![]() Most went to North America, but many also emigrated to Great Britain (especially Liverpool, Glasgow and London) and to Australia. It is estimated that at the height of the famine as many as 250,000 may have left Ireland in a single year. In addition, the famine gave a further boost to already-high emigration rates, especially from the west of the country. While many of the deaths can be directly attributed to starvation, most were due to a wide range of diseases related to malnutrition and the resultant increased vulnerability to infections. To make matters worse, they were largely reliant on a single variety, the Irish Lumper, so that the entire crop failed at the same time due to lack of genetic variation. Indeed, it is estimated that on the eve of the famine 30% of Irish people were largely or wholly dependent on potatoes for their food. ![]() Given the small size and poor soil of their holdings, many of these tenant farmers had become totally dependent on the potato as the only feasible way of feeding themselves and their families. ![]() Its impact was particularly devastating because much of the rural Irish Catholic population of tenant farmers had been driven onto ever smaller units of marginal land to make way for large estates for cattle and grain, many of which were owned by absentee landlords who lived in England. The immediate cause of the famine was an infestation of Phytophthora infestans, a potato disease commonly known as potato blight. During the famine, approximately a million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island’s population to fall by around 20%. The decline was mostly as a result of The Great Famine, also known as The Great Hunger, which started in 1845 and swept the country for several years. The census taken in 1841 recorded a population of 8,175,124, while the 1851 census counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. This map shows the catastrophic decline in the population of Ireland during the decade from 1841 to 1851.
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