Irish Immigration: Potato Famine In America

Irish Immigration

Without the potato or some food substitute available in sufficient quantity to replace it, the Irish simply died. Historians dispute how many died but the best of the experts, like Cormac O’Grada, estimate that about one million did. Some died of outright starvation, perhaps as many as 9 percent in Mayo, but most died of the diseases that easily infected and ravaged the malnourished, like dysentery or diarrhea. Whatever the cause, they died everywhere: in their mud cabin hovels, on the roads, in the fields, even in the squares of towns where they had fled looking for relief. In Kenmare in Kerry, the local priest, Archdeacon O’Sullivan wrote, they were “dying by the dozens in the streets.” 1 Even nearly a hundred years after the famine, old men and women told the Irish Folklore Commission that there were mounds in fields or the ruins of cabins scattered around the country where no one would walk because they believed famine dead lay there.

The famine led many people to leave their homeland behind and started to consider new places to live at. Many Irish moved to America, the mainly settled in New York, Boston, and Pennsylvania. Even though immigrants usually bring with them problems and diseases that affect the stability of the country, however that was not the case with the Irish immigration. Irish immigration had tremendous benefits in the American society, the immigration improved many economic, political, and religious