The proximate cause of the famine was a potato blight which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, causing an additional 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influencing much of the unrest in the widespread European Revolutions of 1848. Ī potato infected with late blight, showing typical rot symptoms Between 18, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barque-one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history. During the Great Hunger, roughly a million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 18. The worst year of the period was 1847, known as 'Black '47'.

With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, loosely translated as 'the hard times' (or literally 'the bad life'). The Great Famine ( Irish: an Gorta Mór ), also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland) was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849, which constituted a historical social crisis which had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. See list of memorials to the Great Famine

Permanent change in the country's demographic, political, and cultural landscape Population fell by 20–25% due to death and emigration

Scene at Skibbereen during the Great Famine by Cork artist James Mahony, The Illustrated London News, 1847Ĭorn Laws, Gregory clause, Encumbered Estates' Court, Crime and Outrage Bill (Ireland) 1847, Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, Three Fs, Poor Law Amendment Act

Dont starve wiki sweet potato