|
There were two ways out of this Irish nightmare, death and emigration. People were leaving from every port in Ireland. In 1847 a quarter of a million Irish men, woman and, children left Ireland and the rate of emigration was to continue at the same level and sometimes higher for the following four years. This massive emigration rate not only permanently changed Ireland\'s population structure but also helped develop an Irish nationalist feeling against English government.
Many of the poorest emigrating Irishmen never got beyond the English port. By mid-May 1847 there were one thousand plus Irish wondering, begging and filling the streets of Liverpool and other towns north of England. The poor classes were n ot the only Irishmen migrating. On board the emigrant ships, conditions were sometimes shocking. These ships came to be known as Coffin Ships because of the conditions the emigrants are forced to live in. There was little air in these over crowded below decks, which carried the poorest class. There were extreme cases of fevers, little water, low abundance of food, few cooking and sanitary facilities. Most of the Irish emigrants went to the United States, but the emigrants with the worst conditions went to Canada. Almost every ship had a third of their passenger\'s die at sea or upon their arrival. By August 1847 half the passengers from 10 ships had died while the others were sick with fevers. On the shores of Quebec eyewitnesses saw hundreds literall y flung on the beach, left in the mud, dying like fish out of water.
Emigration has been an on going feature of Irish life since the famine. The large amounts of emigration before independence were streams of criticism towards the British government by the Irish nationalists. Population continued to fall a fter the independence and the government stopped recording emigration statistics.
Towards the end of the 1870s the alarming realization broke on Ireland that there was once again the dangers of Famine on something like the scale of the terrible tragedy of 1845-9. That tragedy, apart from bringing death to possibly as many as a million of the Irish people had started an outpour of emigration from Ireland, mainly to America, which had continued for many years. In the ten years after the start of the Famine some two million had left - about a quarter of the entire population of Ireland in 1945.
The emigration had helped the larger farms. This was because the smaller farm farmers immigrated to America and Canada making the population food supplies demand smaller. The larger farms flourished because of the fall in numbers of sma ll farms. But the small tenant farmers, though decreased in numbers, still lived very much as they had lived at the time of the Famine, which meant that they were dependent on the potato crop. In the mid-1970s farm prices went up, these were good times , both the large farm owners and small tenant farmers prospered though this time.
Emigration before, during and after the Famine brought a better life to those few lucky Irish people, but also gave a slow death to others. Emigration has it good points and bad. If I were an emigrant I would hope that I was rich so th at I would have a better chance of survival. That is what emigration is all about, don\'t you think, survival!?!
|
