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LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

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LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostTue Jan 13, 2015 1:15 pm

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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostTue Jan 13, 2015 1:18 pm

Life During the GREAT HUNGER
by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

The poor Irish who had lost their potatoes faced terrifying difficulties. They called the time an Gorta Mór, which means “the Great Hunger,” or an Droch Shaol, “the Bad Times.”

The poorest farmers, already living at a subsistence level, were the first to feel the effects. Within a few months of the bad harvest, the people in the hardest-hit areas were already dying of starvation. Travelers reported seeing skeletal people with their mouths stained green; they had tried to ward off hunger by eating grass. In some places in western Ireland, piles of corpses filled the ditches.

The first thing the stricken farmers did was try to eat their diseased potatoes. This made them terribly sick with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and intestinal bleeding. Some very old and very young people died from this disease.

There was some food to be found on the land, and the Irish were very resourceful at scrounging it. They trapped birds and stole eggs from nests, gathered shellfish from the shores, and caught fish. Coastal people ate seaweed. They would take blood from cattle and fry it. They ate rats, worms, nettles, and chickweed. When the opportunity presented itself, they stole food from wagons and barges. But none of it helped much.

With Famine Comes Pestilence

The malnourished Irish were very vulnerable to diseases. In fact, more people died from illness than from actual starvation.

Typhus appeared in the winter of 1846. The Irish called it the black fever because it made victims' faces swollen and dark. It was incredibly contagious, spread by lice, which were everywhere. Many people lived in one-room cottages, humans and animals all huddled together, and there was no way to avoid lice jumping from person to person. The typhus bacteria also traveled in louse feces, which formed an invisible dust in the air. Anyone who touched an infected person, or even an infected person's clothes, could become the disease's next victim. Typhus was the supreme killer of the famine; in the winter of 1847, thousands of people died of it every week.

Another fever appeared at the same time, the relapsing fever called yellow fever because its victims became jaundiced. This fever also came from lice. A victim would suffer from a high fever for several days, seem to recover, and then relapse a week later. Many people died from this fever as well.

Scurvy became a problem. This disease comes from a deficiency of vitamin C, and it causes the victim's connective tissue to break down. The Irish called scurvy black leg, because it made the blood vessels under the skin burst, giving a victim's limbs a black appearance. The cure for scurvy is fresh food — meat, vegetables, or fruit — none of which was available to the poor in Ireland.

The modern obsession with cleanliness isn't just a matter of cosmetics or pride. Dirty clothes and sheets can harbor disease. When someone died of typhus, anyone who took and wore that person's clothes without washing them first could catch the fever from dust lingering in the clothes.
There were other diseases, too. Some Irish children fell victim to an odd disease that made hair grow on their faces while it fell out of their heads. Some observers commented that the children looked like monkeys. Cholera was always a problem in unsanitary, crowded conditions; it broke out in workhouses throughout the famine years.

Deaths in the Family

When people died, the living were left with the problem of what to do with the bodies. There were not enough coffins to hold the dead, even if the poor had money to pay for them. Stories abounded of entire families dying, or of mothers losing all their children and carrying the bodies to the cemetery on their backs, one by one. Visitors reported seeing dead bodies stacked in ditches and dogs devouring corpses in the fields; to their horror, they also observed people killing and eating those same dogs.

When someone came down with typhus, relatives and neighbors feared that they would contract the disease, too. Sometimes all healthy members of a family would leave a sick person alone in a house, hoping to escape the contagion. They hadn't abandoned the sufferer; they would push food in through the windows on the end of a long pole. When there was no longer a response from inside the house, they would pull the house down on top of the victim and burn the whole thing.

Landlords and Evictions

Most of the victims of the famine did not own the land they lived on. Instead, they rented houses and farmland from large landholders. When the potato crops failed, they could no longer pay their rent. Some landlords were understanding; many actually helped their tenants, handing out food and concocting jobs that would allow them to earn wages.

But other landlords were less accommodating. Scores of poor Irish were evicted from their homes. This wasn't all due to cruelty and greed; many landlords themselves faced bankruptcy and starvation as their rents stopped coming in. Some landlords decided that grazing sheep or cattle would be a better use of the land, and the peasants and their potato plots had to give way for the livestock.

The result was that many poor Irish found themselves not only starving, but homeless as well. Some of them moved into workhouses, but many dug holes in hillsides or made huts out of peat and lived in them as best they could. Others simply wandered the roads until they dropped dead.

One of the most bitter comments about the Irish potato famine came from economic theorist and “father of communism,” Karl Marx. He remarked that in the time of Cromwell, the English had supplanted the Irish Catholics with Protestants, but during the famine they supplanted them with cattle.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostMon Feb 09, 2015 1:04 am

Why They Left
by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney
No one kept careful track of how many people left Ireland in the nineteenth century, but it certainly was a large number. People started leaving long before the Great Famine began in 1845; in the thirty years that preceded it, at least 1 million people left Ireland. Between the start of the famine and 1870, another 3 million or so emigrated. A decreased population and a lower birthrate decreased the flow of emigrants in the following years, but a significant proportion of the population continued to leave well into the twentieth century.

The two overpowering causes for emigration were hunger and poverty. The Great Famine and the half-dozen other potato failures of the nineteenth century sent millions of Irish people overseas. People saw the death and suffering around them; rather than wait for death in a land with no food, they picked up everything and sailed across the Atlantic.

What is the difference between an emigrant and an immigrant?
An “emigrant” is a person who leaves a country; an “immigrant” is someone who moves to a new country. Therefore, an emigrant from Dublin would be an immigrant in New York. In this chapter, we use the term “emigrant” when looking at people from the perspective of Ireland, and “immigrant” when speaking about them in their new country.
But long before the famine struck and years after its end, young Irish people were leaving their homeland. The basic economic facts of Ireland were not promising: the island was small, with few natural resources beyond farmland; most of the best land was tied up in the hands of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and the rest was split up among more people than it could support; and English policies inhibited the development of Irish industries, which might have provided a way off the farms. Young Irish men and women realized that if they wanted any hope of a better life, they had to go overseas. If families were lucky enough to own land, younger sons often emigrated in order to clear the way to inheritance for the oldest.

Some young people left Ireland as seasonal migrants. Instead of setting up a new home in the New World, they would travel to another country for seasonal work, in agriculture or the fisheries, and then return home when the work was done for the year. The sons of small farmers were especially likely to do this; their periodic wages helped the family hold on to its property.

There were also noneconomic reasons to leave Ireland. Some people, particularly a number of Nationalist revolutionaries, emigrated to avoid legal trouble and to drum up support for their cause in the New World. Others left to join family and friends overseas.

The only significant non-English-speaking destination for Irish emigrants was Argentina. From 1840 to 1885, around 11,000 families moved to the Rio Plata area in Argentina and Uruguay. They were known as gauchos ingleses or irlandeses, and they even had their own newspaper, the Hiberno-Argentine Review. Today, Irish descendants make up about 1 percent of the Argentine population.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostMon Feb 09, 2015 1:06 am

Help for Victims
by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney
One of the things that made the Irish famine especially bad was a lack of help for the starving. The British government was reluctant to help too much, partly out of fear that the poor would depend on aid and not try to help themselves. The mid-nineteenth century was the heyday of laissez faire economics, which taught that the free market would solve all problems and that the government should never intervene. Unfortunately, that approach led to tragedy for the Irish population.

Governmental Response, or Lack Thereof

Politicians quickly got word that the Irish peasantry had nothing to eat. Many English were not particularly impressed with the Irish plight. A number of them thought that the famine was a punishment for Ireland's sin of overpopulation. According to population theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, Ireland had far too many people for its land to support, and the best solution was to get rid of most of them. The famine would take care of that.

The truth was, the factors that contributed to the Irish famine were far more complex than mere overpopulation. There was plenty of food in Ireland. The island grew and exported more than 1 billion pounds of grain every year. Many Irish actually sold this food willingly so they would have the money to pay rent. Ireland also was not allowed to import rice or corn from the British colonies. This was the effect of the Corn Laws (the British call wheat “corn”; they call corn “maize”), which set artificially high prices for British grain and locked out cheaper imports until the entire British crop was sold. This was a problem for the Irish, who had no money.

Prime Minister Robert Peel initially took pity on the starving Irish, and, unbeknownst to his own government, ordered Indian corn from the Americas to be delivered to the island. This corn was only a last resort for the sufferers; it was difficult to grind and cook, not nearly as filling as potatoes, and it lacked vitamin C. It ran out quickly, too, and was not replaced.

Peel resigned in 1846, and for the next four years the man he appointed to oversee famine relief, Charles Edward Trevelyan, handled matters. Trevelyan didn't have a very high opinion of the Irish, and in fact only visited Ireland once; he thought distance helped him maintain objectivity. He was a firm believer in laissez faire and thought donated food actually exacerbated the problem by relieving the Irish of the obligation to feed themselves. Unfortunately, in some places, no one had either food or money, so feeding themselves was completely impossible. Irish crops continued to be exported, which led to great resentment on the part of the Irish people.

Workhouses

When people got truly desperate, there was a place that they could go: the workhouse. These houses had been established in the early 1840s to provide relief to the poorest people. Opponents of workhouses feared that the Irish would abuse the system, using the workhouse if they weren't truly desperate. But supporters countered that they could solve this problem by making workhouses so unpleasant that only people with no alternative would enter them.

Unpleasant they were. Anyone who owned land had to give it up before entering a workhouse, which forced many families to choose between staying on their farms and starving or giving up their land for a chance to eat. People who entered a workhouse were segregated by sex, which meant dividing up families. They were forced to live there, essentially sentencing themselves to prison. They had to give up their own clothes and wear pauper's uniforms, which marked them as destitute. They had to work at menial jobs to earn their keep — men broke up rocks, women knitted, and children either had lessons or learned to do various industrial tasks. Families only got together on Sundays.

The Irish people did everything they could to avoid the workhouse. They found the splitting up of families especially hard to bear. The unpleasant regimen did succeed in keeping people away from public charity in the early 1840s and even into 1846, before the second bad potato crop.

Although it was probably not common in practice, Irish folk memory recalls Protestant soup kitchens that would only give food to Catholics if they renounced the Catholic faith. The families who converted were called “Soupers,” and they bore a stigma from it for generations.
But after the second nonexistent potato harvest in the autumn of 1846, people were more willing to surrender their dignity in the hopes of not starving. Poorhouse food was bad and often inadequate, but at least it was food. By mid-October, most workhouses in the worst-hit areas were full and turning away inmates.

Crowding did nothing to improve the workhouse atmosphere. The stench became overpowering as hundreds of unhealthy people contributed their bodily products to the building. Typhus, cholera, and other diseases thrived in this environment, and many people died.

Public Works

Not everyone could fit in the workhouses, and many people refused to even consider the possibility. The government provided an alternative for them: working for pay on public projects. Local relief committees made lists of people who needed help, and then one member of each needy family was allowed to work for pay.

This was a nice idea, but ineffective in practice. The projects in question involved hard physical labor — digging ditches, breaking and moving rocks to build roads — and the workers were already malnourished. The winter of 1846 to 1847 was especially harsh, and the workers had no adequate clothes. Many of them fell sick and dropped dead on the job. In fact, 1847 was such a bad year that it became known as “Black ′47.”

Old famine roads from these make-work projects are still visible in western Ireland, where many of them have been converted into hiking trails or highways. The Dingle Peninsula contains a number of these roads and some famine fences. Some roads travel by prehistoric tombs and other ancient Irish artifacts.
The wages for public works would have been generous in the days of plentiful potatoes, but during the famine food prices went through the roof. A week's wages were barely adequate to buy half a week's sustenance for a family of any size, and many Irish families were large. Families were desperate to keep someone on the works to collect money, though, so they would often deprive nonworkers of food to keep up the strength of the wage-earner. Children would go hungry so their father could eat.

In many cases, the person going out to work was also the person who would have planted the next year's potato crop at home. Without that labor, the next year's harvest suffered.

Private Charity

At the start of the famine, the government insisted that charity was best done by private institutions. The Quakers in particular rose to the occasion, opening soup kitchens to feed paupers. Some landlords helped their tenants, providing food, clothes, or housing. Irish peasants helped one another when they could; many stories from the famine years tell of housewives who gave away their last cabbage in the garden or last drop of milk from the cow, only to have their supplies miraculously renewed the next morning. These are nice stories, but unfortunately usually not true.

British “Charity”

In 1847, the government stopped the public works programs and announced that from now on, private aid would be the solution. The British still feared that too much aid to the Irish would prevent them from ever going back to work. The British decided that Irish landlords must be responsible for the famine, so it would be their job to fix it. Local governments were supposed to organize charitable soup kitchens paid for by taxes collected by local relief committees.

But as the famine years progressed, Ireland had less and less food and money. Landlords went bankrupt as their tenants failed to pay rents, and property taxes went up, ironically, to provide money to feed the starving. In an effort to lower their property values and thus their taxes, some of them evicted the peasants still living on their land and tore down their huts. Britain sent more and more soldiers to Ireland to enforce evictions and see that taxes were collected. This combination of military might and no food made the Irish even more resentful of the occupying British government. Though there was more food available now, no one had the money to buy it.

Matters were made even worse by a financial crisis in Britain in 1847. Wheat prices plummeted, railroad stocks fell, and many businesses went bankrupt. The British had less money to help the Irish, even if they had wanted to.

The winter of 1848 to 1849 was a nightmare for the Irish. They had gambled on the potato crop, spending every cent they had to buy seed potatoes that they planted in the spring; after all, the blight hadn't attacked the 1847 crop, so they had reason to hope that it was gone. But they were terribly wrong; the blight was still around and it devastated potatoes all over the island. Landlords kept evicting peasants, and the British government kept raising Ireland's taxes in the vain hope that this would help the island pull itself up by its bootstraps. The poorest people shrank down to human skeletons before dying. Some turned to crime as an alternative to starvation — in prison or on a ship heading to Australia there would at least be something to eat. Wealthier people gave up on Ireland and left for other countries.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostMon Feb 09, 2015 4:05 am

Had a read at all that there now .. Such harrowing stories bless them all..... ..it's now 3am im the off to sleep
My ipad controls my spellings not me so apologies from it in advance :) lol
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostSun Feb 15, 2015 4:01 pm

Potatoes, for Better or for Worse by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

Potatoes came to Europe from the New World in the early sixteenth century. Sir Francis Drake is thought to have introduced the potato to England, and shortly afterward Sir Walter Raleigh tried planting them on his Irish estates.

When the potato reached Ireland, it created a revolution. It was very easy to grow; farmers could plant them in the spring and leave them alone for months while they went off and worked elsewhere (anywhere that scarce wages might be offered). People grew potatoes on any patch of land that could sustain them, even the most marginal of fields.

There are many varieties of potato, and the Irish had definite preferences among them. Richer people ate the more desirable types, such as “minions” or “apple potatoes.” Poor folk grew and ate “lumper” potatoes, which were watery and tasteless but grew well on poor farmland. Unfortunately, the lumper was especially susceptible to the blight that caused the famine.
A Good Source of Nourishment

Potatoes are extremely nutritious; they are full of vitamins, protein, calcium, and iron, especially when washed down with buttermilk, the potato's traditional accompaniment. The potato, in fact, is perhaps the only crop that can provide a balanced diet by itself, which kept the Irish healthier than other people living on one starch such as rice or millet or even bread (made of wheat). It was relatively easy to store over the winter, which was important because most tenant farmers had no buildings in which to store vast quantities of grain. Unfortunately, you can't store potatoes for much more than a year, and this would have devastating consequences for the Irish in the famine years.

A Potato Economy

Patterns in land ownership made Irish farmers dependent on the potato. Most farmers had to rent from landlords (who were usually English), who demanded cash payments. The farmers had to use most of their time and land to produce cash crops to cover the rent, and consequently they only had small amounts of time or land left to grow their own food. Given these constraints, the potato was the only crop that could provide sufficient nutrition to feed the growing Irish families.

And grow they did; between 1700 and 1800 the population doubled from somewhere around 2.5 million people to about 5 million people. By the early 1840s, the population stood at 8.2 million; ironically, it was densest in the poorest areas. The potato helped make this possible, but population growth also made people more dependent on the potato. Fathers would split up their land between their sons, making families depend on smaller and smaller plots of land. The system worked, but only as long as the potatoes were plentiful.

What did people eat besides potatoes?
Not very much. They might supplement their diet with foraged berries or shellfish if they lived in the right area. Most families kept a pig, to fatten it up on leftover potatoes and then sell it at the beginning of the summer, which was the only time of year the potatoes ran low. Then they would buy oatmeal to tide themselves over until the potatoes came back.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostSun Feb 15, 2015 4:05 pm

The Impact of Emigration by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

This outflow of people had a tremendous impact, both on Ireland and on the destination countries. By 1890, some 3 million Irish-born people lived in other countries. In Ireland, it meant that the remaining population had a better chance of getting by, but it also meant a degree of stagnation. By taking away the youngest and most vigorous members of the workforce, emigration deprived Ireland of the surplus manpower that could have fueled an industrial revolution. Instead, Irish muscles powered the factories of England and the United States.

The wide-scale emigration took a huge psychological toll on those remaining in Ireland. Everyone living on the island would have known someone, and probably many people, who had gone away forever. It seems likely that this constant sense of loss would have contributed to the sense of fatalism and morbidity that has appeared in so much of Ireland's art and literature.
Another impact of losing the young population was that it made revolution in Ireland unlikely. With its youngsters gone, the remaining population tended toward conservatism. While Ireland in the late nineteenth century certainly had its share of revolutionaries, one has to wonder what would have happened if all the angry young men running the political machines in Boston and New York had stayed home. It is noteworthy that Ireland's final revolt against England happened during World War I, when ordinary emigration policies had been suspended.

The Story Continues

The story of Irish emigration isn't over. You'll still frequently run into authentic Irish accents in the many pubs of Boston and New York. Thousands of young Irish men and women emigrate every year. The difference, however, is their reason for leaving. Today, Irish people emigrate for education, or for job relocations, or because they've always heard how much fun Boston is. The days of people leaving because of hunger and poverty are over.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostSun Feb 15, 2015 4:06 pm

The Results of the Famine by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

Ireland was a different place after the famine. The population was drastically reduced — an island of 8.2 million people in 1841 was reduced to 6 million in 1851. At least 1 million of those people had died. The rest fled the country, hoping for a new life in another land.

After the famine, there were fewer tiny landholdings, farms of 5 or fewer acres. By 1851, many more farms consisted of 30 acres or more. Fathers stopped dividing their acreage among all their sons and instead passed the entire farm to just one of them. This made it easier for a farmer to support his own family but caused problems for the children who didn't inherit.

It also forced inheriting sons to wait longer to come into property, which delayed marriages. Farmers used more of their land to grow livestock; not surprisingly, they didn't grow nearly as many potatoes as they had before.

When did the famine end?
Various historians give different dates, ranging from 1847 to 1850. In 1851, workhouses were still full and mortality was still high. By 1852 conditions seemed more or less back to normal. So the famine lasted about five years.
A New Start in a New Country

Many Irish left their beloved homeland during the famine years, hoping to find something better in the United States, England, Canada, or Australia. Emigration posed its own risks. Many emigrants died en route to their destinations. Others found that their new homes were little better than the barren farms they'd left behind. Nevertheless, many Irish emigrants quickly grew roots in fresh soil and flourished. For better or for worse, the Irish were now permanently planted around the world.

Young Ireland's Movement Toward Independence

Daniel O'Connell had worked hard on behalf of the starving Irishmen, petitioning Parliament to put a stop to grain exports and to provide public work for people in need. He continued his support of nonviolent means of dealing with the Crown, but at the same time a group called Young Ireland appeared. This was a group of younger men who were more interested in gaining Irish independence than in improving the existing system. After O'Connell died in 1847, the Young Irelanders were ready to use violence to fight for an Irish republic.

The year 1848 was a great year for revolutions in Europe; they happened in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania. Although each was unique, they all were attempts to correct government abuses and give more representation to the people.
The Young Irelanders tried to foment a rebellion in 1848. They weren't prepared for it, and it fizzled quickly. Some of their leaders were captured and transported to Australia; others fled to the United States. Prominent among them were William Smith O'Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher (MAH-her), John Mitchel, and John Boyle O'Reilly.

These men and others like them were responsible for spreading word throughout the world of Britain's handling of the famine. They also became prominent citizens of the New World and Ireland; for example, Meagher fought as a general for the Union Army in the American Civil War and went on to become governor of Montana. Mitchel later returned to Ireland and became mayor of Tipperary.

The Start of the Fenian Movement

The famine did a lot to foster a feeling of unity among the Irish against the English. Dedication to the Catholic Church increased and priests grew more powerful. The Irish especially hated the landlord-tenant system, which had forced so many of them out of their homes. People across the country formed societies to protect tenants by fixing rents and getting farmers to promise not to take over the lands of evicted tenants. Irish politicians began pushing the tenant agenda in Parliament, and their efforts formed the start of Ireland's independence movement.

On St. Patrick's Day, 1858, a former Young Ireland leader named James Stephens founded the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Around the same time, another rebel named Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa founded a similar Phoenix Society in Skibbereen. These movements spread rapidly during the late 1850s. Though they were strongly condemned by the Catholic Church, these independence movements continued to gather steam and plan insurrections that would lead to an Irish republic.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostSun Feb 15, 2015 4:08 pm

A Fungus Among Us by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

So there the Irish were, planting their potatoes every spring, digging them up every fall, and eating rather well, all things considered. But in the autumn of 1845, all that changed.

In October of that year, farmers walked out to their fields to harvest their crops. They plunged their shovels into the ground and then shrieked in horror — the potatoes were black and rotten, completely useless. The crop they had counted on for generations had finally failed them.

No one knew what to do. Experts offered advice, suggesting that the fungus killing the potatoes was attracted to moisture. Farmers tried to dig dry pits, but the spores traveled through the air and soaked into the ground after rain, which has always been plentiful in Ireland. It took only one infected plant to spread the blight over acres of potatoes. There was no escape.

The potato blight was caused by a “vampire” fungus called Phytophthora infestans. It might have originated in the United States and traveled to Europe in the holds of ships carrying produce. By the end of the 1800s, scientists had figured out that farmers could control it by spraying plants with copper compounds.
The Hardest Hit

The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. Poor laborers were hardest hit, followed by the smallest farmers.

Famine Here to Stay

The worst part of the potato blight was that it didn't go away. After the 1845 crops failed, people counted on the potatoes of 1846 to pull them through, but those potatoes rotted away, too. For some reason the crop of 1847 survived, but not enough fields of potatoes had been planted to produce enough food for everyone who needed it. And in 1848 the blight reappeared with a vengeance.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostFri Apr 10, 2015 1:28 pm

Fairlie » Tue Jan 13, 2015 12:18 pm wrote:Life During the GREAT HUNGER
by Amy Hackney Blackwell and Ryan Hackney

The poor Irish who had lost their potatoes faced terrifying difficulties. They called the time An Gorta Mór, which means “the Great Hunger,” or an Droch Shaol, “the Bad Times.”

The poorest farmers, already living at a subsistence level, were the first to feel the effects. Within a few months of the bad harvest, the people in the hardest-hit areas were already dying of starvation. Travelers reported seeing skeletal people with their mouths stained green; they had tried to ward off hunger by eating grass. In some places in western Ireland, piles of corpses filled the ditches.

The first thing the stricken farmers did was try to eat their diseased potatoes. This made them terribly sick with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and intestinal bleeding. Some very old and very young people died from this disease.

There was some food to be found on the land, and the Irish were very resourceful at scrounging it. They trapped birds and stole eggs from nests, gathered shellfish from the shores, and caught fish. Coastal people ate seaweed. They would take blood from cattle and fry it. They ate rats, worms, nettles, and chickweed. When the opportunity presented itself, they stole food from wagons and barges. But none of it helped much.

With Famine Comes Pestilence

The malnourished Irish were very vulnerable to diseases. In fact, more people died from illness than from actual starvation.

Typhus appeared in the winter of 1846. The Irish called it the black fever because it made victims' faces swollen and dark. It was incredibly contagious, spread by lice, which were everywhere. Many people lived in one-room cottages, humans and animals all huddled together, and there was no way to avoid lice jumping from person to person. The typhus bacteria also traveled in louse feces, which formed an invisible dust in the air. Anyone who touched an infected person, or even an infected person's clothes, could become the disease's next victim. Typhus was the supreme killer of the famine; in the winter of 1847, thousands of people died of it every week.

Another fever appeared at the same time, the relapsing fever called yellow fever because its victims became jaundiced. This fever also came from lice. A victim would suffer from a high fever for several days, seem to recover, and then relapse a week later. Many people died from this fever as well.

Scurvy became a problem. This disease comes from a deficiency of vitamin C, and it causes the victim's connective tissue to break down. The Irish called scurvy black leg, because it made the blood vessels under the skin burst, giving a victim's limbs a black appearance. The cure for scurvy is fresh food — meat, vegetables, or fruit — none of which was available to the poor in Ireland.

The modern obsession with cleanliness isn't just a matter of cosmetics or pride. Dirty clothes and sheets can harbor disease. When someone died of typhus, anyone who took and wore that person's clothes without washing them first could catch the fever from dust lingering in the clothes.
There were other diseases, too. Some Irish children fell victim to an odd disease that made hair grow on their faces while it fell out of their heads. Some observers commented that the children looked like monkeys. Cholera was always a problem in unsanitary, crowded conditions; it broke out in workhouses throughout the famine years.

Deaths in the Family

When people died, the living were left with the problem of what to do with the bodies. There were not enough coffins to hold the dead, even if the poor had money to pay for them. Stories abounded of entire families dying, or of mothers losing all their children and carrying the bodies to the cemetery on their backs, one by one. Visitors reported seeing dead bodies stacked in ditches and dogs devouring corpses in the fields; to their horror, they also observed people killing and eating those same dogs.

When someone came down with typhus, relatives and neighbors feared that they would contract the disease, too. Sometimes all healthy members of a family would leave a sick person alone in a house, hoping to escape the contagion. They hadn't abandoned the sufferer; they would push food in through the windows on the end of a long pole. When there was no longer a response from inside the house, they would pull the house down on top of the victim and burn the whole thing.

Landlords and Evictions

Most of the victims of the famine did not own the land they lived on. Instead, they rented houses and farmland from large landholders. When the potato crops failed, they could no longer pay their rent. Some landlords were understanding; many actually helped their tenants, handing out food and concocting jobs that would allow them to earn wages.

But other landlords were less accommodating. Scores of poor Irish were evicted from their homes. This wasn't all due to cruelty and greed; many landlords themselves faced bankruptcy and starvation as their rents stopped coming in. Some landlords decided that grazing sheep or cattle would be a better use of the land, and the peasants and their potato plots had to give way for the livestock.

The result was that many poor Irish found themselves not only starving, but homeless as well. Some of them moved into workhouses, but many dug holes in hillsides or made huts out of peat and lived in them as best they could. Others simply wandered the roads until they dropped dead.

One of the most bitter comments about the Irish potato famine came from economic theorist and “father of communism,” Karl Marx. He remarked that in the time of Cromwell, the English had supplanted the Irish Catholics with Protestants, but during the famine they supplanted them with cattle.
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Re: LIFE DURING THE GREAT HUNGER

PostTue Jun 07, 2016 7:37 pm

334 views :D
My ipad controls my spellings not me so apologies from it in advance :) lol

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