Which European country has had a significant population decline since 1845?
The population of Ireland reached its peak of over 8 million in 1845, the year that saw the beginning of the potato blight. This rapid population growth, from approximately 4.4 million in the late 18th century, had been made possible by the introduction of the potato. It was a cheap source of nutrition, but an over reliance on this single crop proved disastrous. When the potato crop failed, the poor starved.Exacerbating the crop failure was British rule. The British and the ruling gentry were Protestants, while the vast majority of the population were Catholics. Denied basic political and civil rights because of religion, the poor now also died needlessly. During the Potato Famine, Ireland exported food. Moreover, taking advantage of the calamity, landed gentry gained more land as they evicted the starving families from their homes.The Great Famine caused the starvation of one million, the emigration of a million more and has repercussions that are felt today in Irish society. Continued emigration and general societal disruption lowered the population to 2.8 million in 1961. The total population of the whole of Ireland in 2012, the north(still under British rule) and the Republic , was approximately 6.4 million. Despite having the highest birth rate in the European Union, and migration from several countries, Ireland has never fully recovered from the Great Famine. The population remains lower than 1845.
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What are your thoughts on this subject?
44 Comments
filmnut
Recognized by my name, Foley, you might well understand why this was an easy question for me. A good read is the novel by Leon Uis "Trinity".
sarahhvf
Shocking lack of Christian charity and greedy land grab. Sounds like some polititions we know
deborahpmercer
Christopher Skinner, There are good and bad people who are both believers and atheists.
Richard D. Boyle
Irish Potato Famine of mid 19th Century was major factor for exit to US.
Val Wilkinson
No Fred, we were very much to blame - or rather the wealthy land owners.
1. There was no support
2. The struggling rural Irish were moved up the hills onto poorer land
3. Readily evicted, without any tolerance
4. Food was available but was exported
I could go on - but whilst blight is fungal, the appalling management by British landlords and Parliament made i a humanitarian crisis
It also affected Scottish Highlanders but to a lesser extent
Fred Keogh,
Kevin Fox
How would feel if you were poor and saw food being exported for profit instead of feeding the native population? Why is famine in quotation marks? What do you call it when a substanial part o fetch population starves to death?Robert Henderson,
Margaret White
English racism against both the Irish and the Scots resulted in cruel and inhumane treatment over several centuries. Fact.
John New
Your take on it is biased obviously, all of Europe had the same blight disease, but they didn’t lose a million dead needlessly. It was the British rule which allowed it to happen in order to sort the “Irish problem”, they evicted starving people from their homes, let them die in the fields, they had green mouths from eating grass. Ireland was exporting food to the UK at the time, it wasn’t a food shortage, it was a Genocide.Derrick Beggs,
David Stokes
Not just Eire, but ulster (Northern Ireland) as well, in 1845 they were one country.
Coral Harvey
Queen Victoria was apped when she learnt of the famine . She had only been Queen a handful of years but she tried to get aid to the Irish people but the parliamentary powers tried to overrule her and they succeeded. There has always been reluctance until 1972 and Bloody Sunday for the British government into in intervene.
Coral Harvey
Margaret White, unfortunately that was not true a significant proportion of the landlords were protestants Irish who thought of the famine as a deliberate punishment by God for the sin of being Catholic. The English were scapegoated. .
Peter Robertson
Andy Gibson, Yes well,when given their independance in 1921 they unleashed a murderous civil war on each other. So none of us has a perfect record.
Peter Robertson
Margaret White, Not really.More the way people lived in those days.It wasn't too good for an ordinary citizen of any country. The Scots and Irish were pretty good at their own inhumanity to their own people.
Ettore Eme
Also Frank Mc Court's books The Ashes of Angela and Yes t' is depict the famine situation in Ireland.
Andy Gibson
David Stokes, you are almost correct, " N I is NOT Ulster, Ulster Is 9 counties, the unionists where offered Ulster but opt for 6 counties as it would give them a majority
Andy Gibson
It was not a famine, it was GENOCIDE as there was plenty of food in Ireland, all the food was transported to England to feed there people and terrorist army. Also the So called Republic of Ireland is not all Ireland as the brits Devided the country against the vast majority of the Irish people to appease the small minority of brit/Scot settlers in 1921, they wher given the northern 6 counties so they would be the majority of that stolen land, and they treated the irish Catholics who lived in that illegal stately as second class citizens until they started protesting for civil rights
Colin McPherson
I think a lot of them came to Australia.
popeyenys
Richard Rubright, That's what the questions says, it hasn't returned to the 1845 level in over two 150 years
popeyenys
Andrew Walsh, The population still hasn't rebound to the 1845 level
Kath Thomson
Christopher Skinner, I agree. It's not religion, religious observance or the following of religious rules that makes you a Christian but the following of Jesus. His two commands were to, "love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind" and "love your neighbour as yourself." Not very evident in the potato famine!
Shirley Dutt
So many of them came to the United States as indentured servants. Some never gained independence from their owners. Just another way to enslave people.
Shirley Dutt
filmnut, absolutely love that book. I haven't read it in years, but, it's still in my home library.
Richard Rubright
I object to the use of the word decline. Decline refers to a process. According to the answer provided, the population of Ireland has grown, just not back to the 1845 level. Growth is also a process.
Joe Mangan
Robert Henderson, Charles Trevelyan assistant secretary to HM Treasury, who was directly responsible for famine "relief" wrote to Lord Monteagle of Brandon, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, that the famine was an "effective mechanism for reducing surplus population", and that "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.". Further he wrote that "The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people". He did his utmost to obstruct relief.
Your take on contemporary charity, at least outside of the UK, is patently wrong. The same potato blight afflicted France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Prussia. In all of these the death figures were minimal compared to Ireland, thanks to government intervention.
The offending landlords would scarcely have considered themselves Irish, occupying as they did land stolen from the indigenous population by their not very distant ancestors. A few landlords behaved decently, bankrupting themselves in the process. So did the Quakers, who have never been forgotten for it in Ireland.
In your study of Irish history you would be better employed drawing on a source other than the paddy-bashers of the Daily Mail, the Telegraph or The Critic. The officers' mess is not the best source either.