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An Ghorta Mor -- Crossroads of A People
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.
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.
-- Lady Jane Francesca Wilde ("Esperanza"), The Nation, 1847
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