TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 THE COMING STORM 4 Chapter 2 THE POTATO BLIGHT 12 Chapter 3 THE GREAT HUNGER 20 Chapter 4 AFTER THE FAMINE 28 GLOSSARY 38 SOURCE NOTES 38 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 39 FURTHER INFORMATION 39 INDEX 40
THE COMING 1 THE COMING THE COMING STORM Lush green landscapes and rolling meadows fill the Irish countryside The country is well known for its natural beauty But when French traveler Gustave de Beaumont arrived in 1838 he noticed something else Ireland was in stark poverty Misery naked and famishing starvation it is the first thing you see when you land on the Irish coast and from that moment it ceases not to be present to your view he wrote Ireland came fully under English control as part of the United Kingdom in 1801 4
De Beaumont saw swarms of poor people in the cities They wore ragged clothing They begged for food Traveling into the countryside he saw rundown one-room cabins They were made of mud There were no windows or chimneys Inside several generations of a family lived together They had no furniture They shared a single straw mattress Farmers cottiers and landless laborers made up Ireland’s large working class Farmers often had several acres of land to farm Cottiers usually had less than an acre Some of them worked for farmers with larger crops to harvest Landless laborers were the poorest They did not grow their own crops Gustave de Beaumont wrote about his observations in an 1839 book Ireland Social Political and Religious 5
