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| Irish potato famine |
Each Irish person eats 141 of potatoes every year -more than any other people. In the 18th and early 19th century they would have eaten a great deal more.
There was a time when every spare inch of land was planted with potatoes. When you're in the countryside, especially in areas where no-one now lives, and all you can see is grass, look closely. You may be able to make out the faint ridges on the land where once potatoes grew up the foothills of mountains, down river banks and out to the edge of the bogs.
More information: BBC
The potato is not native to Ireland. It was brought by Sir Walter Raleigh from the Andes around the end of the 16th century.
It was soon found that the potato grew remarkably well in the cold wet Irish climate, and could feed more people per acre than any other crop. More and more poor labourers could marry young and rear large families. They could live almost entirely on the potatoes they grew on their little patches of rented land.
More information: Discovering Ireland
The disease which destroyed the potato crops of the mid-1840's caused a famine in which over one million people died.
The total dependence of vast numbers of people on the potato was broken by the famine. The survivors and their descendants emigrated rather than face the threat of starvation again.
More information: Mises Institute
However, to this day, most Irish people feel a little insecure unless some sort of potato turns up on their dinner plate every day.
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase
the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine.
It is a peculiar feature of human actions that,
once performed, they can never be recuperated.
What is true of the past will always be true of it.
Terry Eagleton
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