The Famine
The failure of the Irish potato crop from 1845 to 1849 plunged the island into appalling famine . Elsewhere in Europe, the blight was a resolvable problem but Irish subsistence farmers were utterly dependent on the crop. No disease affected grain, cattle, dairy produce or corn and throughout the disaster Irish produce that could have fed the hungry continued to be exported overseas. Millions were kept alive by charitable soup kitchens, and some individual landlords were supportive to their tenants; for millions more, the only choice lay between starvation and escape. Between 1841 and 1851, census returns suggest that 1.4 million people died in Ireland and 1.4 million emigrated to the United States and elsewhere - though the exact numbers in each case were probably higher. Many emigrants were too ill to survive the journey on what became known as "coffin ships", some drowned when overcrowded ships sank, and still more died on arrival in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. One consequence of mass emigration was the creation of large Irish communities abroad, which henceforth added an international dimension to the struggle for Irish independence. Financial support from the Irish overseas became crucial to such Nationalist organizations as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenians . Their attempted uprising in 1867 was little short of a fiasco, but they nonetheless retained a loyal following both in the States and in England (where a number of bombings were carried out in their name). The legacy of the Famine was such that the long-standing bitterness instilled by the English connection now deepened to a new level of emotional intensity. Resentment focused on the failure of the British government to intervene, and more specifically on the absentee English landlords who had continued to profit while remaining indifferent to the suffering of their tenants. Such landlords had little or no contact with the realities of life on their estates; rents were far higher than most tenants could pay, and evictions became widespread, most notoriously at Derryveagh in Donegal .
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