The Great Famine and the Emigration It Forced, 1845-1855

Potato blight reached Ireland in the autumn of 1845. By 1847, the year Irish people still call Black '47, the failure of the crop, the collapse of relief and a hard winter had turned hunger into mass death across the west. Roughly a million people died in the Famine years and well over a million left, and the census of 1851 counted more than a million and a half fewer people than the one taken a decade earlier.

Mayo was among the counties hit hardest. Its people depended on the potato more than almost anywhere, its landholdings were small, and its workhouses in Ballina, Castlebar and Westport were overwhelmed. The relief schemes of the time, from the public works and famine roads to the soup kitchens of 1847 and the later workhouse system, each have their own history, and each shaped who could stay and who had to go.

Emigration in these years was rarely one decision. A family raised passage money for one son or daughter, who was expected to send for the next. Some landlords paid tenants to leave; some workhouses sent inmates abroad. Many went first to Liverpool or Glasgow, and many never went further. Before any of them left, there was often an American wake, the night of farewell held as if for the dead.

We treat this history as a bereavement, not a backdrop. The entries below are written from the record: the census, the relief papers, the workhouse minutes and the letters themselves.

Read the story set in this decade