Great Irish Famine
No statistics exist on how many people in the Limerick area died during the famine. Nationally, the population declined by an average of 20%, half of whom died and half emigrated. While the Great Famine reduced the population of County Limerick by 70,000, the population of the City actually rose slightly, as people fled to the workhouses.
Ships berthed on the Limerick quaysides ready to transport produce from one of the most fertile parts of Ireland, the Golden Vale, to the English ports. Francis Spaight, a Limerick merchant, farmer, British magistrate and ship owner, recorded 386,909 barrels of oats, and 46,288 barrels of wheat being shipped out of Limerick between June 1846 and May 1847. Giving evidence to a British parliament select committee inquiring into the famine, Spaight said that:
| “ | I found so great an advantage of getting rid of the pauper population upon my own property that I made every possible exertion to remove them ... I consider the failure of the potato crop to be the greatest possible value in one respect in enabling us to carry out the emigration system. | ” |
The same quaysides were the departure point for many emigrant ships sailing over the Atlantic. One week in April 1850 saw four ships, Marie Brennan, Congress, Triumph, an 1849 Youghal built ship, and Hannah, the smallest emigrant ship, glide down the Shannon towards the Americas. The latter three ship had 357 people aboard mostly comprising young men and women, depriving Ireland of their vigour and prosperity which they would bring to other nations instead. The Hannah at 59 feet long could barely hold the 60 passengers and eight crew, yet made eight trans-Atlantic voyages.
Read more about this topic: History Of Limerick
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or famine:
“The next forenoon we went to Oldtown.... The Indian is said to cultivate the vices rather than the virtues of the white man. Yet this village was cleaner than I expected, far cleaner than such Irish villages as I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)