Episode Details

Between 1845 and 1852, ships left Irish ports loaded with grain, butter and livestock while more than a million people starved. This episode explains how that happened during An Gorta Mór. It starts with the middleman system of absentee landlords and ever-smaller subdivided farms, the 1843 Devon Commission's findings, and a population of about 8.5 million, many of whom depended almost entirely on a single potato variety, the Irish lumper.

We explain Phytophthora infestans, a water mold that most likely originated in central Mexico and destroyed three quarters of the harvest in 1846. We look at Robert Peel's hard-to-mill maize, known as Peel's brimstone, and the Whig government's laissez-faire policy under Lord John Russell and Charles Trevelyan. We also cover the Poor Law tax structure that encouraged evictions and exports, then Black 47, the famine fevers, about a million deaths and a million emigrants, and the Land League's response when blight returned in 1879.

• How subdivided tenant farms left families dependent on the potato
• Why potato blight is a water mold, not a fungus
• How the Poor Law Extension Act turned landlord taxes into evictions
• A 2025 study on why famine survivors showed little stunting
• Michael Davitt, the Land League, and the legacy of the famine