New facts about Great Famine emigration out of Ireland revealed

Between 1845 and 1855, more than 80,000 Irish died on coffin ships bound for America

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Emigrants at the quayside in Cork, 1851, surrounded by their baggage

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Gullible and unprepared for exile, many Famine emigrants were overwhelmed by their new surroundings and became easy prey for exploitation. In most cases, the book suggests, the predators were not unscrupulous Anglo-Saxons but, instead, fellow Irish who wielded their soothing, familiar tones – in Irish or English – to lull the new arrivals into trusting them.

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.”

Chief among the stigmas endured by the Famine Irish and inherited by their children, Dr Ó Murchadha suggests, was the “brand of their Irishness” and, consequently, their inferiority. But for them – and subsequent generations – this was eased by the succour of Irish neighbourhoods, particularly the trinity of the Catholic Church, Irish cultural societies and major political organisations, until demography, democracy and economic success enabled the Irish to tentatively assimilate within the majority society.

Those who remained in Ireland grappled with another kind of anguish. “As surviving inhabitants tried to come to terms with a significantly emptier landscape, they were also wrestling with a sense of guilt: that they had survived and a great number of their neighbours had not,” says the author. “In so many cases, their survival had been at their neighbours’ expense. This sense of survivor guilt was something that inevitably became embedded in the Irish psyche.”

Charting a monumental record of abject suffering, from the destruction of the potato harvests, through to the degradation inflicted by the relief programmes, the swell of fever pandemics through the workhouses, the mass clearances by landlords and the hemorrhaging emigration, The Great Famine climaxes with a sober analysis of the consequences and causes of this seminal event in Irish history.

Approximately 1.1 million died and over a million emigrated during the Famine. The population of Ireland plummeted from almost 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.5 million in 1851. Among its legacies were the physical and psychological disabilities of Famine survivors in Ireland and abroad, a deep-seated hatred of Britain, ruptured social and communal intimacy and rising conservatism in Irish society and a highly influential Catholic Church that met a gaping spiritual yearning and provided otherwise absent leadership.

The failure of private charity and state relief is central to explaining the extent of the Famine, insists the author. While contributions towards famine relief were received from the US president, the papacy and, most movingly, from the Choctaw tribe of Native Americans – the Famine resonated with the ‘Trail of Tears’ deaths during their forced population transfer from Mississippi to Oklahoma in 1841 – its impact was tempered by soaring international food prices. While Britain spent £8 million on relief programmes in Ireland during the Famine, most of it as loan advances, it spent £69 million on the Crimean War (1854 – 56).

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