Paddy's Lament

The staple source of food for the Irish, the potato crop fell victim to blight during the mid 19th century and created years of havoc to an agricultural society. The crop disease, later discovered by scientists to be an unintentional passenger on food shipments from North America, burgeoned in the central regions of the Irish farming districts in previous years. In the summer of 1846, it was apparent that this harbinger of starvation was consuming each and every farm throughout Ireland. As the Irish daily news printed at the time, “The (po

Crowded into the steerage section of a slow-sailing merchant ship, the filthy conditions and dwindling supply of food made the journey to North America a floating Hell. Poorly engineered for the mass of humanity embarking on these ships, the overcrowding and lack of sanitary conditions spread Typhus through an ever-increasing swarm of fleas. The rough Northern Atlantic conditions rocked the ships fiercely, spewing raw sewage from the shoddily prepared toilet facilities, adding to the filth and infestation of disease. Burials at sea where a daily event as whole families where eradicated during the months-long voyage. Later, a conservative estimate of the death toll to the Irish immigration in 1847 to Canada alone was, “(out of) roughly 100,000 travelers, 25,000, or one in every four, died en route or within six months of arrival to their destination” (Gallagher 211). The appalling conditions on these English hellholes where brought to world attention by American doctors inspecting the arriving ships at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. “Britain’s ‘coffin ships’ had become a scandal in the eyes of the world but, although this stirred concern with some members of Parliament, the body as a whole reacted as it usually did to matters concerning the ‘Irish Question’ and it took another seven years before anything of significance was done to correc

Some topics in this essay:
Ireland Irish, Northern Atlantic, York Philadelphia, Paddy’s Lament, English-backed Protestant, Thomas Gallagher, North America, Hell Poorly, , Catholic Irish, paddy’s lament, north america, thomas gallagher, irish farming, potato crop, book paddy’s, absentee landlord, book paddy’s lament,