Troubles in Ireland – Artifact 5

The Irish Potato Blight

Potatoes are just another luxury that the modern world could feasibly do without. But the world has not always been so. We did not always have access to every imaginable crop grown in every imaginable place. Around the 1850s, the Irish persisted also solely on potatoes as their food source. When that food source was threatened, panic ensued.

 

It is hard to imagine that losing some potatoes was a cataclysm, but from 1700 to 1840, the Irish population grew from 3.5 to 8 million. With increased population and economic stringency caused by the British, the Irish needed a solid food crop that they could fall back on. (Enter Potato!) Potatoes are generally a hardy crop that require little work to grow and offer a high yield. Because of the wonders of the potato, about half of Ireland was dependent on it as their primary source of nutrition by the early ’40s. It was possible, and commonplace, for people to subside solely off of potatoes and milk. (Enter cataclysm…) From 1845 to 1852, the Irish potato crop was ravaged by blight. Somewhere between one third to one half of all acres planted in 1845 were lost due to blights. In 1846, three quarters of the crop was lost. Things didn’t just miraculously recover in 1847 either. Since most of the crop had died, there were very little seed potatoes to plant for the coming years. Today we know that a fungus-like organism known as phytophthora infestans was the cause of the blight.

 

Results:

The potato blight directly caused the deaths of approximately 1 million people or more. Mass starvation was their lot, followed by disease. Around a million more people emigrated from Ireland during the famine, mostly to North America. All told, the population fell almost 25%.

Disease played a factor as well, undernourishment causes a person to become very susceptible to measles, diarrhea, tuberculosis, respiratory infections, whooping cough, intestinal parasites, and cholera. Speaking of which, cholera was introduced into Ireland in 1849. It was a truly bad time to be born in Ireland.

 

Origin Stories:

In 1842 or 43, the ancestor of the HERB-1 strain of p. infestans made it from Mexico to North America and thence to Europe. It was probably contained in the potatoes that ships carried as food for passengers. Shortly after, it raced across across the globe, triggering the famine in Ireland and persisting until the 1970s when it died out was replaced by the US-1 strain. HERB-1 and US-1 likely split apart soon after their common ancestor made it out of Mexico.