The Great Famine in Ireland

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County Kildare did not suffer the extremes of death that occurred in the west and north west of Ireland. However, all things considered for those men and women in Kildare who lived before the Famine poverty and want were part of everyday life. For the Poor Irish, life on the eve of the Great Famine was very grim, many modern writers compare the situation in pre-famine to that of the Third world today. A series of official inquires and numerous travellers' reports and letters highlighted the poverty within the poor class of Ireland. They recorded the dirt, damp and almost nakedness of the people of Ireland. English traveller Edward Wakefield found the Poor Irish situation to be of 'such various gradations of misery as he could not have supposed possible to exist, even among the most barbarous nations'. In 1834 another travelling English writer, Henry Inglis, found the condition of the elderly and the ill to be 'shocking for humanity to contemplate, and beyond the efforts of private beneficence to relieve,' while he found that most agricultural labourers to be living 'on the verge of starvation'. Many travellers such as these mainly visited Ireland during it off season for harvest, when unemployment was high and food supplies were low. They also stayed on Ireland's main roads which were targeted by paupers and the poverty was more clearly evident.

There is no denying that Ireland was in dire need of aid in order to find the cause of the poverty problem that had swept over it. Reports carried out at that time in order to establish the cause of the Irish poverty highlighted the seasonal unemployment of the Irish labourers and the poverty that resulted from this in both their living conditions and what they possessed and ate. The ...

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...ber in order to assess the damage that the potato crop failure had had. A challenge soon presented itself in the form of differing assessment reports so it was not clear exactly how much damage had been done. A detailed report from an agriculturist however estimated the loss of the potato crop to be between one third and one half of the potatoes that were originally thought to be free from the fungus. More charitable relief works were being set up in order to care for the now starving people. Local clergy began to devise means for the labourers to receive his provisions at a cheaper rate and to find a way of bringing food into the country in order to prevent further starvation. Following a damp Spring and Summer the complete potato crop failure occurred in 1846 and from this began a series of potato crop failures that resulted in the decade long famine in Ireland.

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