Potato Famine Killed One Million Irish and Sent Survivors to U.S.

The English, who conquered, confiscated, and redistributed much of the land in Ireland, refused to give grain to the Irish when their potatoes turned to goo in the ground beginning in the mid-1840s, because the English didn't want to depress the price of grain. Only Quakers, a religious sect based on simplicity and compassion, fed the Irish. Quakers formed a Central Relief Committee, ran soup kitchens, and organized U.S. aid for Ireland. However, their efforts weren't enough due to widespread starvation, so over a million Irish men, women, and children starved to death.

The English were particularly punitive toward the western Irish, who were more rebellious than most. The ships that took desperate refugees to America, both the U.S. and Canada, were known as "coffin ships," because so many Irish died in transit. They had to provide their own food for the voyage. Of course a lack of food was their reason for leaving, so "famine fever," most likely typhus, claimed the lives of many.

Typhus also kept American and Canadian authorities from allowing the Irish to leave the coffin ships and embark on their new lives in North America. The Irish were quarantined on their ships until they could prove they were well enough to disembark. The men, women, and children who survived long enough to disembark must have been sturdy indeed.

Irish famine and typhus survivors clung to the coastal cities where they found themselves and only the bravest ventured west to Iowa. The Irish Catholics were discriminated again, even by other Catholics who were German.

Even as recently as the last 10 or 15 years, I was in an Iowa City bar, Shakespeare's, and a customer at the bar, apropos of nothing, spontaneously yelled, "No Irish need apply!" A friend who used to work at New Pioneer Coop in Iowa City, a man who went by Fodge, said his Irish ancestors were evicted from their tenancy on a lord's estate in Ireland for want of the equivalent of $10.

Bibliography:

"The Great Hunger," by Cecil Woodham-Smith, 1962, a history of the Irish potato famine

"Famine," by Liam O'Flaherty, 1896, a historical novel with interesting archaic words and turns of phrases

"Angela's Ashes," "'Tis," "Teacher Man," by Frank McCourt, 2005, novels about an Irish survivor and his family