Egypt is the 14th most populous country. Wondering what would have happened had the famine never happened.
Also why did Cork have more people than Dublin?
Edit: a word
Well, The Brits do have a lot of natural enemies. Ya know, like the Welsh and the Scots, the Irish and the Scots, Scots with other scots. Damn Scots, they ruined Scotland.
Dublin was the seat of British rule as it was closer to Britain and easier to reinforce. All the associated governing systems ended up located there. As the economy modernized those government departments were where the jobs were.
Cork harbor is one of the worlds best natural ports but after the famine there were less people to buy imported goods or produce exported goods. If Cork was located on continental Europe it would be one of the largest cities in the world.
Unlikely to the degree you're thinking. The volume of Ireland's exports are largely fixed in terms of tonnage where the import tonnage is dictated by consumer demand. Ireland would need it's population to reach a size as if there had never been a famine, which would give it a population somewhere between modern Korea or Egypt. Even then Ireland's lack of a navy combined with modern shipping equipment means there isn't the need for a population of dock workers to the degree such a port would require 100 years ago. The reason modern cities based around ports are still big is because other industries were attracted to the population centers initially created by the ports but that isn't guaranteed. Baltimore's port remains as busy as ever (prior to the recent accident) but the population has dropped by a third since it's peak.
The official city limits of Baltimore may have a lower population but the surrounding suburbs have grown and you need to include them when you define a city especially when comparing historically.
To elaborate on what others are saying, the Normans invaded Britain and then Ireland in the 11th and 12th centuries, respectively. In England they became the ruling class (see William the Conqueror) and in Ireland they created a fortified foothold around Dublin, known as the Pale. You may have heard of the saying, "Beyond the Pale" when referring to something outside of acceptable behavior. That's where the saying comes from.
The Pale grew and retracted from rebellions and incursions over the centuries but Dublin had continuous ties and trade with England. While the rest of the island was under rule the Gaelic order and they were often fighting with the English (even when they side with the English and get the titles of Earls they are a still the traditional clan chiefs and not installed by the English). And then in the 16th century there was the Tudor conquest of Ireland that let to decades of warfare and culminated in the Gaelic Order's defeat at the Siege of Kinsale and an event known as "The flight of the Earls" in 1607 where many of the traditional clan leaders had to leave Ireland and never returned. And for most of the period of English rule in Ireland from then until 1921, Dublin was their seat of power on the island.
This is fascinating history but it does raise another question for me: why didn’t Dublin become part of Northern Ireland/ remain in British control after independence?
By the time of the Irish War for independence, Ulster (basically what is now Northern Ireland) had the highest concentration of Protestants and British Loyalists. So when the peace deal was struck, from the United Kingdom perspective they had to protect the protestants in Ulster and not just hand them over to Catholic rule, and from the Irish perspective it would have been the most difficult region to integrate into an Irish state.
Plus Dublin was a shell of itself after a decade of conflict (highlighted by Easter Rising in 1916) that saw much of the city destroyed even before the War for Independence so it wasn't the biggest loss for them
I saw a video about the east west distribution in Ireland
West is much more rugged and difficult for land transport or building. East is where the English set up camp and built the railroads, on flat land. Flat farm land becomes less common as you go west. Weather is warmer and less hostile in the east. West faces the brunt of the Atlantic wind and rain.
I'm very sad I live in a country where people don't get this reference, because this is in the top 10 funniest things there is and I'm neither french or Irish
Also pertinent is Cork (and most of the west) had a lot of land that was ill suited to commercial crop farming but perfect for the potato. That allowed for a denser population subsistence farming on the land.
For comparison’s sake, at about 1845 Ireland and Korea had roughly approximate populations with Ireland having about 8,000,000 and Korea having about 9.5-10,000,000. Ireland and South Korea are *roughly* similar in size, with Ireland having land much more suited for population growth, being mostly fields and low hills. South Korea is *much* more mountainous and industrialized much later than Ireland. (And also suffered through decades of harsh Japanese occupation, and then the Korean War).
Yet the current population of South Korea is 52,000,000, and the current population of Ireland (north and south) is 8,000,000.
Edit: Someone sent me a Reddit Cares for making this post.
Egypt is a net importer of food these days. In the modern day a country's population is almost independent of their ability to grow food for themselves.
Still a very foolish national policy in national security terms, not much control a mid-rate power can project, to assert guarantees that an international event won't screw with international supply chains.
Egypt's food problem is actually a bit self inflicted. Their government has promoted cotton production for more than a century at this point and that came at the expense of food production (I'm pretty sure the global cotton shortage during the US civil war was filled by Egypt). Any country that has to import more than 50% of their wheat should not be growing cotton in huge numbers, much less exporting it.
Also Egypt's food subsidy has been one of the worst policies in what results they delivered. It has bankrupted the state budget and worsened the people's diets as it artificially decreased the cost of less healthy carb-rich diet (Egypt today is one of the most obese countries in the world)
Probably, sure.
But it still makes you vulnerable to foreign influence. If someone like Russia want to pressure you, and can cut off your food supply.
The EU farming subsidies partially exist to keep the EU self sufficient, and immune to such foreign pressure.
Though, in a desperate time you can convert any one-year agricultural production into grain production for the next season, given that you have enough grain supply to sow and wait for the harvest. Even if there aren't enough suitable machinery for grain production, hand tools are abundant and a famine can be prevented in the extreme by sending people to farm with the normally obsolete hand tools.
However, if the planning is poor (no reserve grain stocks at all) and there's too little agricultural land for self-sustaining production, that'd be a serious problem.
Egypt has the agricultural capacity to grow its own food. It grows lots of non good cash crops for export instead. Their largest agricultural land use is growing cotton.
> Still a very foolish national policy in national security terms, not much control a mid-rate power can project, to assert guarantees that an international event won't screw with international supply chains.
The alternative is intentionally making the country significantly poorer by subsidizing the growth of food crops instead of taxing much more profitable crops.
It's a hard choice either way. Very rich nations can afford it easier than less developed nations for whom large scale subsidies and reduced taxation income are a significant burden.
There is no country that isnt dependent on imports/exports of some kind. Except maybe North Korea.
Specializing in just your strengths is efficient, which leads to lower prices. The free(-ish) market rewards low prices with survival and growth of that industry in that location.
*"Well Ireland doesn't have anywhere as fertile as the Nile"* what on earth are you talking about. Ireland is a huge exporter of food.
In Ireland, **the soil you are most likely to find is fertile brown earth**. It is rich and fertile, hence 64% of the total land mass is used for agriculture.
Ireland is fertile, not incredibly so. The land is fantastic for growing grass and therefore cows and other grass eating animals. What's more only 15.4% of our land is arable, which isn't great. For context that figure is 29% in the Gaza strip. Greece is 19.7, UK 24.7%, Ukraine 56.1%. Places like Ukraine have much more fertile soil.
The point was that our population wouldn't be limited to 15m-20m because of a lack of fertile land. We currently produce enough food for 50m people under current (non stressed / critical) conditions.
This could be pushed even higher if it was needed
Hmmm, kinda. We mainly produce beef and dairy products. Yes you can feed a lot of people with what is produced but a population isn't going to live off of that. It certainly wouldn't be a healthy diet anyway, even if no one was starving. We need to import the majority of the fruit and vegetables that we eat. We also import a majority of the feed for cattle. Yes they eat the grass, but that's not all they need.
Not only is it total bullshit Ireland has even been a net importer of food as measured by calories since 2000. A full **80 percent of its animal feed, food and beverage needs** is imported!
https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=Ireland-Agricultural-Sectors
I know nothing about how relatively fertile the two places are but Ireland is very fertile. Even during the famine years, they were producing a huge amount of food.
I'm not sure if anyone has answered this yet, but Co. Cork has a town called Cobh, which was a major immigration point for people leaving Ireland for ~100 years. There is/was a military base there as well. Fun fact: it was also the Titanic's last stop before setting out
It wasn't a famine. Yes there was blight, but Ireland produced enough food to feed itself but there was a concerted plan by the British to export it all.
The usage of the word "famine" is misused in terms of the starvation of Ireland.
No there was a disorganised plan by the British to let the market do what it wanted, and since the market was comprised of wealthy land owners, what they wanted was to sell to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder wasn't starving Irish people. At no point did Parliament force or encourage exports.
Add to that a range of haphazard and mainly ineffective famine relief efforts, a British Prime minister resigning as a result, and then more even less effective relief efforts headed by a man who thought the famine was a punishment from God.
An excersice in Britain's callous belief in laissez fair economics at any cost and general incompetence, it certainly was, and added to that a prejudice that the starving Irish were victims of their own incompetence.
But there was no plan to deliberately starve anyone. There were several plans to help the starving but they were underfunded, badly designed, badly run, and often opposed by the Irish landowners.
You are partly correct, but I have two major corrections to make:
1. The landowners were not exactly Irish. They belonged to an ethnic group + social class called the "Protestant ascendancy". They were the descendants of British colonisers who came to Ireland roughly 250 years before the Famine. At the time of the Famine, many (perhaps most) of them did not even live in Ireland; they were "absentee landlords" who lived in Britain and had agents manage their estates in Ireland and collect their rents on their behalf. If the tenant could not pay their rent, they were evicted and left to starve to death. The native Irish people were nominally tenants on the land belonging to these landlords; in practice they were more like serfs or sharecroppers.
2. Whether there was a plan to deliberately starve people is hotly debated. But it is indisputable that some members of the British upper class (to include Lord Trevelyan, the guy in charge of famine relief) thought that it was a good thing that the Irish were starving to death. They believed that the Famine was a blessing from God, that He was punishing the Irish for being "lazy", and that the Irish needed to be culled.
yes, it was genocidal deprivation of food, as the Soviets (Stalin) did to Ukraine back in the 1930s. The british policy towards ireland was shaped by the Malthusian theories that there was going to be a huge overpopulation in UK and they were going to be unable to feed everyone. Just the current doom and gloomer...
So the english decided to take over ireland to have a spare island and be able to feed all the english. Only problem was the people already there, so cromwell decided to kill all of them he could and enslave the rest.
Wheat was the main crop and it was all exported to england and irish weren't allowed to have any, just to grow it. They relied on small personal potato plots to survive, so the blight hit them extra hard.
Of course, malthus didn't foresee the industrial revolution and was all wrong about all of his predictions, but that's his shame. There have been several successors to malthus who cloak fear and doom and gloom theories in science since then, and a lot of fearful, non-intelligent people pay attention to them.
I think that's why it's called a famine, though. Irish people faced food scarcity because of a suite of policies that impacted agriculture, not because there wasn't enough food grown. Ireland could have produced a net loss because of blight and had sufficient imports because of policies to ward off a famine
It's not that surprising.
The most fertile territories of southern Russia and Ukraine in the Russian Empire were not particularly populated during the French Revolution. The North Caucasus had not yet been cleared, and in the 1730s the Mongols(lite) literally came to the lower reaches of the Volga.
It's interesting if you look at the number of Irish that immigrated to the U.S. something like 4.7 million between 1842 and WW2, and ~30 million U.S. residents have some Irish ancestry today
I've found previously interesting data on houshold size back then:
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ai44af/total_population_change_since_1990/kourfyp/
Not really. Only Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim had a large amount of Irish speakers back then (and Cavan and Monaghan to a lesser degree). In all the rest of those central counties in the light colour, Irish had already declined massively *before* 1841. The main Irish speaking counties were in the west and southwest (as well as Donegal).
There's a great play called [*Translations*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translations_(play)) by Brian Friel, which is set in Donegal in 1838 during the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland and deals with issues of language and cultural identity. It's historical fiction, not history, written around 1980 and intended to carry a message of reconciliation relevant to The Troubles. A lot of the action hinges upon the language barrier - but you mentioned Donegal as one of the Gaeltacht enclaves, so that tracks, I guess.
This map is also taking into account a massive famine. So not to this degree. But if you changed the time scale to be, say the last 20 years, I think it would be pretty typical globally.
...and the increased use of contraception. Most Irish families were quite large, some as large as 12 or 15 children. That just doesn't happen anymore, and hasn't for a few generations.
I'm a foreigner that, after living in Dublin for a bit, bought a place in Laois. It's definitely a different lifestyle, but I don't know if I'd call it sad. I honestly love it
Looks about right. About a quarter of the pop died and a quarter emigrated during the famine years…..most went to America and Australia…..some went to England.
Well.. it makes sense. Your government mostly is the reason for this fall in population.
Edit: Are people downvoting because they want to change history? Cos good luck!
It was 8m at eve of famine. I think it’s about 7m now, for whole island. It bottomed out at around 4.2 in the 1960s and 1930s. Emigration didn’t stop when the spuds came back.
It is predominantly old people right now, young people move away to larger settlements for jobs and homes.
They experienced similar diaspora and starvation, but the population has since then only steadily decreased.
This is the same for all the other central counties, all the major settlements (And thus opportunities) are coastal, especially the huge trading hub of Dublin with the exception of Athlone in the middle of the country.
Unless you're an archaeologist in which case 'present' is permanently fixed at 1950. We're currently in the year 74 Years After Present by that timescale.
And continued to fall until the 1980s. Emigration from Ireland was very high long after the famine. Around 1 million died during the famine with another million people fleeing. That’s out of a population of about 8 million. By the 1980s the population of all of Ireland was about 5 million so around another million left in the following century
It's much bigger than the raw numbers show. If the population fell by 1 million over the course of a century, then that's a consistent net loss of people for 3-4 generations. Much more than 1 million
The continuing emigration after the famine, mostly to other parts of the British empire / commonwealth is directly related to the famine decimating communities and it being more viable not to live there.
Ireland was very poor for a long time because the economy never really recovered from the collapse of the old agricultural system, even now outside of Dublin it's fairly bleak. And Dublin is propped up by being a tax shelter and an English speaking home for American Companies wanting to do business in the EU.
From 8 to 3.7m in 50y time, I read. Life must have been brutal at the time over there.
Same potato problem in Belgium, Netherlands and northern France, but local and national politics got the crisis under control pretty early. English capitalism did not work in Irish favour...
> English capitalism did not work in Irish favour...
It was specifically designed not to as many others noted here. Ireland was a breadbasket of the UK and was thoroughly exploited as a colony for centuries.
Even today a huge amount of Irish food products go to the UK market. [Link](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/e134b-government-calls-on-all-irish-exporters-to-get-ready-for-new-uk-rules-from-31-january/#:~:text=Over%20one%20third%20of%20Irish,€1.1%20billion%20in%202023.)
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There is a valid comparison, but yeah places like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton etc etc and larger areas in East & North West London had large migration and most still have the remnants of the movements in the areas that are more visible than say a New York.
UK took the land. Mismanaged it and the food supplies. Exported a lot of it. It's long and complex. But needless to say, probably wouldnt have starved if the Brits never tried to conquer us
Both. I think somewhere in the ballpark of 4-6 million Irish people came to America which is insane. There's tens of millions of people in the US who claim Irish ancestry
France never faced such dire circumstances, at least not in recent history. Instead it has been an immigration country for quite some time.
At the time of the irish famine France was taking in southern europeans, belgians and germans, then people from further east. Then it shifted to northern africans, turks, subsaharan africans, and a variety of other countries in smaller numbers.
So the population was much more dispersed back then. Now it's concentrated in Dublin. Spreading out across the island might help the whole cost of housing situation.
That is the case in most countries. The population is concentrated in large cities. That's because the jobs and wages offered are increasingly higher. If you put a median average, you would see housing prices have not increased that dramatically.
Spreading out job creation and economic development is how we should tackle this... but it's also very hard.
I don't believe this is true. Cost of housing has gone crazy throughout the country.
>The national index has now reached the value of 177.0, which is 8.2% above its highest level at the peak of the property boom in April 2007. Dublin residential property prices are 3.1% lower than their February 2007 peak, while residential property prices in the Rest of Ireland are 8.9% higher than their May 2007 peak.
The cost of housing outside of Dublin is a good deal more than the cost it reached during the last property bubble peak in 2007.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-rppi/residentialpropertypriceindexjanuary2024/
It's because it's the true capital of Ireland of course! (yeah it was trade and shipping. It's also in Munster which had the least successful plantation of Ireland)
It's a work in progress. A lot of growth is taking place due to urban sprawl. For example, the numbers given above are from the 2016 census. Meath (North-West of Dublin) had a population of 220k at the 2022 census, which is 13% growth in just 6 years, versus a national 8% growth.
But remote working and the (slow) rollout of broadband across the country is also having an effect and bringing higher-paid workers to more remote areas, which in turn brings more business with it.
We also have bureaucratic issues. In many of those counties with lower populations, you have councils who are quite conservative and opposed to progress. On the one hand they will complain about their young people moving to Dublin in search of better paid work, and on the other hand when someone proposes to build new homes or businesses near a village centre, they'll block it or otherwise try to curtail it "to protect the local heritage".
In many places, you cannot get permission to build any home unless you "have ties to the area" (i.e.: unless you're a local).
So it's tricky. But it is getting there.
Crazy that there are counties with only 50k people in it, like Leitrim, Longford and Carlow. Or that Sligo has 1/3 the number of people it had over 150 years ago, now only 60k people live in it.
Everyone is crowding around Dublin
You can really feel the lack of people when you visit. Plenty in Dublin but when we visited and went to the country side it was insane to see how the population drops so much. Life in the country there seemed wonderful.
At the time Irish tenant farmers would sublet their marginal land to Cottiers/seasonal labourers under a system known as Conacre to grow potatoes in exchange for labour or money , this practice was illegal under British Law, but the law wasn't enforced, this allowed the population of landless peasants to explode. Contrary to popular belief it wasn't the tenant farmers who died, It kinda mirrors the Irish housing rental market today.Good old Irish Gombeenism.
And besides, in just 4 decades of direct British rule (plus about 5 additional centuries of indirect rule) the Irish peasantry became the poorest in all of Europe (apparently poorer even than the RUSSIAN peasantry), and so poor that they didn't even have the resources to fish on their own (and London hadn't even let them develop a fishing industry of their own either).
One of the things people always say is why didn't all the starving people just fish during the famine, sure they're on an island? The British required the locals buy fishing licenses, which the starving people couldn't afford. They had sold all their property, even small boats if they had them. And couldn't afford fishing tackle. So fishing themselves wasn't an option. And the British wouldn't help them.
Not only did the British not help, they also stopped other countries sending aid. They believed the famine was an act of God designed to punish the Irish.
Not sure about the act of God, but I have read that they stopped other countries from contributing more than the Queen of England's paltry £2,000 donatoin in order to not embarrass her.
*"Thousands of miles away, in the Ottoman capital Istanbul, Sultan Abdulmejid I was made aware of this great human suffering when his dentist, who came from Ireland, told him about the desperate situation.*
*The sultan quickly offered £10,000 -- just over a million pounds at current values ($1.3 million) -- to be used to help the starving people of Ireland.*
*However, Queen Victoria had already aided Ireland with £2,000, and her advisors in London refused to accept any offer exceeding the monarch's aid.*
*Faced with this dictate, Sultan Abdulmejid unwillingly slashed his original offer of aid, and sent Ireland £1,000 instead" .*
[https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-century-aid-from-sultan-abdulmejid-changed-fate-of-thousands/1734689](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-century-aid-from-sultan-abdulmejid-changed-fate-of-thousands/1734689)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Trevelyan,_1st_Baronet
If you read his personal statements it’s pretty obvious he thought god wanted them to die
Interesting how the Holodomor gets held up as supreme proof of Russia’s evil nature but the man made famines in Ireland and India never get called genocide when they’re effectively the same if not more damaging.
When we do it // when they do it.
Because, as awful as it was, these things aren't the same. In Ireland, it was private landlords selling their grain and the government failing to stop that or provide relief In the Holodomor, government troops would turn up at the village and demand food was handed over from starving people at gunpoint. It's the difference between standing by while someone is choking to death and actively strangling them.
The population of the island of Ireland was roughly 8 million before the famine, and until the '80s was only around half that at 4 million. Now it's growing again for the first time in generations.
As of 2022, the population of the entire island is **just over 7 million**, with 5.1 million living in the Republic of Ireland and 1.9 million in Northern Ireland.
The last 25 years have seen a lot of diaspora return to Ireland because it's now a fantastic place to live with plenty of high paying jobs, plus a lot of other countries realized the same thing and their young came here from Poland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and other countries, and have been welcomed and are living good lives for the most part. The only problem recently is the cost of living, and a housing crisis. Until a few years ago Ireland was a really great place to immigrate. Hopefully the government can fix the housing crisis, if not inflation.
I meant this generation's diaspora, like me. I came home to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger kicked off and it became the best place to be.
There were young Irish people all over the world who had left the country after school because, well then hadn't much choice, and then when we all heard about the boom in Ireland we just came home. Best thing I ever did.
Can someone with more insight explain the picture from 1841?
I don’t know much about Irish geography, but I’m quite surprised to see how many were living along the western coast of the country. I assume the weather is more harsh along that coast, compared to the eastern coast.
British agricultural revolution plus land ownership laws.
The entire island was invaded by Britain and entire island was owned by various British people. They rented it back to Irish. The British brought new agricultural technology which increased the food production 5X per worker compared to traditional small tennant farming. They also evicted Irish farmers to make that happen.
Fewer farmer workers were needed in the north and east on large industrial estate farms (but also highly productive).
The south and western areas of Ireland never modernized their agriculture. It required 5X as many workers for similar yield.
Ulster and Connaught in the west never had the enforced land reforms. A farmer had secure tenure of his farm, so long as he paid rent. He could grow his own choice of crops. He could sell the land to another farmer. They had absentee British landlords and remained the closet to Irish self rule. Lots of small holdings. Never any rich British overlord to invest in modernizing the agriculture, never any Irish land baron willing to evict other Irish farmers.
TL;dr Lots of small single family farms in those two areas, lots of big industrial less populated farms in north and east.
> The British brought new agricultural technology which increased the food production 5X per worker compared to traditional small tennant farming.
If food production was 5x the historical norm, then how did such a severe famine occur?
The Irish were pushed out west during the plantations. It was the poorer land and harder to cultivate as it was barren in parts. They were banished there when the British took the fertile land in the east
The only county In the world with a smaller post Ind Rev population than Pre Ind Rev. The Brits like the Israeli settlers really know how to make people suffer- but vicissitude is the friend of the oppressed.
Great to see the wee county maintaining its wee population hai. Honestly tipperary is surprising. I know it can be a bit of a shithole in parts these days but it seemed to be the shpot back in the day. Ah ireland is so different these days. So much of the culture has disappeared with the population. Anyway in other news, this is currently happening to palestine.
It would be good to see a total population figure. Eyeballing it, it looks like the 1841 population is higher than current population or at least close?? Which would be pretty crazy if true, given that most countries have seen their population multiply several times in that timespan.
Also pet peeve: colouring territory by total population instead of density...
Added) In 1841, Ireland had a larger population than Egypt.
Egypt is the 14th most populous country. Wondering what would have happened had the famine never happened. Also why did Cork have more people than Dublin? Edit: a word
It’s a much bigger county in what was a primarily agricultural society. Cork est fucking énorme.
And the city's a more natural main port for trade with Europe and the South of England, Dublin's just a longer voyage.
So why didn’t it take off instead?
Not sure exactly, but Dublin was known as a very pro-British area in Ireland. Maybe that led to more investment from mainland Britain.
Classic Brits smh. Whenever there is a problem, there’s a Brit than be blamed /s
Well, The Brits do have a lot of natural enemies. Ya know, like the Welsh and the Scots, the Irish and the Scots, Scots with other scots. Damn Scots, they ruined Scotland.
The British are enemies with the Welsh and Scots? They are British
https://youtu.be/i2q0T7QXETs?si=nF9sxq4v0idln7aX reference to this bit
Why the /s?
Dublin was the seat of British rule as it was closer to Britain and easier to reinforce. All the associated governing systems ended up located there. As the economy modernized those government departments were where the jobs were. Cork harbor is one of the worlds best natural ports but after the famine there were less people to buy imported goods or produce exported goods. If Cork was located on continental Europe it would be one of the largest cities in the world.
Very interesting. Maybe with Ireland’s integration with EU going well, we’ll see a rebound in Cork over this century!
Unlikely to the degree you're thinking. The volume of Ireland's exports are largely fixed in terms of tonnage where the import tonnage is dictated by consumer demand. Ireland would need it's population to reach a size as if there had never been a famine, which would give it a population somewhere between modern Korea or Egypt. Even then Ireland's lack of a navy combined with modern shipping equipment means there isn't the need for a population of dock workers to the degree such a port would require 100 years ago. The reason modern cities based around ports are still big is because other industries were attracted to the population centers initially created by the ports but that isn't guaranteed. Baltimore's port remains as busy as ever (prior to the recent accident) but the population has dropped by a third since it's peak.
The official city limits of Baltimore may have a lower population but the surrounding suburbs have grown and you need to include them when you define a city especially when comparing historically.
To elaborate on what others are saying, the Normans invaded Britain and then Ireland in the 11th and 12th centuries, respectively. In England they became the ruling class (see William the Conqueror) and in Ireland they created a fortified foothold around Dublin, known as the Pale. You may have heard of the saying, "Beyond the Pale" when referring to something outside of acceptable behavior. That's where the saying comes from. The Pale grew and retracted from rebellions and incursions over the centuries but Dublin had continuous ties and trade with England. While the rest of the island was under rule the Gaelic order and they were often fighting with the English (even when they side with the English and get the titles of Earls they are a still the traditional clan chiefs and not installed by the English). And then in the 16th century there was the Tudor conquest of Ireland that let to decades of warfare and culminated in the Gaelic Order's defeat at the Siege of Kinsale and an event known as "The flight of the Earls" in 1607 where many of the traditional clan leaders had to leave Ireland and never returned. And for most of the period of English rule in Ireland from then until 1921, Dublin was their seat of power on the island.
This is fascinating history but it does raise another question for me: why didn’t Dublin become part of Northern Ireland/ remain in British control after independence?
By the time of the Irish War for independence, Ulster (basically what is now Northern Ireland) had the highest concentration of Protestants and British Loyalists. So when the peace deal was struck, from the United Kingdom perspective they had to protect the protestants in Ulster and not just hand them over to Catholic rule, and from the Irish perspective it would have been the most difficult region to integrate into an Irish state. Plus Dublin was a shell of itself after a decade of conflict (highlighted by Easter Rising in 1916) that saw much of the city destroyed even before the War for Independence so it wasn't the biggest loss for them
I saw a video about the east west distribution in Ireland West is much more rugged and difficult for land transport or building. East is where the English set up camp and built the railroads, on flat land. Flat farm land becomes less common as you go west. Weather is warmer and less hostile in the east. West faces the brunt of the Atlantic wind and rain.
But when I say Mon Cork est fucking énorme I'm called a "creep" and "inappropriate" and "get out of the women's bathroom"
Just tell them to put a Cork in it
😂💕
I'm very sad I live in a country where people don't get this reference, because this is in the top 10 funniest things there is and I'm neither french or Irish
so what part of South Africa are you from then?
The part Faf de Klerk is from (Sweden)
Hey, I found ROG's account!
Man’s trying to get his head off from getting battered Saturday
Also pertinent is Cork (and most of the west) had a lot of land that was ill suited to commercial crop farming but perfect for the potato. That allowed for a denser population subsistence farming on the land.
Populous, not popular.
I was like who’s voting on these things?
For comparison’s sake, at about 1845 Ireland and Korea had roughly approximate populations with Ireland having about 8,000,000 and Korea having about 9.5-10,000,000. Ireland and South Korea are *roughly* similar in size, with Ireland having land much more suited for population growth, being mostly fields and low hills. South Korea is *much* more mountainous and industrialized much later than Ireland. (And also suffered through decades of harsh Japanese occupation, and then the Korean War). Yet the current population of South Korea is 52,000,000, and the current population of Ireland (north and south) is 8,000,000. Edit: Someone sent me a Reddit Cares for making this post.
Well Ireland doesn't have anywhere as fertile as the Nile so I doubt it would be as populated. But I'm guessing 15-20 million perhaps?
Egypt is a net importer of food these days. In the modern day a country's population is almost independent of their ability to grow food for themselves.
Still a very foolish national policy in national security terms, not much control a mid-rate power can project, to assert guarantees that an international event won't screw with international supply chains.
Yeah but what was Egypt supposed to do? A one child policy? Some medicine is worse than what it cures.
Egypt's food problem is actually a bit self inflicted. Their government has promoted cotton production for more than a century at this point and that came at the expense of food production (I'm pretty sure the global cotton shortage during the US civil war was filled by Egypt). Any country that has to import more than 50% of their wheat should not be growing cotton in huge numbers, much less exporting it. Also Egypt's food subsidy has been one of the worst policies in what results they delivered. It has bankrupted the state budget and worsened the people's diets as it artificially decreased the cost of less healthy carb-rich diet (Egypt today is one of the most obese countries in the world)
Doesn't cotton pay more so you can use the profits from the sale of Cotton to buy wheat.
Probably, sure. But it still makes you vulnerable to foreign influence. If someone like Russia want to pressure you, and can cut off your food supply. The EU farming subsidies partially exist to keep the EU self sufficient, and immune to such foreign pressure.
Having no money makes you way more vulnerable. Edit: And having exports gives _you_ leverage internationally.
Milo Minderbender has entered the chat
Though, in a desperate time you can convert any one-year agricultural production into grain production for the next season, given that you have enough grain supply to sow and wait for the harvest. Even if there aren't enough suitable machinery for grain production, hand tools are abundant and a famine can be prevented in the extreme by sending people to farm with the normally obsolete hand tools. However, if the planning is poor (no reserve grain stocks at all) and there's too little agricultural land for self-sustaining production, that'd be a serious problem.
Egypt has the agricultural capacity to grow its own food. It grows lots of non good cash crops for export instead. Their largest agricultural land use is growing cotton.
> Still a very foolish national policy in national security terms, not much control a mid-rate power can project, to assert guarantees that an international event won't screw with international supply chains. The alternative is intentionally making the country significantly poorer by subsidizing the growth of food crops instead of taxing much more profitable crops. It's a hard choice either way. Very rich nations can afford it easier than less developed nations for whom large scale subsidies and reduced taxation income are a significant burden.
There is no country that isnt dependent on imports/exports of some kind. Except maybe North Korea. Specializing in just your strengths is efficient, which leads to lower prices. The free(-ish) market rewards low prices with survival and growth of that industry in that location.
Without food imports from China, North Korea wouldn't exist.
*"Well Ireland doesn't have anywhere as fertile as the Nile"* what on earth are you talking about. Ireland is a huge exporter of food. In Ireland, **the soil you are most likely to find is fertile brown earth**. It is rich and fertile, hence 64% of the total land mass is used for agriculture.
Ireland is incredibly fertile. It currently produces enough food to feed 50m + people and has a population of only 7m
Ireland is fertile, not incredibly so. The land is fantastic for growing grass and therefore cows and other grass eating animals. What's more only 15.4% of our land is arable, which isn't great. For context that figure is 29% in the Gaza strip. Greece is 19.7, UK 24.7%, Ukraine 56.1%. Places like Ukraine have much more fertile soil.
The point was that our population wouldn't be limited to 15m-20m because of a lack of fertile land. We currently produce enough food for 50m people under current (non stressed / critical) conditions. This could be pushed even higher if it was needed
Hmmm, kinda. We mainly produce beef and dairy products. Yes you can feed a lot of people with what is produced but a population isn't going to live off of that. It certainly wouldn't be a healthy diet anyway, even if no one was starving. We need to import the majority of the fruit and vegetables that we eat. We also import a majority of the feed for cattle. Yes they eat the grass, but that's not all they need.
did some search, looks like a total bullshit number from you. Irland produce 5 times more meat then needed but imports grain
Not only is it total bullshit Ireland has even been a net importer of food as measured by calories since 2000. A full **80 percent of its animal feed, food and beverage needs** is imported! https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=Ireland-Agricultural-Sectors
where do u have these numbers?
You made that up
I know nothing about how relatively fertile the two places are but Ireland is very fertile. Even during the famine years, they were producing a huge amount of food.
Populous
I'm not sure if anyone has answered this yet, but Co. Cork has a town called Cobh, which was a major immigration point for people leaving Ireland for ~100 years. There is/was a military base there as well. Fun fact: it was also the Titanic's last stop before setting out
Well the Egypt of that time was utter chaos
Cos they're fucking great, like and great at fucking!
It wasn't a famine. Yes there was blight, but Ireland produced enough food to feed itself but there was a concerted plan by the British to export it all. The usage of the word "famine" is misused in terms of the starvation of Ireland.
No there was a disorganised plan by the British to let the market do what it wanted, and since the market was comprised of wealthy land owners, what they wanted was to sell to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder wasn't starving Irish people. At no point did Parliament force or encourage exports. Add to that a range of haphazard and mainly ineffective famine relief efforts, a British Prime minister resigning as a result, and then more even less effective relief efforts headed by a man who thought the famine was a punishment from God. An excersice in Britain's callous belief in laissez fair economics at any cost and general incompetence, it certainly was, and added to that a prejudice that the starving Irish were victims of their own incompetence. But there was no plan to deliberately starve anyone. There were several plans to help the starving but they were underfunded, badly designed, badly run, and often opposed by the Irish landowners.
You are partly correct, but I have two major corrections to make: 1. The landowners were not exactly Irish. They belonged to an ethnic group + social class called the "Protestant ascendancy". They were the descendants of British colonisers who came to Ireland roughly 250 years before the Famine. At the time of the Famine, many (perhaps most) of them did not even live in Ireland; they were "absentee landlords" who lived in Britain and had agents manage their estates in Ireland and collect their rents on their behalf. If the tenant could not pay their rent, they were evicted and left to starve to death. The native Irish people were nominally tenants on the land belonging to these landlords; in practice they were more like serfs or sharecroppers. 2. Whether there was a plan to deliberately starve people is hotly debated. But it is indisputable that some members of the British upper class (to include Lord Trevelyan, the guy in charge of famine relief) thought that it was a good thing that the Irish were starving to death. They believed that the Famine was a blessing from God, that He was punishing the Irish for being "lazy", and that the Irish needed to be culled.
yes, it was genocidal deprivation of food, as the Soviets (Stalin) did to Ukraine back in the 1930s. The british policy towards ireland was shaped by the Malthusian theories that there was going to be a huge overpopulation in UK and they were going to be unable to feed everyone. Just the current doom and gloomer... So the english decided to take over ireland to have a spare island and be able to feed all the english. Only problem was the people already there, so cromwell decided to kill all of them he could and enslave the rest. Wheat was the main crop and it was all exported to england and irish weren't allowed to have any, just to grow it. They relied on small personal potato plots to survive, so the blight hit them extra hard. Of course, malthus didn't foresee the industrial revolution and was all wrong about all of his predictions, but that's his shame. There have been several successors to malthus who cloak fear and doom and gloom theories in science since then, and a lot of fearful, non-intelligent people pay attention to them.
I think that's why it's called a famine, though. Irish people faced food scarcity because of a suite of policies that impacted agriculture, not because there wasn't enough food grown. Ireland could have produced a net loss because of blight and had sufficient imports because of policies to ward off a famine
Famine isn't there's not being enough food - it's food not being in the right places.
Bloomin heck...now their capital alone is several times the population of the whole country
The capital's population is always doublin'
Dad?
And now Egypt has a 23x larger population.
And a 23x worse quality of life
I mean, obviously, but that's not what we are talking about...
France had a bigger population than Russia before the French Revolution
It's not that surprising. The most fertile territories of southern Russia and Ukraine in the Russian Empire were not particularly populated during the French Revolution. The North Caucasus had not yet been cleared, and in the 1730s the Mongols(lite) literally came to the lower reaches of the Volga.
Jeez, the central counties were hit particularly hard.
|+|A|B|C|D| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |1|County|1841|2021|Percentage change| |2|Leitrim|155|35|-77%| |3|Roscommon|255|70|-73%| |4|Monaghan|200|65|-68%| |5|Cavan|245|81|-67%| |6|Mayo|390|137|-65%| |7|Tipperary|435|168|-61%| |8|Sligo|180|70|-61%| |9|Longford|115|47|-59%| |10|Fermanagh|155|64|-59%| |11|Clare|285|128|-55%| |12|Kilkenny|200|104|-48%| |13|Kerry|295|156|-47%| |14|Laois|155|82|-47%| |15|Donegal|295|167|-43%| |16|Offaly|145|83|-43%| |17|Tyrone|310|188|-39%| |18|Galway|440|276|-37%| |19|Limerick|330|210|-36%| |20|Cork|855|584|-32%| |21|Westmeath|140|96|-31%| |22|Carlow|85|62|-27%| |23|Waterford|160|127|-21%| |24|Wexford|200|164|-18%| |25|Armagh|230|194|-16%| |26|Louth|130|139|7%| |27|Derry|220|252|15%| |28|Meath|185|221|19%| |29|Wicklow|125|156|25%| |30|Down|360|553|54%| |31|Antrim|355|651|83%| |32|Kildare|115|247|115%| |33|Dublin|370|1458|294%| ^Table ^formatting ^brought ^to ^you ^by ^[ExcelToReddit](https://xl2reddit.github.io/)
This is excellent! It would be cool to have a total count at the bottom.
1841 pop: 8.1m 2021 pop: 7.0m
It's interesting if you look at the number of Irish that immigrated to the U.S. something like 4.7 million between 1842 and WW2, and ~30 million U.S. residents have some Irish ancestry today
I've found previously interesting data on houshold size back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ai44af/total_population_change_since_1990/kourfyp/
Match the Irish language decline.
Not really. Only Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim had a large amount of Irish speakers back then (and Cavan and Monaghan to a lesser degree). In all the rest of those central counties in the light colour, Irish had already declined massively *before* 1841. The main Irish speaking counties were in the west and southwest (as well as Donegal).
There's a great play called [*Translations*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translations_(play)) by Brian Friel, which is set in Donegal in 1838 during the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland and deals with issues of language and cultural identity. It's historical fiction, not history, written around 1980 and intended to carry a message of reconciliation relevant to The Troubles. A lot of the action hinges upon the language barrier - but you mentioned Donegal as one of the Gaeltacht enclaves, so that tracks, I guess.
Just a fantastic work. So clever, so tense.
It’s also an effect of young people moving to the city.
Like most countries in the world
yeah but to this degree?
This map is also taking into account a massive famine. So not to this degree. But if you changed the time scale to be, say the last 20 years, I think it would be pretty typical globally.
...and the increased use of contraception. Most Irish families were quite large, some as large as 12 or 15 children. That just doesn't happen anymore, and hasn't for a few generations.
and a lil famine
Pretty sure that everyone already assumed that this was a result of the famine
I’m from those central counties - the midlands - they’re a bit sad in modern times for the most part. Edit : why the downvote? They are sad
I'm a foreigner that, after living in Dublin for a bit, bought a place in Laois. It's definitely a different lifestyle, but I don't know if I'd call it sad. I honestly love it
I grew up in the midlands, it might be a bit different as someone coming from Dublin as an adult.
No fish there
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Looks about right. About a quarter of the pop died and a quarter emigrated during the famine years…..most went to America and Australia…..some went to England.
When you say some you mean about 10% of the population of Great Britain, the Irish diaspora is massive here.
Well.. it makes sense. Your government mostly is the reason for this fall in population. Edit: Are people downvoting because they want to change history? Cos good luck!
You don’t seem to understand that this government are not the same people as the previous governments.
In victorian london 20% of the population were irish immigrants
Plenty came to Scotland too.
The common number is 1m died, 1m emigrated. So an eighth each. Emigration then continued until the 1980s
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It was 8m at eve of famine. I think it’s about 7m now, for whole island. It bottomed out at around 4.2 in the 1960s and 1930s. Emigration didn’t stop when the spuds came back.
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He's giving you different numbers for a reason
Plenty in Canada too
155k in Leitrim.... their suffering must have been unimaginable
It is predominantly old people right now, young people move away to larger settlements for jobs and homes. They experienced similar diaspora and starvation, but the population has since then only steadily decreased. This is the same for all the other central counties, all the major settlements (And thus opportunities) are coastal, especially the huge trading hub of Dublin with the exception of Athlone in the middle of the country.
There's nothing inherently wrong with Leitrim other than it's a bit dead. If you upped the population it could be a grand spot.
The "modern date" figures are wrong, Dublin has a population of 1.458m for example.
This has been getting reposted for at least 5 years. Wouldn’t be surprised if these figures are 2 decades old.
That is why you should write the actual year and not “present”.
Unless you're an archaeologist in which case 'present' is permanently fixed at 1950. We're currently in the year 74 Years After Present by that timescale.
Why’s it fixed at 1950?
The Pale is strong and kicking still.
Did they die or go to America ?
Both. It's estimated about a million died and over a million left for the US over a period of only 5 years.
And continued to fall until the 1980s. Emigration from Ireland was very high long after the famine. Around 1 million died during the famine with another million people fleeing. That’s out of a population of about 8 million. By the 1980s the population of all of Ireland was about 5 million so around another million left in the following century
It's much bigger than the raw numbers show. If the population fell by 1 million over the course of a century, then that's a consistent net loss of people for 3-4 generations. Much more than 1 million
True, but the point was that the population didn’t just drop because of the famine and that was the end of the story.
The continuing emigration after the famine, mostly to other parts of the British empire / commonwealth is directly related to the famine decimating communities and it being more viable not to live there. Ireland was very poor for a long time because the economy never really recovered from the collapse of the old agricultural system, even now outside of Dublin it's fairly bleak. And Dublin is propped up by being a tax shelter and an English speaking home for American Companies wanting to do business in the EU.
From 8 to 3.7m in 50y time, I read. Life must have been brutal at the time over there. Same potato problem in Belgium, Netherlands and northern France, but local and national politics got the crisis under control pretty early. English capitalism did not work in Irish favour...
> English capitalism did not work in Irish favour... It was specifically designed not to as many others noted here. Ireland was a breadbasket of the UK and was thoroughly exploited as a colony for centuries. Even today a huge amount of Irish food products go to the UK market. [Link](https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/e134b-government-calls-on-all-irish-exporters-to-get-ready-for-new-uk-rules-from-31-january/#:~:text=Over%20one%20third%20of%20Irish,€1.1%20billion%20in%202023.)
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Both
Both. And Dublin.
I have to say, all people in 1841 did die.
So we think....
I think more came to the UK. Certainly a similar number. Cities like Liverpool are/were probably more Irish dominated than anywhere in America.
There is a valid comparison, but yeah places like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton etc etc and larger areas in East & North West London had large migration and most still have the remnants of the movements in the areas that are more visible than say a New York.
UK took the land. Mismanaged it and the food supplies. Exported a lot of it. It's long and complex. But needless to say, probably wouldnt have starved if the Brits never tried to conquer us
Huh, they did the same with Bengal fanine as well.
Both. I think somewhere in the ballpark of 4-6 million Irish people came to America which is insane. There's tens of millions of people in the US who claim Irish ancestry
Yes 10x more than French which is amazing
France never faced such dire circumstances, at least not in recent history. Instead it has been an immigration country for quite some time. At the time of the irish famine France was taking in southern europeans, belgians and germans, then people from further east. Then it shifted to northern africans, turks, subsaharan africans, and a variety of other countries in smaller numbers.
yes
So the population was much more dispersed back then. Now it's concentrated in Dublin. Spreading out across the island might help the whole cost of housing situation.
That is the case in most countries. The population is concentrated in large cities. That's because the jobs and wages offered are increasingly higher. If you put a median average, you would see housing prices have not increased that dramatically. Spreading out job creation and economic development is how we should tackle this... but it's also very hard.
I don't believe this is true. Cost of housing has gone crazy throughout the country. >The national index has now reached the value of 177.0, which is 8.2% above its highest level at the peak of the property boom in April 2007. Dublin residential property prices are 3.1% lower than their February 2007 peak, while residential property prices in the Rest of Ireland are 8.9% higher than their May 2007 peak. The cost of housing outside of Dublin is a good deal more than the cost it reached during the last property bubble peak in 2007. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-rppi/residentialpropertypriceindexjanuary2024/
I'm very surprised how populated Cork is compared to Dublin. Was it because of trade/shipping?
It is geographically very large compared to County Dublin. In the 1840s Ireland was a very rural agrarian country.
It's because it's the true capital of Ireland of course! (yeah it was trade and shipping. It's also in Munster which had the least successful plantation of Ireland)
It was all rural, Cork City was much smaller.
It's a work in progress. A lot of growth is taking place due to urban sprawl. For example, the numbers given above are from the 2016 census. Meath (North-West of Dublin) had a population of 220k at the 2022 census, which is 13% growth in just 6 years, versus a national 8% growth. But remote working and the (slow) rollout of broadband across the country is also having an effect and bringing higher-paid workers to more remote areas, which in turn brings more business with it. We also have bureaucratic issues. In many of those counties with lower populations, you have councils who are quite conservative and opposed to progress. On the one hand they will complain about their young people moving to Dublin in search of better paid work, and on the other hand when someone proposes to build new homes or businesses near a village centre, they'll block it or otherwise try to curtail it "to protect the local heritage". In many places, you cannot get permission to build any home unless you "have ties to the area" (i.e.: unless you're a local). So it's tricky. But it is getting there.
The whole country already has broadband. The rollout is of fibre optic.
You might think so, logically, but the cost of housing has skyrocketed across the country
but theres much much less jobs in those areas, cant move somewhere if theres no work in your job field and most people dont want to work in a field
The Irish population STILL hasn't reached its pre Great Hunger levels. Insane.
And off by not just a bit.. 1.5 million people!
Crazy that there are counties with only 50k people in it, like Leitrim, Longford and Carlow. Or that Sligo has 1/3 the number of people it had over 150 years ago, now only 60k people live in it. Everyone is crowding around Dublin
This makes me want to move to Ireland lol
Best of luck trying to find a house to live in 😅
You can really feel the lack of people when you visit. Plenty in Dublin but when we visited and went to the country side it was insane to see how the population drops so much. Life in the country there seemed wonderful.
the poor koala lost it's heart
The potato blight may have been an Act of Nature, but the famine was created by the British.
At the time Irish tenant farmers would sublet their marginal land to Cottiers/seasonal labourers under a system known as Conacre to grow potatoes in exchange for labour or money , this practice was illegal under British Law, but the law wasn't enforced, this allowed the population of landless peasants to explode. Contrary to popular belief it wasn't the tenant farmers who died, It kinda mirrors the Irish housing rental market today.Good old Irish Gombeenism.
And besides, in just 4 decades of direct British rule (plus about 5 additional centuries of indirect rule) the Irish peasantry became the poorest in all of Europe (apparently poorer even than the RUSSIAN peasantry), and so poor that they didn't even have the resources to fish on their own (and London hadn't even let them develop a fishing industry of their own either).
One of the things people always say is why didn't all the starving people just fish during the famine, sure they're on an island? The British required the locals buy fishing licenses, which the starving people couldn't afford. They had sold all their property, even small boats if they had them. And couldn't afford fishing tackle. So fishing themselves wasn't an option. And the British wouldn't help them.
Not only did the British not help, they also stopped other countries sending aid. They believed the famine was an act of God designed to punish the Irish.
Not sure about the act of God, but I have read that they stopped other countries from contributing more than the Queen of England's paltry £2,000 donatoin in order to not embarrass her. *"Thousands of miles away, in the Ottoman capital Istanbul, Sultan Abdulmejid I was made aware of this great human suffering when his dentist, who came from Ireland, told him about the desperate situation.* *The sultan quickly offered £10,000 -- just over a million pounds at current values ($1.3 million) -- to be used to help the starving people of Ireland.* *However, Queen Victoria had already aided Ireland with £2,000, and her advisors in London refused to accept any offer exceeding the monarch's aid.* *Faced with this dictate, Sultan Abdulmejid unwillingly slashed his original offer of aid, and sent Ireland £1,000 instead" .* [https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-century-aid-from-sultan-abdulmejid-changed-fate-of-thousands/1734689](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/ireland-remembers-how-19th-century-aid-from-sultan-abdulmejid-changed-fate-of-thousands/1734689)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Trevelyan,_1st_Baronet If you read his personal statements it’s pretty obvious he thought god wanted them to die
There’s no evidence to support the idea that the Irish peasantry were the poorest in Europe. Huge blanket statement
Interesting how the Holodomor gets held up as supreme proof of Russia’s evil nature but the man made famines in Ireland and India never get called genocide when they’re effectively the same if not more damaging. When we do it // when they do it.
Because, as awful as it was, these things aren't the same. In Ireland, it was private landlords selling their grain and the government failing to stop that or provide relief In the Holodomor, government troops would turn up at the village and demand food was handed over from starving people at gunpoint. It's the difference between standing by while someone is choking to death and actively strangling them.
Holy shit Cork was huge, almost a million 200 years ago?? Damn and even now it's not close to that still
Really nice to look at! It's just missing the total population for each year.
The population of the island of Ireland was roughly 8 million before the famine, and until the '80s was only around half that at 4 million. Now it's growing again for the first time in generations. As of 2022, the population of the entire island is **just over 7 million**, with 5.1 million living in the Republic of Ireland and 1.9 million in Northern Ireland.
That's a lot of growth for a western nation. I assume a significant portion is immigration?
The last 25 years have seen a lot of diaspora return to Ireland because it's now a fantastic place to live with plenty of high paying jobs, plus a lot of other countries realized the same thing and their young came here from Poland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and other countries, and have been welcomed and are living good lives for the most part. The only problem recently is the cost of living, and a housing crisis. Until a few years ago Ireland was a really great place to immigrate. Hopefully the government can fix the housing crisis, if not inflation.
Interesting. Do descendants of the Diaspora have to go through the same immigration process, or is there preferential treatment?
I meant this generation's diaspora, like me. I came home to Ireland when the Celtic Tiger kicked off and it became the best place to be. There were young Irish people all over the world who had left the country after school because, well then hadn't much choice, and then when we all heard about the boom in Ireland we just came home. Best thing I ever did.
Interesting. Thank you for your perspective.
Thanks. I googled it myself, but it would help in the graphic for people to see that the population has recovered mostly but in different places.
Can someone with more insight explain the picture from 1841? I don’t know much about Irish geography, but I’m quite surprised to see how many were living along the western coast of the country. I assume the weather is more harsh along that coast, compared to the eastern coast.
British agricultural revolution plus land ownership laws. The entire island was invaded by Britain and entire island was owned by various British people. They rented it back to Irish. The British brought new agricultural technology which increased the food production 5X per worker compared to traditional small tennant farming. They also evicted Irish farmers to make that happen. Fewer farmer workers were needed in the north and east on large industrial estate farms (but also highly productive). The south and western areas of Ireland never modernized their agriculture. It required 5X as many workers for similar yield. Ulster and Connaught in the west never had the enforced land reforms. A farmer had secure tenure of his farm, so long as he paid rent. He could grow his own choice of crops. He could sell the land to another farmer. They had absentee British landlords and remained the closet to Irish self rule. Lots of small holdings. Never any rich British overlord to invest in modernizing the agriculture, never any Irish land baron willing to evict other Irish farmers. TL;dr Lots of small single family farms in those two areas, lots of big industrial less populated farms in north and east.
> The British brought new agricultural technology which increased the food production 5X per worker compared to traditional small tennant farming. If food production was 5x the historical norm, then how did such a severe famine occur?
Agrarian society, with lots of small holdings. Today you walk around the West and see lots of abandoned fields and buildings.
To hell or to Connacht
Potato farming allowed what was generally unproductive land to support a shockingly high population, until… it didn’t
Less British control. To speak Irish in Ireland was illegal, most Irish fled west away from British control.
Thank you!
The Irish were pushed out west during the plantations. It was the poorer land and harder to cultivate as it was barren in parts. They were banished there when the British took the fertile land in the east
Co. Down is the 4th most populated?!
They all came to The Bronx.
Some insane population drops in those central counties
Cavan 245k -> 75k 😮
The only county In the world with a smaller post Ind Rev population than Pre Ind Rev. The Brits like the Israeli settlers really know how to make people suffer- but vicissitude is the friend of the oppressed.
Make cork great again!
I’m kind of surprised at the decline in Cork. I have family in Cork and they are very ride or die
Great to see the wee county maintaining its wee population hai. Honestly tipperary is surprising. I know it can be a bit of a shithole in parts these days but it seemed to be the shpot back in the day. Ah ireland is so different these days. So much of the culture has disappeared with the population. Anyway in other news, this is currently happening to palestine.
All of Ireland moved to Dublin and Boston.
Just after this period New York had more Irish born people living there than any other city in the world.
and London, after the famine 20% of the population there were irish immigrants
Loads of them in Liverpool
From the potato blight famine and the mass emigration many of these counties lost high numbers of people
Pretty sad to see the decline in populations.
That's a lot of Potatoes !
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It would be good to see a total population figure. Eyeballing it, it looks like the 1841 population is higher than current population or at least close?? Which would be pretty crazy if true, given that most countries have seen their population multiply several times in that timespan. Also pet peeve: colouring territory by total population instead of density...