The Irish Holocaust
The\xa0Great Famine\xa0(Irish:\xa0an Gorta M\xf3r\xa0[an\u02e0 \u02c8\u0261\u0254\u027e\u02e0t\u032a\u02e0\u0259 \u02c8m\u02e0o\u02d0\u027e\u02e0]), also known as the\xa0Great Hunger, the\xa0Great Starvation, the\xa0Famine\xa0(mostly within Ireland) or the\xa0Irish Potato Famine\xa0(mostly outside Ireland),[1][2]\xa0was a period of mass\xa0starvation\xa0and disease in\xa0Ireland\xa0from 1845 to 1852.[3]\xa0With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the\xa0Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as\xa0An Drochshaol,[4]\xa0loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). The worst year of the period was 1847, known as "Black '47".[5][6]\xa0During the Great Hunger, about 1 million people died and more than a million\xa0fled the country,[7]\xa0causing the country's population to fall by 20%\u201325%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1851.[8][9][10]\xa0Between 1845 and 1855, no less than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on\xa0packet ships\xa0but also\xa0steamboats\xa0and\xa0barks\u2014one of the greatest mass exoduses from a single island in history.[11][12]
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