The Great Famine of 1845-1850, often called the Irish Potato Famine, was an actual event in history.  In the Ireland of this time, most of the people were very poor.  They lived and worked on land that was not their own.  Their homes were small cottages and cabins which were overcrowded and dirty.

  They had small plots of land beside their houses on which to grow their own food.  The potato was widely grown because it yielded the most productive crop.  Their food was largely potatoes and milk, which was not a well-balanced meal but was enough to keep them going.

  In the summer of 1845 after a long wet spell, when the people went to dig their potatoes they found them rotting in the ground from a disease.  No matter what they did, most of the potatoes turned to sludge and slime.  Even then, they ate what they could of them, though they were gray and dingy and slightly rotting.  The potato disease spread all over the country to every part of Ireland.

  Soon the people were starving.  They prayed to God to save them but the famine had come.  They became desperate in their search for food, often selling everything they had, right down to the clothes on their backs and such small things as combs for their hair.  Most simply went hungry.

  We Americans have very little understanding of what going hungry really means.  We often throw away and consider garbage what others in third world countries would see as a banquet.  Even as I read this book I was ashamed at how little it affected the foods I eat and the leftovers I often throw in the garbage.

  There were in Ireland at the time plenty of other crops; however, most of them were sold and exported to other countries.  The poor had no money to buy food and very few possessions that would yield enough money to buy even the barest necessities.  The government imported boat-loads of yellow corn meal to feed the poor but it was never enough.  Soldiers protected the grain being sent to other countries and those rich enough to have their own fruit trees, berry bushes, and cattle protected them with fences and guns.

  By 1846 the government had begun large public works schemes, which included such things as building roads, clearing land, and so on.  The work was hard for those already undernourished and weak, but at least it was a way of earning a few coins.  People stayed in workhouses where there was little room and even less to eat.  But it was a way to survive for some.

  Poorhouses had been in operation for a long time, but they had little space for so many and even less food to fill hungry mouths.  As two people died inside the poorhouse, twenty more were waiting outside to replace them.  The poorhouses were seen by the poor as places people went to die.  It was the last, the absolute very last, resort.  But times are desperate and many have no other choice.  As usual, children and the elderly are those who suffer the most, many of them caught in a harsh world with no way to help themselves.

  A few religious organizations set up soup lines to try to help feed the poor, but there were always more mouths to feed than soup to give.  The soup was often greasy and contained little if any meat, but it at least kept people going for a day or two.  There were times that people took to bleeding stray cows to obtain enough liquid to bake a dark blood cake to sustain them.  Many would eat animals they found dead along the road and then die from the eating of tainted meat.  Most took to eating things that had always before been reserved for animals, everything from turnips to common weeds.  There was little wood to be had for the building of fires, so the people dug up sod patches to use as fuel.

  Some of the landlords did what they could to help their tenants, but most just ignored the situation.  The worst of these evicted tenants who could not pay the rent and pulled down their simple cabins, giving the people nowhere to go but the poorhouse.

 By the end of the summer of 1846 it became clear that the potato crop again had failed.  Now the people had nothing.  Many roamed the country.  The workhouses were totally crowded and people rioted outside trying to get in.  With the starvation came diseases such as typhus, famine fever, and dysentery.  They spread like wildfire among already weakened people.

 Parishes could not keep up with the amount of deaths, and since many of the priests were taken by the disease and starvation, there was no one to provide proper burials.  The priests did what they could to provide food and medical services to the poor but they were vastly outnumbered by the spread of disease and starvation.  It soon became necessary to bury the dead in open mass graves.

 During 1847 and the following years the cycle continued.  Approximately one million men, women and children set sail for Liverpool and North America.  Many died on the long hard sea voyages.  Those who survived had to work very hard to make a new life in a strange land.

 For those who remained in Ireland the winter of 1847-1848 was one of the worst.  It was followed by the potato blight in the autumn of 1848 and again in 1849.  People died on roads, in streets, in cottages, and in the fields.  In all about one million people died -- one million -- all for the want of decent food.  In a small country such as Ireland this figure represents a huge proportion of the population.  It is a telling factor when historians note that Ireland became a land of living ghosts.

 Those who emigrated to America and Canada brought with them their strength and their courage and their hope, which for many was all that was left to them.  Those who remained behind struggled to survive the human cost, and they worked to build a country where such a disaster could not happen again.