The Census of 1841

In 1837 Patrick McKye, a National School teacher, wrote a letter to Dublin Castle on behalf of the people of West Tullaghobegley, a parish in Gweedore, Co Donegal. The inhabitants, he informed the viceroy, ‘are in the most needy, hungry, and naked condition of any people that ever came within the precincts of my knowledge’.

There the population of some 9,000 owned between all of them only one cart, one plough, 16 harrows, eight saddles, 20 shovels, seven table-forks, 27 geese, eight turkeys, three watches and two feather beds. In the whole parish there was not a single wheeled car, not a pig, not a clock, and not a pair of boots. And there were neither fruit trees nor crops of turnips, parsnips, carrots or clover.

McKyle continued: 'None of their either married or unmarried women can afford more than one shift, and the fewest number cannot afford any…nor can many of them afford a second bed, but whole families of sons and daughters of mature age indiscriminately lieing together with their parents, and all in the bare buff. Their beds are straw – green and dried rushes or mountain bent: their bed cloathes are either coarse sheets, or no sheets, and ragged filthy blankets…if any unprejudiced gentleman should be sent here to investigate…I can shew him about one hundred and forty children bare naked, and was so during winter, and some hundreds only covered with filthy rags, most disgustful to look at.'

Long storms had ruined their crops and now they faced starvation. Many could afford only one meal every three days and McKye found 'their children crying and fainting with hunger, and their parents weeping, being full of grief, hunger, debility and dejection, with glooming aspect, looking at their children likely to expire in the jaws of starvation.'

Patrick McKye could have been writing about almost any part of Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard. This beautiful but barren coastland and its adjacent islands had only acquired a dense population over the previous century. There, only by unremitting labour had the people had made the thin and leached soil fertile by spreading shell sand and seaweed on the ground.

The first thorough census in Ireland was completed in 1841. The population of the island was calculated to be just under eight and a quarter million. Ninety years before the number of people in Ireland had been no more than two and a half million. This was an astonishing growth considering that at least one and a half million had emigrated since the end of the war with Napoleon in 1815. No great plague or epidemic had checked the natural tendency of the population to grow.

Just across the Irish Sea Britain was fast becoming the greatest industrial power on earth. The burgeoning populations of the manufacturing and coal-mining towns there eagerly bought up food from Ireland’s farms. Irish landlords and farmers prospered from this trade but there was a down side – competition from mass-produced British imports had all but destroyed the ability of the Irish poor to supplement their incomes by selling cloth and knitwear made in the home.

In the 1840s the gap between the rich and the poor was yawning wide. The 1841 census reported that two-fifths of the houses in Ireland were single-room mud cabins without windows. Only seven out of every 100 farms in Ireland were 30 acres or more – and this at a time when in Scotland a farm of 60 acres was considered small.

Only a quarter of the rural population was made up of farmers: the rest were wretchedly poor labourers and cottiers. As the population rose the land was sublet into smaller and smaller scraps – in the western province of Connacht 64 per cent of holdings were less than five acres each in size.

Most of the produce of even the tiniest plots of land had to be set aside to pay rent. More than ever, the Irish depended on the potato. The potato provided more nourishment per acre than any other crop. By the 1840s half the population of Ireland was almost totally dependent on the potato for sustenance.

The precarious position of so many people was recognised by the Devon Commission which reported to the government in 1845: 'It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they habitually and silently endure…in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water…their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather…a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury…and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.'

Such people were fatally vulnerable when a previously unknown disease struck the potato crop in Ireland in August 1845.