devastated Ireland in three successive years: 1845, 1846 and 1847. The potato was the staple of the Irish peasants' diet and when the potato crop failed the result was over a million Irish deaths - many literally starving to death. Ireland's history is one of troubles and tragedies and many, if not most, of the Irish trace the cause of their problems to the conquest of the country by England in the 12th century. In fact the English invaded and conquered Ireland a number of times. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and King William III of Orange are just 4 English leaders who were responsible for military attacks against Ireland. The English confiscated the land and reduced the Irish to the status of peasants or tenant-farmers, forced to rent land from the English landlords. Although they had been conquered the Irish were never subdued and remained actively hostile toward their English masters. They were the most unhappy, and unruly, subjects of the English crown. The Irish problem - what to do with Ireland - tormented the British government in London as long as Ireland remained part of the British Empire.
Although they may not have been subdued they were poor. The famous general and Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, himself a native of Ireland, said that, "There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland." And no part of Ireland was poorer than Donegal! The following quote from The Great Hunger, the definitive account of the famine, describes one Donegal community as it was in 1837 (the year before James McCool left to come to Canada): "Furniture was a luxury; the inhabitants, numbering about 9,000 had only 10 beds, 93 chairs and 243 stools between them. Pigs slept with their owners, manure heaps choked doors, sometimes even stood inside; the evicted and unemployed put roofs over ditches, burrowed into banks, existed in bog holes." This was the situation before the famine so when the potato crop failed for three consecutive years the results were catastrophic. Conservative estimates place the number of deaths at over 1 million, about 15% of the population. Another million left the country--most going to the United States and Canada. The famine became a political issue because of the fact that, while the Irish peasants were starving, England did virtually nothing to help. In fact, during the time of the famine crops produced on Irish land were being exported from Ireland by the English landlords. It may not have been a holocaust in that there were no concentration camps or gas chambers but many Irish saw, and still see, the English reaction to the famine as a deliberate attempt to "solve" the Irish problem by eliminating their troublesome subjects.