The rural poor were the most vulnerable people in Irish society and over one million of them would perish as potato blight struck the crop which was providing sustenance for fifty percent of the population.

Over a million more would flee the country, emigrating to the United States or Britain.

But it wasn't only starvation which would kill many.

The emaciated frames of the starving would prove prone to disease and infection.

The resulting fever spread at an alarming rate through workhouses and on the 'coffin ships' carrying emigrants to new lives.

Those tasked with ministering to the victims would themselves prove vulnerable to disease and death.

In 1841 the census reported eight and a quarter million people in Ireland.

By the next census in 1851, that number had dropped to six and half million.

The dramatic drop in population levels is but one of the legacies of the Famine, still felt to this day.