Ireland’s Great Famine occurred almost two centuries ago. But it remains a modern disaster

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Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine.

From 1845 to 1851, Irish potato crops were destroyed by a novel pathogen, the fungus-like organism Phytophthora infestans. Famine killed at least a million people. Some half again as many fled Ireland – including all eight of my great-great-grandparents on my father’s side, who emigrated to Quebec. In the depths of the crisis, people ate grass, carrion, the eggs of seabirds, moss, cats, worms, insects, dogs and rats. Grinding hunger stripped relationships down to a cutthroat struggle, “a sordid avarice,” as one observer wrote, “to grasp at everything in the shape of food.”

The blight was not unique to Ireland, and devastating everywhere it struck. In the Netherlands, 71 per cent of the 1,845 potato crop was lost; in Belgium, 88 per cent. Only in Ireland, however, did this general subsistence crisis cause such prolonged degradation, suffering and death. John Russell, the U.K.’s prime minister at the height of the crisis, called it “a famine of the 13th century acting upon the population of the 19th.” Because Ireland was poor and rural, it seemed backward. The U.K. government launched relief programs designed to encourage the Irish to earn wages and buy imported food. British policy makers could only imagine relief based on the principles of the free market.

But the Irish Great Famine was not a return to the past. It was a complex and modern political, ecological and economic disaster, shaped by Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, and in the British empire.

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Ireland was never a British colony, but its relationship to Britain was colonial. Ireland was invaded and conquered by England in the 17th century, although it remained notionally independent. Its economy was subordinated to Britain’s, its Irish Catholic majority vilified and persecuted. Ireland began to export more food. Landlords subdivided their estates to generate rent. Potatoes, which produced good yields on small plots, allowed labourers to sell other crops to pay rent without starving to death. British stereotypes insisted that “Paddy,” with his horde of dirty children, his booze and superstitions, ate potatoes because he was lazy. In fact, potato dependence was an adaptation to a highly pressurized market. Between 1741 and 1779, the number of Irish acres planted with potatoes increased twentyfold.

In 1800-01, the Acts of Union combined Ireland and Britain into a new United Kingdom, with a single currency and an integrated economy. By 1845, nearly a third of the population of the U.K. lived in Ireland. Union, however, did not reduce the pressure on the Irish economy. By the 1840s, a fifth of Ireland’s population faced food insecurity every summer, when potato supplies were lowest. By 1845, Ireland exported roughly 250,000 head of cattle, 90 million eggs and enough grain to feed two million people to Britain each year. But the Irish poor rarely ate anything but potatoes. “They are just as much fed on flour as they are clad in jewels and embroidery,” the London Times commented.

When the blight spread, relief policy dictated that the Irish poor should not be given food, lest they come to depend on the state. Irish grain could not be kept in Ireland, because the normal operation of trade was sacrosanct. In 1845, Robert Peel’s government bought 44 million pounds of American maize, to be sold at cost. Irish labourers who were unable to find work could apply to public works projects to earn wages to buy the unfamiliar “Indian corn.” Although 1845-46 was the worst subsistence crisis in Ireland since the Union, no one expected that the blight would return in 1846.

However, in 1846, fewer potatoes were planted, and a greater proportion destroyed. That winter, 400,000 people died. As much as 3 per cent of the Irish population emigrated. Still, Ireland continued to export food – a fundamental principle of a relief program designed to energize and reform an ostensibly indolent Ireland, as well as to feed the starving. In 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs for export. Meanwhile, in the first six months of 1847, more than 182 million dry gallons of grain were imported to Ireland. The market dictated that it was efficient to export grain from one pier, and import it from another. In any case, the overall supply of food often did not matter. In the countryside, there were very few warehouses, shops or other infrastructure for selling any of the grain piling up on docks and in warehouses.

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In 1846, a new government, led by John Russell, placed its emphasis on public works. By March, 1847, they employed about 700,000 people, supporting millions more. Facing ballooning costs, however, the government quickly closed the works, and replaced them with temporary soup kitchens. In the summer of 1847, three million people were served daily rations. The soup kept bellies full, but did not nourish, and officials recorded outbreaks of scurvy. After the kitchens closed, the Russell government declared the crisis over, and devolved responsibility for famine relief onto the Irish network of Poor Law Unions, and their austere and violent workhouses. Regional famines continued for nearly four more years.

For many descendants of Irish emigrants, the Great Famine is the anchor for a common – if often distant and attenuated – identity, commemorated by monuments like the Black Rock, set in the shadow of the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, that remember both the horror of the Famine and the resilience of survivors. The panicked rush to escape from Ireland during the blight was followed by waves of emigration. The Irish population, which stood at more than eight million people in 1841, continued to fall for nearly a century, bottoming out at 4.2 million in 1931. In the diaspora, the Famine is now mostly mythic history – a galvanizing symbol of an ever-more-distant oppression for a generally prosperous and influential global diaspora.

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In Ireland, the sordid faith of some officials that the Famine would, as one wrote in his diary, “let the evil work itself out like a consuming fire,” proved misplaced. The potato remained Ireland’s staple. Conflict over land continued. The Famine became a rallying point for Irish nationalists, making Irish discontent more acute and more intractable for the United Kingdom and the British empire. The 1916 Easter Rising and subsequent war of independence had their own proximate causes, but the Famine was in the background, a symbol of Irish humiliation and subordination to Britain. It is no accident that hunger strikes were powerful symbolic weapons for Irish republicans.

The Great Famine was a modern disaster, structured by British imperialism, the changing disease ecology of the industrializing, globalizing world and the vicissitudes of a global market for commodities. Famines in the present share similar structural features; they are modern catastrophes. Between 2000 and 2011, according to experts, there were food shortages, but no famines. As of June, 2024, however, the World Food Program warned that there were 18 “hotspots” in 22 countries either currently enduring famine conditions – in Gaza, at bayonet point – or at risk of falling into famine. In Sudan, 24.6 million people are at risk amidst a collapsed state and a vicious civil war.

In 2025, as in 1845, the imagery of famine can still deceive; skeletal limbs and swollen bellies can evoke the recrudescence of a squalid past into the sophisticated present. But famine now, as then, is a consequence of the failure of states, of logistics, of policy, of empathy, of political will and imagination.

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