“Dear Father and Mother, Pen cannot dictate the poverty of this country at present. ... We can only say, the scourge of God fell down on Ireland, in taking away the potatoes, they being the only support of the people ... if you don’t endeavour to take us out of it, it will be the first news you will hear, by some friend, of me and my little family to be lost by hunger, and there are thousands dread they will share the same fate.”
So read a letter from Ardnaglass, Co Sligo, that reached Thomas and Bridget Barrett in Deux-Montagnes County, Quebec, in late autumn 1846. It had been sent, in late September, by their daughter Mary and her husband, Michael Rush. The Rushes were poor, most probably illiterate; a priest or schoolmaster had probably penned the letter. The Barretts had emigrated with several of their children in the 1820s and made a life for themselves farming in St Columban, an Irish Catholic settlement 40 miles northwest of Montreal. And now, in the darkening autumn of 1846, that elderly emigrant couple, in far off Quebec, was the best hope of their daughter and her “little family” in Sligo.
Ireland’s potatoes had first succumbed to blight in 1845, but that year the disease was most severe in the east. The second failure, in 1846, was general, ravaging the west of Ireland where people were most dependent on potatoes.
Sligo suffered terribly. In the space of a few years, the county lost a third of its population to hunger, disease and emigration – where there had been approximately 187,000 people in 1845 there were 128,515 in 1851. And the demographic decline that began with the Famine, and that was driven in succeeding decades by emigration and less and later marriage, continued into the last third of the 20th century. Sligo scraped demographic bottom about 1971 when the census returned 50,275 persons in the entire county. Its population has grown since then, topping 70,198 in 2022 – less than two-fifths of what it was before the blight. And to think some eejits have convinced themselves that this place is full?
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For sure, population decline was more severe in western counties, such as Sligo, than elsewhere in Ireland. But the national decline still shocks. Ireland’s population stood at about 8.5 million in 1845; by 1851 it was 6.5 million, by 1901 it was down to 4.46 million and it never again topped 4.5 million until 1971. Indeed, for much of the 20th century it fluctuated between 4.2 and 4.4 million, half of what it had been when the potato failed and Westminster failed those dependent on it.
Demographic recovery effectively stalled in the 1980s due to emigration. The population had risen from 4.5 million in 1971 to five million in 1981 but it was only 5.2 million in 1991. College graduates who became illegal labourers and barmen, nannies and waitresses in the United States still remember Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan snr telling Newsweek that we couldn’t all live on a small island.
That was the original “Ireland is full” and, by the 1980s, it had a long history: from the Famine, a microeconomic version of it – we can’t all live on a wee farm – was drummed into the firstborn in poor rural families, readying them for the boat and for sending home remittances to “bring out” their younger siblings.
In Montreal in 1847, the press reported that Irish beggars and the threat of typhus associated with them had discouraged American tourists who could be counted upon to spend money in the city
Since the 1990s demographic growth has been remarkable: in 2022, the country was home to just over seven million, 5.15 million in the South and 1.91 million in the North, but the population is still well short of the 8.5 million living here when the blight came and the great exodus began. The current “Ireland is full” cry – intended to discourage “others” from coming, whereas the old one was to encourage “our own” to go – is a product of racism, but it betrays too an appalling inadequacy in maths and history.
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Canada, the place that Mary and Michael Rush wanted to reach in 1846, was never the optimum destination for those fleeing hunger and disease. The United States had a more dynamic economy, offering better-paid work. But it was cheaper to get to Canada. So it was that in 1847 some 400 ships from Britain and Ireland carried the most desperate Irish refugees up the Gulf of St Lawrence, where thousands of them would die in fever sheds in the quarantine station on Grosse Île or on ships that were not permitted to disembark their diseased passengers on that overcrowded island.
A monument erected on the island claims 5,424 are buried there. That alone would make Grosse Île what historian James Donnelly has called “the largest of the mass graves of the Great Famine”. However, as Donnelly observes, it is estimated that between the island and the ships moored around it, as many as 20,000 may have perished in the Gulf of St Lawrence. And that figure does not include people who, having passed through Grosse Île, died in fever hospitals and the “emigrant sheds” around towns and cities.
How many Irish people sailed for Canada in the time of the Famine? In 1847 alone, the province of Canada received 85,000–90,000 Irish “boat people”. New Brunswick (now part of Canada) took in a further 17,000 and some 2,000 landed in Nova Scotia. In all, in the great outflow of 1845–55, some 340,000 Irish people embarked for British North America. That number is a fraction of the 1.5 million who sailed for the US in that same period. Still, dealing with these people presented an enormous challenge to Canadian authorities, not least as the majority of them were Catholics arriving into places, such as Toronto, where the inhabitants prided themselves on their Protestantism and attachment to the British crown.
[ Why the Famine Irish didn’t emigrate to South AfricaOpens in new window ]
Collected here in Canada and the Great Irish Famine are 10 essays exploring disparate aspects of the crisis as experienced in Canada, all contextualised in a wide-ranging introduction by William Jenkins. It includes informative pieces on the Atlantic passage, efforts to raise funds for relief, the treatment of orphans, the activities of a philanthropist, and literary representations of the crisis, but the volume’s great strength is a set of five chapters exploring how urban centres coped with an influx of destitute and diseased Irish people, including large numbers of orphaned and abandoned children in 1847; these essays are on Quebec (Robert J Grace), Montreal (Dan Horner), Toronto (Jenkins) and its lunatic asylum (Max Smith), and Hamilton (Laura J Smith).
The scale of the “pauper immigration” was immense. Jenkins reports of predominantly Anglican Toronto that by February 1848 “an estimated 38,560 persons had arrived in a city that had approximately 21,000 nine months earlier. The vast majority were refugees from the Irish Famine, and a high proportion were Roman Catholics.”
By then, 26,700 of those people had moved on to Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula and, aided by free transportation provided by the government, 8,950 had dispersed to other parts of Canada. Still, the net increase in Toronto’s population was 1,786 (8.5 per cent) – 781 in lodgings, 623 in the emigrant hospital, 293 in emigrant sheds and 89 in a new Widows and Orphans’ Asylum.
Likewise, civil authorities and charitable agencies struggled to cope with the immigrants thronging the wharves of Montreal. Quarantine facilities had to be expanded, a tent city sprang up in the grounds of the general hospital, and shanties grew on the main approaches. Mortality ran high. Little over a decade later, in 1859, Irishmen building the Victoria Bridge southwest of the city erected a large black boulder “to preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever” in emigrant sheds in 1847–48.
For sure, the Irish met the “Canada is Full” crowd. In Montreal in 1847, the press reported that Irish beggars and the threat of typhus associated with them had discouraged American tourists who could be counted upon to spend money in the city. And in Toronto a public meeting in 1848 decried the “numerous evils, misery and sufferings attendant on the ill-regulated emigration of 1847 ... the emigration of last year was not what was desired”.
Overall, however, the impression from this collection is that Canada responded well to the initial reports of distress, with significant donations to funds for the relief of Ireland. And if Famine fatigue set in as the crisis deepened and the challenge that it posed for Canada itself became apparent, cities coped, integrating, in time, the very people who many Canadians would have preferred had not come among them.
[ Irish emigration has changed. Now it’s claiming my friends in their 40sOpens in new window ]
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As for the Rushes and their little family, they never made it to Deux-Montagnes County. Some of them may have got to New York, for there was a 40-year-old labourer named Michael Rush among a party of related Rushes and Barretts that disembarked there in May 1847. That Michael Rush may well have encountered people in the US who thought that it was “full”. But there too, as in Canada, there were others who gave help and hope.
Breandán Mac Suibhne is professor of modern Irish history at University of Galway, where he is a director of Imirce, an emigrant letters project, and the author of The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland
Further reading
Central to Kerby A Miller’s magisterial Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985) is the argument that Irish people tended to look upon emigration not as a lifestyle choice but as unwanted exile. A masterpiece.
Tyler Anbinder’s Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York (2024) presents a different view. Tracking people with accounts in the Emigrant Savings Bank through the census, Anbinder argues that Famine emigrants did well in America, rapidly adjusting rather than aching for Old Ireland.
Of course, to make America their home, Irish people first had to get there. Cian T McMahon’s The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine (2021) is a vivid and accessible history of the Atlantic crossing in the years of the Famine.
