The Irish Potato Famine

The Irish Potato Famine was from 1845 to 1852. The phrase Black '47 refers to the worst year of the famine.

Most people didn't die of starvation per se. Instead, being physically weak from being underfed fostered disease which killed a great many people.

One cause of disease during the famine was when people would go to the beach in desperation, dig up clams to eat and consume them raw because they were too weak and hungry to cut peat, start a fire and cook them.

The primary root cause of this crisis is nominally potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) and sources routinely state that it was made worse by British political and economic policies, though there is substantial debate as to how much of an impact that had. 

The Irish were under British rule at that time and as overlords generally living far away pre-internet looking to get their cut, lacking sufficient local knowledge and not really caring about the people, they made policies that clearly compounded the problem. 

Two that I know of:

1. Food shortages were widespread across Europe during this time and most governments were moving to protect the food supply of the people, but the British overlords continued lining their pockets by exporting food from Ireland while the Irish starved.

2. Local landlords initially told a lot of people they could stay in their rental without paying rent and then the British said "If it's occupied, you owe us taxes on it even if you are not getting rent." The local lords could afford to let people stay for free, but they couldn't afford to be bled by the British for it, so they began throwing people out into the streets, though it wasn't what they wanted to do to their own people.

The reality is that the Irish trend towards being Catholic and not using birth control, so they tend to have large families. The potato is the only food I personally know of where you can almost live on it by itself. 

By the start of the famine, nearly half of the Irish population relied almost exclusively on potatoes for sustenance because large families with small farms planted only potatoes and those are the people who were hardest hit by the famine. There was a huge sell off of bankrupted tiny farms and there were changes to land law and land policy in Ireland following the famine that rarely gets mentioned.

Farms under a certain size essentially disappeared. Farms over that size grew a diversity of crops to feed the family and they certainly suffered from the loss of half to three quarters of their potato crop, but it usually wasn't catastrophic.

The seven years of the famine saw about one million deaths in Ireland and an exodus out of the country of over one million people who permanently relocated elsewhere. It's possibly up to two million who left and we have no record of how many died on the coffin ships.

That constituted a fall in the island's population by about 20 to 25 percent and it continued falling. Ireland’s population fell from about 8.5 million before the famine to 4.4 million by 1901. 

At the behest of his friends, Frederick Douglass traveled to Ireland shortly after legally gaining his freedom from slavery. He was beginning to be noticed and people feared his previous owner might try to reclaim him as their property.

Douglass arrived in Ireland in August 1845 as the Great Famine was beginning and ultimately spent two years traveling Ireland and Great Britain. He was shocked by the extreme levels of poverty he saw in Ireland and compared it to his former condition as a slave in America.

Like with the genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe in World War II, entire communities were devastated. The population of Ireland still has not recovered well over a century after the fact and closing in on two centuries from the start of the famine. It currently stands at approximately 5.37 million people or approximately 63 percent of its pre-famine size of 8.5 million. 

For comparison, the much more famous Jewish Holocaust saw a loss of about six million people, dropping from something like 16.5 million people globally before World War II to maybe 11 million globally in 1945 according to the Internet -- which conflicts with claims that 6 million died in the Holocaust, but those are the figures search is giving me -- and currently stands at approximately 15.8 million less than a century later.

That's in spite of the Irish still having a reputation for generally being Catholic and trending towards large families. A quick search suggests Orthodox Jews have a similar reputation, but it doesn't really fit with how most Jews are generally perceived.

Though the story is a hair more complicated than that and can't really be directly compared. The Irish diaspora began before the Potato Famine and some fifty to eighty million people living outside Ireland are deemed to be at least partly ethnically Irish.

When the Irish came to the US in droves fleeing famine, disease, death and harsh British policies, they were not viewed as White here and were not warmly welcomed. It seems unlikely that they were warmly welcomed anywhere.

Most of the Famine Irish struggled to improve their circumstances. “For all but a lucky few,” the author writes, “the lot of the Famine immigrants was grinding poverty, unemployment or backbreaking, dangerous work for little pay. Immigrants’ lives were shortened by work-slavery, psychological alienation, and the alcohol with which many sought to obtain relief from both.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence is dated 14 May 1948. I'm not readily finding anything that states the Jews were given Israel following World War II as some kind of compensation for the Holocaust, but that's such a widespread perception that Internet search for such information auto completes or prompts with when was israel given to the jews.

To this day, the Irish are viewed as typically poor and Jews are viewed as typically monied. 

One thing ethnic Irish and ethnic Jews have in common is a relatively high incidence of Cystic Fibrosis, a debilitating and deadly Dread Disease, also an orphan disease that doesn't attract much in the way of research dollars and new treatments.