workingclasshistory:

On this day, 17 March 1846, Saint Patrick’s Day, one of the first shipments of famine refugees left Dublin for New York. During the next five years more than a million people followed, driven by hunger to Canada or the United States.
Élisée Reclus, the great French geographer, anarchist, vegetarian, and naturist, who arrived in Ireland at the end of the famine, noted that “Within a few miles of the wealthiest island in the world there live the most wretched human beings in Europe” and observed that “In no other country has famine committed such ravages as on the fertile soil of Ireland.” The Great Famine killed a million people and forced a similar number to emigrate, while vast quantities of food produced in Ireland was exported to Britain for profit.
In the decades preceding the famine, agricultural labourers and tenant farmers had staged numerous violent revolts. They had suffered successive famines throughout the 19th-century, and in 1841 almost half the homes in Ireland were single-room mud cabins. They fought these miserable conditions through secret societies known to history as “Whiteboy” groups. Members of these secret organisations were bound by elaborate oaths and rituals. They demanded lower rents and tithes, increased wages, and fairer land distribution, and they pressed their claims with property destruction, animal mutilation, assault, and even murder.
Pictured: a famine memorial in Dublin
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