Ireland's Famine Museum

The greatest social catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe happened in Ireland 150 years ago. The failure of the potato crop in successive harsh winters saw a huge fall in a population conservatively calculated at 8,175,124 in the in the 1841 census. As no record was kept of deaths, it is estimated that between 1845 and 1850 almost 1.5 million people died of hunger or of diseases brought on by famine, and a similar number emigrated. The loss decimated an entire rural class – the landless labourer – and by 1881 just over 4 million people were left. In one town alone, Strokestown, in the western county of Roscommon, a population of 11,958 was reduced by a staggering 88 per cent.