survival in famine ireland --2/10/2026

10 Feb 2026

survival in famine ireland --2/10/2026

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Today's selection-- from Rot by Padraic X. Scanlan. During the Great Famine, extreme hunger and disease pushed Irish communities to the edge of survival.

“Cannibalism 'was a common metaphor for class conflict in Ireland during the famine. An inspecting officer wrote, ‘If the graziers do not break up some of their farms to allow employment the labourers will eat the farmers, and the farmers will eat the landlords. But real cannibalism is famine's open secret: there are few recorded famines without at least rumours of the desperate eating human flesh, sometimes that of people already dead, sometimes freshly killed. It seems to have been rare in Ireland, but not unheard of. ‘People killed and ate anything they could catch,’ a folk history relates, ‘pigs, rats, cats, cattle, sheep, and finally their own children.’ There are references to mothers eating their infants and to fathers ‘known to make a wolfish meal’ of dead children. In May 1849, in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, a priest reported that a starving man had eaten the heart and liver of a man who had died in a shipwreck. Later, a relieving officer reported that a man had seen the same man ‘cut up a shipwrecked human body,’ apparently intending to eat the thigh, until his neighbours stopped him.

“As food dwindled, disease surged. Many clergy and gentry who volunteered in hospitals contracted typhus and died. The more profound the epidemic and the more severe the lice infestation, the more flecks of typhus-infected louse feces scatter in the air, turning an insect-borne disease into an airborne disease. The Society of Friends gave clothing away to the poor to try to reduce lice infestations. Many pawned the new clothes to buy food. The Irish poor well knew that the dirty clothes of a feverish person needed to be cleaned or destroyed, and that the clothes that had belonged to the sick had ‘the venom of the sickness in it’ and could easily make others sick. But what could they do? Without the means to wash, much less replace, louse-infested clothes, most wore what they could scavenge, weighing the possibility of contracting an epidemic fever against the more immediate risk of death from exposure. Typhus and other illnesses, as one historian puts it, ‘pauperized, when they did not kill.’ Weekly mortality rates in workhouses rose from about four in one thousand in October 1846 to twenty-five in one thousand by April 1847. Most of the (at least) one million Irish fatalities in the course of the famine died not of organ failure caused by starvation but from infectious diseases worsened by hunger and wasting. Of 140,000 reported deaths in 1840, starvation was listed as the cause of death in 17 cases. In 1847, out of 250,000 reported deaths (the real death toll was much higher), 6,000 were attributed directly to starvation. Scurvy and other syndromes caused by malnutrition were common. In Mayo, between 1846 and 1850, historians estimate, about 41 percent of all deaths were ‘hunger-sensitive,’ and another 30 percent were partially hunger-sensitive. In Clare, about 65 percent of deaths were either wholly or partly sensitive to hunger, and in Tipperary, 66 percent.

Ireland in the 1730s

“To fight epidemics, relief committees had the power to build temporary hospitals, ventilate and cleanse cabins, and bury the dead. During the crisis, at least three hundred hospitals and dispensaries opened, taking in some twenty-three thousand patients. However, fever hospitals were targets for sabotage. Many believed they accelerated the spread of disease; some suspected they were part of a wider plot to exterminate or expel the poorest Irish labourers. In Killeshandra, in summer 1847, a mob attacked a field hospital and promised to pull down any ‘fever shed’ built in the district. In Tipperary, priests condemned the local fever hospital from the pulpit and prayed to ‘see grass growing at the door of the hospital.’ In Donegal the poor built huts out of sod and wood to isolate the sick—similar to shielings, the rough shelters used by shepherds—and pushed food through the doors with the long-handled spades used to dig potatoes. Digestive diseases and accidental poisoning killed many others. People ate wild plants, decomposing carrion, the eggs of seagulls and other birds, moss, uncooked seaweed, cats, worms, insects, dogs, and rats. Livestock that had not been sold or slaughtered died as quickly as their owners. In Claremorris, the flayed corpse of a horse was left on the road. Relief officers found a family of eight eating its rotting flesh. In County Sligo, orphaned children gnawed on the bones of a pig that had died in an outbuilding. Grinding hunger and disease stripped relationships down to a bare and cutthroat struggle, ‘a sordid avarice, and a greediness of disposition to grasp at everything in the shape of food.’”