aused widespread economic disruption and human suffering, including over one million deaths (more than one in every eight Irish) due to related starvation and disease, and massive emigration, about 1.5 million between 1845 and 1850, most of whom went to North America and the rest to other parts of the British Isles or to the Antipodes (Quinn 37). The primary victims of the famine were poor small farmers and farm laborers; however, disease was no respecter of class or occupation. As the effects of the famine spread during 1847, Kinealy said "although the demand for relief was highest in the west, severe distress was also apparent in other parts of the country, including some of the wealthy [poor law] unions in the north-east of Ulster" (128). Death rates continued to climb even after the harvests had begun to return to normal in 1850, ranging from 6.4 percent in 1845 to twin peaks of 18.5 percent in 1847 and 17.9 percent in 1849 and remained at 12.2 percent in 1850 (Kinealy 168). The combined effect of deaths and emigration on some regions was devastating. Connaught Province in the northwest lost nearly 70 percent of its pre-famine population. Strokestown, a town in Roscommon County in the west, lost 88 percent (Braa 204; and Silvester-Carr 30). Despite the spread of diseases such as typhus, relapsing fever (yellow fever) and dysentery to towns, the eastern part of agricultural Ireland which depended on cattle raising and crops other than potatoes and the partially industrialized economy of most of Ulster were spared the worst effects of the famine because they "could cope with local crop failure" (Foster 321).
According to Quinn, "the famine represented the greatest concentration of civilian suffering and death in Western Europe between the Thirty Years' War and the Second World War" (37). The famine became a calamity of such magnitude and it struck certain areas so hard while leaving others relatively unscathed, due to the interrela...