British forces sought to eradicate Irish resistance to them and to seize fertile Irish land by displacing Irish Catholics to the west of Ireland (Connaught). This displacement came with an immense eco-cultural shift and the preceding years were marked by culture-erasing penal laws, mass exportation of Irish resources, and subsequent famines. Under British rule, Ireland was actively underdeveloped and continuously stripped of its resources to fuel England’s industrial revolution as its designated “breadbasket”. 

In 1845 this exploitation came to a head after the devastating effects of Phytophthora infestans. This fungus infected the potato crops, which had become a staple of the displaced Irish population, with minimal support from British forces. Thus, An Gorta Mór, or The Great Hunger, contributed to the mass emigration, starvation, and hunger-related deaths of the Irish. At the peak of Irish immigration between 1845 and 1852, it was estimated that nearly two million people emigrated to the United States.

For Irish Americans, the history of the famine is perhaps not as distant as we would like. Witnessing the genocide in Palestine brings forth the memories of all previous colonial enterprises and their attempts to reshape the land and its people. It is a moral imperative that we recognize this memory and understand that it connects us to an ancestral struggle against colonization and that it must propel us forward toward ending the genocide in Palestine.

Thank you to Cnuasach-Bhéaloideas-Éireann-The-National-Folklore-Collection & the Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection at the Library of Congress.