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History of the Irish
Starvation During the period 1845 to 1850, blight swept over the potato crops in Northern Europe. The people of Ireland, who were forced to rely on this source for almost all of their nutritional needs, suffered far more than their neighbors who had other foods available to them. The Great Hunger in Ireland triggered by the failure of the potato crop in 1845 led to the single greatest loss of life in Europe |
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between the Napoleonic
Wars and World War I. It was a human tragedy of appalling dimensions. The real tragedy is that this so-called "Irish Potato Famine" never should have occurred.
While over a million Irish starved to death and another million were forced to emigrate, food was being forcibly exported from the Island by its foreign rulers - food sufficient to feed the people several times over. This period represented the blackest days of Irish history. The years 1995-2000 represent the Sesquicentennial of this tragedy where twenty-five percent of the population of Ireland either died of starvation or were forced to flee their homeland. Thousands upon thousands of them set sail in "coffin ships" and never arrived at their destination. Those who did manage to survive the arduous journey, found less than a welcome on these shores. In the words of Peter Quinn: "The Irish were swiftly identified in the popular mind with poverty, disease, alcohol abuse, crime and violence - all the enduring pathologies of the urban poor. Indeed, the level of social turmoil that followed the Irish into America's cities would not be seen again for another century, until the massive exodus of African Americans from the rural South to urban North." In his several books including The Irish In Philadelphia, Dennis Clark, Ph.D. described how Irish immigrants helped foster the growth of our city, state and country. From entry level jobs such as digging canals, mining coal, building the railroads, they have made significant contributions in fields of Business, Education, Government, Industry, Medicine, Religion, Science and many more. |
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