All events · Empire, Clearance and Removal

The Irish Famine: Clearances and Mass Emigration

1845–1855 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement

Displaced

500,000

Estimates of eviction vary with the definition and the source. RTE's survey of the historiography reports that surviving police and court records for 1846-52, which begin systematically only in 1849, show at least 100,000 families - about half a million people - losing their homes, with a more realistic figure of between two-thirds and three-quarters of a million; Encyclopedia.com gives roughly half a million permanently expelled, counting only legally sanctioned evictions and excluding informal ejectments and 'voluntary' surrenders. Separately, about two million people emigrated from Ireland in the decade after 1845, and the population fell from about 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.6 million in 1851.

Share of the population affected

6.1%

of the population of Ireland at the census of 1841, before the famine, 1841

Killed

1–1.5 million

excess mortality incl. disease and starvation

Open on the interactive map →

What happened

Successive failures of the potato crop from 1845 destroyed the subsistence of Ireland's cottier and smallholding population. Britannica records approximately one million deaths from starvation and famine-related disease, the worst famine in nineteenth-century Europe. What makes the episode a clearance as well as a famine is the policy framework: the Gregory or quarter-acre clause of the Poor Law Amendment Act of June 1847 required tenants to surrender holdings over a quarter of an acre before qualifying for relief, and the new rating system made pauper tenants a direct cost to landlords. Evictions rose sharply from late 1847, peaked in 1850 and largely ended by 1854, carried out by 'crowbar brigades' that demolished houses to prevent return. Around two million people emigrated in the decade, some assisted by landlords clearing estates. Ireland's population had not recovered its pre-famine level a century and a half later.

Parties

Irish landlords, using powers created and enlarged by British poor-law legislation, cleared tenants from their estates during the potato failure, while some two million people emigrated

Disputed

Whether British relief policy amounts to culpable negligence, to ideological adherence to laissez-faire, or - as some nationalist historians and legislators have argued - to genocide, is a long-running dispute; the number evicted is also unresolved because constabulary records begin only in 1849 and readmitted 'caretakers' were counted inconsistently.

The denominator

The 1841 census counted 8,175,124 people; because that census is thought to have undercounted, the population on the eve of the blight in 1845 is usually put at about 8.5 million. By the census of 1851 it had fallen to 6.55 million.

The affected figure counts people formally evicted from their holdings; it is not the total displaced by the famine, which also included roughly a million deaths and 1-1.5 million emigrants in the same decade.

Where the baseline comes from

Great Famine (Ireland) — Wikipediaopen-edited
Historical population of Ireland — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Britannica gives approximately one million deaths from starvation, typhus and other famine-related disease in 1845-49, the standard figure derived by comparing the censuses of 1841 and 1851 with projected population growth. Higher estimates up to about 1.5 million extend the period to 1852 and include excess deaths among emigrants in transit and on arrival, notably in the Quebec quarantine stations. Both ends are demographic reconstructions; civil registration of deaths did not begin in Ireland until 1864.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of Property

RTE and Encyclopedia.com document the demolition and 'tumbling' of houses by crowbar brigades at eviction, recorded in constabulary returns, court proceedings and contemporary illustrated press.

Movements mapped

Connacht and Munster -> Boston and the United States
Limerick and Clare -> Quebec and Montreal
Dublin -> Liverpool and Britain

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Ireland, United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.