The Great
Famine

The Famine changed Cork more than any battle. When potato blight struck in the autumn of 1845, the crop that fed most of the country turned black in the ground. It came back year after year. Over seven years about a million people died of hunger and disease, and a million more left Ireland. The population fell by a quarter and never recovered.

County Cork was one of the worst-hit places in the country, and the city was its funnel: the place the starving walked towards for relief, and the port the survivors sailed from. To understand modern Cork, you have to stand in these years first.

Why it cut so deep

Millions of the rural poor lived almost entirely on the potato, grown on tiny plots they rented from landlords. It was cheap, it grew well in poor ground, and a family could live on it. When it failed there was nothing underneath.

Food kept leaving Irish ports while people starved. Relief came slowly and often cruelly, tied to road-building schemes that paid too little and to workhouses that spread fever as fast as they gave shelter.

By the winter of 1846 whole districts of West Cork were dying. A Cork magistrate, Nicholas Cummins, walked into Skibbereen that December and wrote what he saw.

Cork at the centre

The Cork Union Workhouse on Douglas Road was built for about two thousand people and held far more, its fever sheds overflowing into the yards. Soup kitchens ran in the lanes. The Society of Friends, the Quakers, set up some of the most effective relief in the city while official help lagged behind.

The dead came faster than the graves. Many were buried without coffins in mass plots on the edge of the city, the ground reopened again and again through the worst winters.

Around the workhouse and the burial grounds, ordinary life carried on a few streets away. The two Corks, the fed and the starving, lived within sight of each other.

The quays and Cobh

Cork was a great port, so it became one of the great points of departure. Emigrants crowded the city quays and the harbour at Cobh, then called Queenstown, boarding ships for Liverpool, North America and Australia. Conditions on the worst crossings were so bad the vessels were remembered as coffin ships.

Cobh went on to become the single most important emigration port in Ireland, and the Famine is where that story starts. The Cork diaspora scattered across the world begins on these quays.

On the tour

This is not a comfortable part of the walk, but it is one of the most important. We stop where the workhouse stood, near the burial grounds, and on the quays the emigrants left from, and we tell you who was there. It is the moment that connects almost every Cork family to somewhere else in the world.