Ireland is a large island situated in the north Atlantic off north west Europe.

In fact, at
82,463 km2, it is the 20th largest island in the world. It is the second largest member
of the British Isles archipelago (Britian being the largest at 218,041 km2), which is also
home to the Isle of Man, Shetlands, Orkneys, Scilly Isles, Western Isles and numerous
other offshore islands.

Although it is on the same latitude as Canada's Hudson Bay, Russia's Kamchatka

Peninsula and southern Alaska, Ireland enjoys a temperate maritime climate. This is
caused by the so-called "Gulf Stream" - a current of warm water and air that flows
from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe. It is this that allows people in Europe to live
more easily in northern latitudes. Without the Gulf Stream, Ireland's average January
temperature would be around 15ºC cooler than today - between -10ºC and -15ºC.

Ireland lies between 50º and 60º north of the Equator and around 15º south of the
Arctic circle. At this latitude, the difference in length between a winter day and a
summer day is quite pronounced. A typical June day in Ireland is over 18 hours long
while a December day can be less than 7 hours long. During some summer nights, the
level of light never falls below twilight.

Ireland is famous for its unpredictable and wet weather. It can be hot one day and cold
the next, wet one hour and sunny the next. This is because Ireland is situated right
beneath a convergence zone where cold air from the pole, warm dry air from Asia and
the wet air from the Gulf Stream meet. When they meet, they produce low pressure
systems, called Depressions which are characterised by lines of wet weather followed
by periods of hot or cold clear, dry weather. The point at which the meeting point
happens to be on any day determines what kind of weather Ireland gets.

Although it is so close to mainland Europe (referred to as "the Continent"), the island

of Britain lies in between. This means that two sea journeys can be necessary to get to
Ireland, and it is partly for this reason that Ireland was not settled as densely as areas
closer to the Continent and why, even today, Ireland is regarded as being on the
perimeter of Europe. However, its location is growing in importance as world commerce
takes off, since it is one of the closest parts of the European Union to the markets of
North America.

The island of Ireland plays host to no less than two independent countries. Most of the
island forms the Republic of Ireland, while the northeastern corner ("Northern Ireland")
is part of the United Kingdom. Both these countries are members of the European
Union, a loose federation of countries which are coloured blue on the map above and
are striving to become ever more closely linked. As Ireland is one of the poorest parts
of the European Union, both parts of the island have benefitted greatly from
membership.
COUNTRY FLAG CAPITAL AREA POPULATION

Republic of Dublin 68,894

3,537,195
Ireland Pop 915,115 km2
(GREEN, WHITE, ORANGE)
 The 19th Century: The Great Famine

During the early years of the 1800's, Irish landlords enjoyed the successful times
because the prices for agricultural products were high, due to war. After the French
at Waterloo were defeated however, the prices fell. The landlords quickly found that
they could get more money by turning their land of small farming plots into grazing
lands. There was a small problem though...what would they do with the hundreds of
tenant farmers living on their estates? But this was a very small problem with a
simple answer. They just merely kicked the families out and off of their land (even if
their rent was fully paid up) and destroyed the huts the workers lived in so they
could not return. There was a lot of these homeless tenant farmer families wandering
aimlessly about on the highways, begging for food just to keep alive because of
these unjustly acts.

The Irish reply to this outrage was the making of more secret organizations to carry
out midnight raids. Some of these organizations were called Rightboys, Thrashers,
Ribbonmen, and Whitefoots. The English response to the Irish response was quick.
They set up a program of shipping offenders to Australian prisons. Little crimes that
today would only get a warning from a judge concluded in severe sentences--for
example, one man named Martin Kinsella from Wexford was caught stealing glue.
Because of his crime he was sentenced to Australia for seven years. Any crime that
was even a little serious received a life sentence.

One might assume that through all the years of depression, nothing worse could
happen to the Irish, but then came "The Great Famine". As the nineteenth century
progressed, the Irish became very dependent on the potato for their main food
source. In fact, a majority of rural people lived on it completely (the potato is one of
the few foods that has all the basic vitamins necessary to maintain a human life).
Several English committees that studied the economic situation in Ireland warned
that if there was a major failure of the potato crop, extensive starvation would result.
All these warnings were ignored.

In 1845 it happened, the biggest fear hit Ireland and suddenly became reality. A
disease attacked the potato crop and half of the crop was destroyed. People
harvested the few potatoes they had and prayed that the next years crop would be
an abundant one. But the crop of 1846 suffered even more than the previous year.
To add to the misery, that winter was the "severest in living memory". When the
1847 crop failed also, the Irish population of the whole nation was faced with
starvation. This is when the first wave of immigrants escaped their starving
homeland. The majority of this first group went to Canada because prices were very
low--ships bringing lumber to England were glad to receive paying passengers
instead of returning to Canada empty. Unfortunately, many of these people carried
typhoid and many other diseases with them on to Canada.

Ironically, during these tragic years it was only the potato crop that failed in Ireland.
Wheat, oats, beef, mutton, pork, and poultry were all in excellent supply but the
Irish-English landlords shipped these to the European continent to soften the
starving there and receive a very good profit in return. When people today wonder
about the hatred between the Irish and the English, they don't recognize the fact
that Irish peoples memory is a long one and that stories are still being told about
those ships leaving Irish ports loaded with food at the same time that their ancestors
were eating grass to live.
All throughout the years of the horrific famine, which continued past 1847, the
English government was unwilling to give any money to Ireland to help with the
famine because, as they said, "the Irish will use it only to buy guns to revolt against
them." They were also reluctant to provide material aid such as soup kitchens
because, "they will get used to the free food and never become of be self-sufficient."

As an sign of how bad things were, when Americans (primarily Quakers) offered to
send food to Ireland, England demanded that the food be first landed in England and
then transferred to English ships--to assure that the English's shipping interests were
fully employed. The American press so taunted this law, asking how greedy could
England be at a time when hundreds of thousands of their people were starving, that
England finally backed down and let the American ships sail directly to Ireland.

Author C.W. Smith, an Englishwoman herself, was dumfounded by the way her
countrymen were behaving during the famine years. As she says, "It is not
characteristic of the English to behave as they behaved in Ireland. As a nation, the
English have proved themselves of generosity, tolerance, and magnanimity, but not
when Ireland is concerned. The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the
English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common
sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots."

In 1849, Queen Victoria decided to visit Ireland. Press stories reported the pomp and
circumstance escorted her arrival in Cork harbor. They described the great variety of
troops and bands as she arrived by ship and it was this day that William Kindles
became a local hero. A huge Union Jack was flying over the dock directly above the
spot where the Royal parade was to pass. Somehow, William was able to get near
the flagpole and cut the ropes so the flag dropped on the heads of the lead marching
band (he promptly emigrated to America).

During the Queen's visit no expense was spared to make the tour a success. At one
banquet, $5,000 was spent on food and wine alone. The Duke of Leinster, one of the
better Irish-English landowners and landlord over the area where many of the
Chinless lived, was disgusted with the overwhelming spending. He wondered how in
this land where hundreds of thousands were starving, where a family of six could be
kept alive for a week for less than $1, the Queen's government could justify
spending thousands of dollars to entertain a privileged few for one night!

It is estimated one and a half million people died of starvation and disease in The
Great Famine. Another million people emigrated, the people that had bitter feelings
about the land they loved. Some cut off all ties with the motherland and never
looked back. The majority however, never lost their love for the land they left. They
continued to follow what was happening in Ireland. They talked and sang about it as
they gathered together at social events. It was said of this immigrant generation that
few found success and prosperity in America...this had to wait for their children's and
grandchildren's generations.
 Emigration of Ireland

There were two ways out of this Irish nightmare, death and emigration. People were
leaving from every port in Ireland. In 1847 a quarter of a million Irish men, woman
and, children left Ireland and the rate of emigration was to continue at the same
level and sometimes higher for the following four years. This massive emigration rate
not only permanently changed Ireland's population structure but also helped develop
an Irish nationalist feeling against English government.
Many of the poorest emigrating Irishmen never got beyond the English port. By mid-
May 1847 there were one thousand plus Irish wondering, begging and filling the
streets of Liverpool and other towns north of England. The poor classes were n ot the
only Irishmen migrating. On board the emigrant ships, conditions were sometimes
shocking. These ships came to be known as Coffin Ships because of the conditions
the emigrants are forced to live in. There was little air in these over crowded below
decks, which carried the poorest class. There were extreme cases of fevers, little
water, low abundance of food, few cooking and sanitary facilities. Most of the Irish
emigrants went to the United States, but the emigrants with the worst conditions
went to Canada. Almost every ship had a third of their passenger's die at sea or
upon their arrival. By August 1847 half the passengers from 10 ships had died while
the others were sick with fevers. On the shores of Quebec eyewitnesses saw
hundreds literall y flung on the beach, left in the mud, dying like fish out of water.
Emigration has been an on going feature of Irish life since the famine. The large
amounts of emigration before independence were streams of criticism towards the
British government by the Irish nationalists. Population continued to fall a fter the
independence and the government stopped recording emigration statistics.
Towards the end of the 1870s the alarming realization broke on Ireland that there
was once again the dangers of Famine on something like the scale of the terrible
tragedy of 1845-9. That tragedy, apart from bringing death to possibly as many as a
million of the Irish people had started an outpour of emigration from Ireland, mainly
to America, which had continued for many years. In the ten years after the start of
the Famine some two million had left - about a quarter of the entire population of
Ireland in 1945.
The emigration had helped the larger farms. This was because the smaller farm
farmers immigrated to America and Canada making the population food supplies
demand smaller. The larger farms flourished because of the fall in numbers of sma ll
farms. But the small tenant farmers, though decreased in numbers, still lived very
much as they had lived at the time of the Famine, which meant that they were
dependent on the potato crop. In the mid-1970s farm prices went up, these were
good times , both the large farm owners and small tenant farmers prospered though
this time.
Emigration before, during and after the Famine brought a better life to those few
lucky Irish people, but also gave a slow death to others. Emigration has it good
points and bad. If I were an emigrant I would hope that I was rich so th at I would
have a better chance of survival. That is what emigration is all about, don't you
think, survival!?!