight destroyed most of the potato crop. Suddenly much of Ireland's population, some of the poorest people in Western Europe, had no means to sustain themselves, and were at the mercy of a foreign government to find a way to rescue them.
The issue of British culpability is contentious, but based on the degree of suffering and death, one could reasonably conclude that the British government failed miserably in its response to this crisis.
About 12 percent of Ireland's 8 million people, one in every eight, died from what were called famine-related causes during the famine. Nearly two million people emigrated to every corner of the globe.In almost every land that accepted these exiles, the Irish people still gather to commemorate and to remember. -- J.G.
We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure -- bask ye in the world's caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses
-- Lady Jane Francesca Wilde ("Esperanza"), The Nation, 1847
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