The Great Famine (1845-1852) was a truly modern famine and one of the greatest social disasters in nineteenth-century Europe. Over a million people perished and a further million and a quarter fled the country which was an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
While power and wealth were vested in a small landholding elite in Ireland, subsistence was the lot of the three million landless labourers and cottiers whose lives were intimately linked to the cultivation of the potato.
