Causes

• In the 1840s, potatoes provided around 60 percent of the food in Ireland, so when potato blight ruined the 1846 harvest, the consequences were serious and immediate.
  
  

Government Role

• The British government that ruled Ireland at the time compounded the problem through poor management. Although it implemented a soup kitchen scheme in 1847, this was discontinued after only six months. After summer 1847 the government largely left Ireland to its own meager devices, says Jim Donnelly of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
  
  

Effects

• Aside from the million deaths directly attributable to the famine, hunger and poverty also drove around two million people to migrate from Ireland, many of them to Canada and the United States. The Irish census commissioners of 1851 calculated that the country's population--then recorded at just more than six and one-half million--would have been more than nine million were it not for the effects of the famine and emigration.