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The potato contains considerable food energy, and yet is very easy to cultivate. Typical farming practice of the era seeded a field once after being hoed, and future years' crops were "seeded" by simply leaving some of the potatoes unharvested in the ground. Weeding was minimal, and irrigation unnecessary. The potato had become Ireland's major food crop after being introduced sometime around 1650, though its dominance was not achieved until around the 1780s. Even small plots could provide enough calories for a family (and also to feed pigs, providing access to meat, while they could also be sold, providing extra income.) Other lands were used for cash crops like flax. The abundance of food and cash led to a rise in population in Ireland.
The potato's benefits also led to a dangerous inflexibility in the Irish food system. The majority of calories were being provided from a single crop. That alone is not unusual, and is still the case today for many subsistence farmers around the world. However the traditional Irish practice of sub-dividing plots among the male children of a family, though reducing was still widely practiced in the poorer areas of the country. The use of the potato and sub-division produced two interlinked side-effects; with increased calories the number of surviving male heirs was quickly increasing, while with the prospect of inheriting a land-holding, heirs married young and produced large families-hence increasing subdivision into smaller estates for their own heirs.
Although the origins are still unclear, in 1845 a potato blight struck across Europe, turning potatoes into a black, soggy, and inedible mess. The Freeman's Journal (the main nationalist newspaper) on June 27 1846 carried a headline Disease in the New Potato Crop, recounting an early outbreak in County Mayo. By Black '47, the vast majority of that year's crop was ruined. Food stores and emergency supplies made up for some of this setback, but the blight appeared again in 1849, and there was no reserve capacity remaining. The result was widespread famine, though it affected different parts of the island to different degrees.
No-one knows for certain how many people died in the Famine. State registration of births, marriages or deaths had not yet begun, while the Roman Catholic Church's records, where they exist at all, are incomplete, understandably given the sheer scale of deaths. Many of the Church of Ireland's records (which included records of local catholics, who paid tithes (local taxes) to the local Church of Ireland), were destroyed when the IRA blew up the Irish Public Records Office in 1922 (an act virtually universally condemned as pointless).
One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s. Earlier predictions expected that by 1851, Ireland would have a population of 8 to 9 million. This calculation is based on numbers contained in the ten year census results compiled since 1821. However a recent re-examination of those returns raise questions as to their accuracy; the 1841 Census, for example, incorrectly classed farm children as labourers, affecting later calculations on how many adults capable of child-bearing existed to produce children between 1841 and 1851!). What we do know is that in 1851 the actual population was 6.6 million. Making straight-forward calculations is complicated by a secondary effect of famine, a key side-effect of malnutrition, namely plummeting fertility and sexual activity rates. The scale of that effect on population numbers was not fully recognised until studies done during African famines in the twentieth century. As a result, corrections based on inaccuracies in census returns and on the previous unrealised decline in births due to malnourishment have led to an overall reduction in the presumed death numbers. Modern historians and statisticians reckon that between 500,000 and 1,100,000 died. Most historians suggest the death-toll was in the region of 700,000 to 800,000.[2] In addition, in excess of one million Irish emigrated in notorious coffin ships to the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, while more than one million emigrated over following decades; by 1911, a combination of emigration and an abnormally high number of unmarried men and women in the population, had reduced the population of Ireland to 4.4 million.
The initial British government response towards the early famine was, in the view of many historians such as F.S.L. Lyons 'prompt and relatively successful'.[3] Furthermore, contrary to myth, as Professor Joe Lee observed:
In the case of the 1846-49 Irish Famine, with tragic consequences the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel (who had served in the Dublin Castle British administration, having begun his political career as an MP for a rotten borough of Cashel, County Tipperary and so had some understanding of Ireland) was replaced (with the help of Irish MPs under Daniel O'Connell) by a Whig ministry under Lord John Russell. Russell believed in a laissez faire economic policy of non-intervention in the economy. So whereas Peel had imported Indian maize to feed the starving, Russell instead focused on providing support through public works and work-houses . A disastrous Gregory Clause of the Poor Law Extension Act was introduced, limiting aid to those who owned less than one quarter of an acre (1,000 m²) of land. This forced poverty-stricken starving tenants either to give up their homes and land, and so become destitute after the famine, or hold on to them and risk starvation.
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