In 1740 the population of Ireland was 2.4 million. The diet of the population at that time was more diverse than in 1845. In 1845 the majority of the population subsisted on potatoes and water. so when the potato crop failed on several successive years the results were catastrophic. In 1740 the population lived on grains (oats, wheat, barley, rye), beef and potatoes (not yet the predominant foodstuff).

In the winter of 1739 to 1740 Ireland suffered a brutally cold winter where for seven weeks the temperature remained well below zero (the Fahrenheit thermometer had been invented fifteen years earlier and recorded readings show an indoor temperature of 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 12 Celsius). Research indicates that the weather was a consequence of massive volcanic eruptions in Russia which impacted all of northern Europe. Rivers and lakes were frozen solid causing initial jubilation and merriment. When the frost finally lifted there followed seven weeks without rain. By summer 1740, the frost had decimated the potato supply (very few potatoes had survived the cold so very few were planted for the 1740 harvest), and the subsequent drought decimated the grain harvest and herds of cattle and sheep. Starving rural dwellers started a “mass vagrancy” towards the better-supplied towns, such as Cork and Dublin. By mid-June 1740, beggars lined the streets and food riots spread as people starved to death unable to afford the record prices.

The cold returned in the winter of 1740-1741 by which time hundreds of thousands of people had starved to death or died from diseases such as typhus, cholera or dysentry.

By summer of 1741 the weather finally returned to normal and ships of grain aid from North America started to arrive in Galway. Normality slowly resumed.

Records at the time were not kept with as great an accuracy as a century later. Mass emigration was still not a feature of Irish society during this Famine so knowledge of the mass starvation was not as widely known internationally. However it was this Famine that started the phenomenon of Irish emigration to North America which would massively accelerate a century later. Estimates state that between 310,000 to 480,000 of the population of 2.4 million died from starvation or disease (13% to 20% of the total population – proportionally a greater percentage of the population than in the Great Hunger and in a much shorter time period).

There is scant research or official records of this cataclysmic event in Irish history. It seems almost completely forgotten – perhaps thanks to its further distance in the past, perhaps due to the fact that it was a result of more natural causes (the failure of the potato crop of 1845 was ‘natural’ but the response to it by the English government was anything but) so less emotive a topic.

Either way I think that an event like the Forgotten Famine needs to be more widely known.