Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Through seven terrible years of famine, Ireland’s poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. According to Irish Famine Facts by John Keating, the average adult working male in Ireland consumed a staggering 14 pounds of potatoes per day, while the average adult Irish woman ate 11.2 pounds. The Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. Packed with nutrition and easy to grow, potatoes were the only practical crop that could flourish on the minuscule plots doled out by wealthy British Protestant landowners. While the potato blight struck across Europe, no corner of the continent was as dependent on tubers for survival as Ireland, which was mired in extreme poverty as a result of centuries of British rule. Beneath the auld sod, festering potatoes bled a putrid red-brown mucus as a virulent pathogen scorched Ireland’s staple crop and rendered it inedible. Beginning in 1845, the fortunes of the Irish began to sag along with the withering leaves of the country’s potato plants. Fragment of the Irish Famine Memorial in Bostonįleeing a shipwreck of an island, nearly 2 million refugees from Ireland crossed the Atlantic to the United States in the dismal wake of the Great Hunger.
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