What really caused the Irish Potato Famine - Stephanie Honchell Smith

Dig into what caused the Irish potato famine, and explore how the UK government’s response turned the crisis into a catastrophe.

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For over 200 years, potatoes thrived in Ireland; roughly half the country’s residents lived almost entirely on potatoes. But when harvesting began in 1845, farmers found their potatoes blackened and shriveled. While this failed harvest created a crisis, the government’s response turned it into a national catastrophe. Stephanie Honchell Smith digs into Ireland's Great Famine.

Lesson by Stephanie Honchell Smith, directed by Denys Spolitak.

This video made possible in collaboration with Gates Ventures

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[derkaiser]

An interesting happy story that came out of the Irish Potato Famine is the Choctow Nation sent $170 to help the Irish during the famine. There is a great statue that commemorates this in Cork County. In 2020, the Irish returned the favor raising $1.8 million to help the Choctow during COVID. The Irish said that the Choctow 'donated money, then were subjugated to the Trail of Tears by the United States.' This was a comparison to how the English treated the Irish. The Republic of Ireland officially states that the Choctow are allies of their Republic. These are stories that show that even Natives from the USA and white Europeans can help each other through horrible times and even become generational allies.

[gustavovillegas]

Something the blows my mind is that Ireland’s population STILL hasn’t recovered today. There are less people in Ireland now than there were before the famine.

[WolfetoneRebel]

The term famine is wildly inaccurate to describe what happened in Ireland at the time. There was enough food grown in the country to feed it's entire population but it was all being exported by the English to England. Genocide is a term much closer to being accurate.

[ElysiumCreator]

I wish you had touched on why we were dependent on the potato so much. Because of the British Occupation, we had to subdivided our land and our farms, and because people had larger families back then, very soon, people could only grow crops for their consumption on land the size of an average garden. The potato was the only crop that could be grown in such small crops, we survived before the potatoes introduction because we had control over our land and had enough to grip other more various crops, if the potato didn’t exist, we could have grown any food at all.

[micahbush]

3:25 What’s interesting about alcoholism claim is that just a few years before the potato famine, Ireland was the site of a massively successful temperance campaign led by a Catholic priest, Theobald Mathew. So successful was this campaign that between 1838 and 1841, national alcohol consumption was cut in half.

[niamhbrunell]

Key to remember is that Ireland always had food during the famine. As your video pointed out, we produced plenty, but were forced to export it. People protested and begged and tried to rob food storeages at the time. Despite the obvious suffrage of the Irish people, the British Crown ignored improving things for the Irish. Their attitude was of complete indifference. They allowed Irish people to starve, nay encouraged it. This occurred while also anglosising our culture and carrying out a variety of other forms of oppresion. The famine is therefore seen by Irish people as a genocide and rightly so. Whole families were wiped out forever. All of which is far less palatable a reality than merely an agricultural misfortune.

[BrackenStrike]

The potato famine is the reason there are roughly 6x as many people who identify as having Irish heritage in the US than the entire population of Ireland.

[diomuda]

Back in 1944-45, northern Vietnam was struck with a devastating famine that killed two million and it was done by the Japanese and the French, altogether, to exploit our paddy fields. The Irish famine tragedy really struck hard to me, for how eerily similar the British tactics was to that of Japan and France to our unfortunate people.

[SteveDavison-mjlo]

During the fammine my people of the Choctaw nation helped the people of Ireland and my father whos irish from Munster met my native American Choctaw mum when he came to visit my cousin is Gary Batton hes the 47th chief of the Choctaw nation 😊

[pageturner]

Learning about the potato famine in US elementary schools: "Wow, what a horrible situation to occur"
Learning about the potato famine when you are older: "What in the actual world..."

[Extremelychubbyglutton]

It’s insane to think about how much of a food surplus we have in the West, when many people in lower income countries couldn’t even eat a 6th of the amount that the average person here eats per day.

[avevee]

I didn’t know the part about the exporting… that’s horrible. They had food, but they literally couldn’t eat it because their government said they weren’t important.

[TheNovaChronicles]

Gotta love when the solution to a crisis is to tax the people affected by the crisis to "help them"

[Sunflowersarepretty]

Our planet is abundant in resources. Its human greed and selfishness that so many have to pay the price for.

[andieallison]

My maternal great-grandparents immigrated to Canada and then moved down to the US during the potato famine. We have documents and papers that show where they resided at the time (Castlegregory), what ship they were on and when they landed, it's so depressing and fascinating at the same time!

[gourabchakraborty]

Hello Ted Ed. Please do the story of the Bengal famine. How the starvation, desperation, and british apathy has scarred the subcontinent cannot be understated .

[LuckyErmine]

As someone who has Irish Ancestry, I am great full to the Choctaw tribe for the donation.

[barbar]

I am a teacher in the west of Ireland. “An Gorta Mór” or “The Great Famine” is a topic I teach.

It is one I teach through the lens of objective truth: it was a genocide through both act (e.g the shutting down of the Quakers soup export of Irish food/famine roads/higher taxes etc.) and omission. It is important to realise this.

[dhanvi-shah]

There's a novel showing how life was back then called 'Under the Hawthorn Tree' if anyone wants to read about it

[majzzz]

YOU FORGOT TO MENTION !
One of the unexpected sources of aid in this crisis was the Ottoman Caliphate.
How an Ottoman Sultan helped Ireland  in the great famine. Ottoman Sultan Abdul Majeed the 1st went out of his way to try to help, so he could ease the suffering of the Irish people. Sultan Abdul Majeed was only 23 years old in 1847, when he personally offered £10, 000 in aid to Ireland, but this time he would have to scale back his generosity. British diplomats advised him that it would be offensive for anyone to offer more than Queen Victoria, who had only donated £2, 000. It was suggested that he should donate half of that amount so he gave £1, 000. The press also blamed the British diplomats in Constantinople for rejecting the initial donation of £10, 000 just to avoid embarrassing Queen Victoria. Meanwhile, Sultan Abdul Majeed had found other ways to help. Today, the port town of Drogheda in Ireland includes a crescent and a star, both of which are symbols of Islam, in its coat of arms. Local tradition in the town has it that these symbols were adopted after the Ottoman Empire secretly sent five ships loaded with food to the town in May 1847. The reason for the secrecy is that the British administration had allegedly tried to block the ships from entering Drogheda's harbor.
Evidence that backs these claims include newspaper articles from the period and a letter from Irish notables explicitly thanking the sultan for his generosity and help. Facts