Gerard Moran – författare

The Great Irish Famine remains one of the most lethal famines in modern world history and a watershed moment in the development of modern Ireland – socially, politically, demographically and culturally. In the space of only four years, Ireland lost twenty-five per cent of its population as a consequence of starvation, disease and large-scale emigration. Certain aspects of the Famine remain contested and controversial, for example the issue of the British government’s culpability, proselytism, and the reception of emigrants. However, recent historiographical focus on this famine has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852.The narratives of those who perished, those who survived and those who emigrated form an integral part of this history and these volumes will make available, for the first time, some of the original documentation relating to an event that changed not only Irish history, but the history of the countries to which the emigrants fled – Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. By bringing together letters, government reports, diaries, official documents, pamphlets, newspaper articles, sermons, eye-witness testimonies, poems and novels, these volumes will provide a fresh way of understanding Irish history in general, and famine and migration in particular. Comprehensive editorial apparatus and annotation of the original texts are included along with bibliographies, appendices, chronologies and indexes that point the way for further study.

The Great Irish Famine remains one of the most lethal famines in modern world history and a watershed moment in the development of modern Ireland – socially, politically, demographically and culturally. In the space of only four years, Ireland lost twenty-five per cent of its population as a consequence of starvation, disease and large-scale emigration. Certain aspects of the Famine remain contested and controversial, for example the issue of the British government’s culpability, proselytism, and the reception of emigrants. However, recent historiographical focus on this famine has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852.This volume seeks to counterbalance the recent historiographical focus on the Great Irish Famine which has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852. As occurred during the Great Famine, they often resulted in increased levels of evictions, emigration, disease and death, although the scale was lower. While the Great Famine brought major economic, social and demographic changes, large areas of the country retained pre-famine structures with many communities continuing to have a subsistence existence and, consequently, regular crop failures and famines. These lesser known famines are examined in this volume along with the causes and why they did not achieve the scale of the Great Famine.

The Great Irish Famine remains one of the most lethal famines in modern world history and a watershed moment in the development of modern Ireland – socially, politically, demographically and culturally. In the space of only four years, Ireland lost twenty-five per cent of its population as a consequence of starvation, disease and large-scale emigration. Certain aspects of the Famine remain contested and controversial, for example the issue of the British government’s culpability, proselytism, and the reception of emigrants. However, recent historiographical focus on this famine has overshadowed the impact of other periods of subsistence crisis, both before 1845 and after 1852.This volume examines how the failure of the potato crop in the late 1840s led to the mass exodus of 2.1 million people between 1845 and 1855. They left for destinations as close as Britain and as far as the United States, Canada and Australia, and heralded an era of mass migration which saw another 4.5 million leave for foreign destinations over the next half-century. How they left, how they settled in the host countries and their experiences with the local populations are as wide and varied as the numbers who left and, using extensive primary sources, this volume analyses and assesses this in the context of the emigrants themselves and in the new countries they moved.