The Irish Crisis: The Great Irish Famine of 1846-7

Sir Charles Trevelyn

The Irish Crisis: The Great Irish Famine of 1846-7

London

Macmillan and Co.

1880

In charge of British relief efforts during Ireland’s Great Famine, Sir Charles Trevelyn not only blamed Irish landlords and tenant farmers for the failure of the potato crop but also wrote that the famine was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” Between 1846 and 1851, over a million men and women starved, many more people died from disease over time, and the famine prompted emigration of another two million people. Irish identity was almost irretrievably damaged, with the Irish language itself in the western part of the country nearly obliterated.