The Famine in Ireland
From the memorial in Ennistymon, Clare
From the first failure of the Potato crop in 1845 until the year 1852, Ireland was devastated by famine and disease. During these years over a million people died of hunger and disease, mostly from laborer, cottier and smallholder backgrounds; men, women, children.
Relief provided by the British government was not nearly sufficient to prevent starvation and was given grudgingly;
landlords callously used the situation to evict tenants wholesale from their farm holdings. As a result countless thousands died in the countryside and in the towns on the public work schemes, in the fields, in their own cabins., on the roadside or in the fever racked wards of the workhouses.
So many died that the graveyards could not contain them all. Huge numbers were buried in shallow graves on the very ground where they died, their surviving relatives too weak to carry them further.
Others again were left unburied for having no relatives to bury them
In Clare the famine shook society to its roots. Three of its Four Poor Law Unions, Scariff, Kilrush, and Ennistymon became bywords throughout Ireland for the horrific scenes witnessed there.
more evictions took place in the County here than in any other in Ireland. By the time the Famine had ended, up to eighty thousand souls had perished in Clare.
Those who survived this holocaust could rarely bring themselves to speak of it to their children and when they did invariably referred to it indirectly as
An Drochshaol - the Bad Times
