Ireland Famine Research Paper

The eighteenth and nineteenth century marked the period in Scottish history that saw the majority of the tenant population who worked landed estates move from arable farming to make way for sheep. The clearances took part in lowland Scotland and other areas however the experiences in the Highlands was, it could be argued, the most traumatic. Families whose clans had worked the land going back centuries witnessed the obliteration of their homes, and the dismantling of their Gaelic culture through forced removal. Scotland fell foul of the potato blight in 1846 and like Ireland it caused devastation, starvation and death with the Highlands being particularly affected. Agricultural communities in the western highlands and the Hebrides witnessed their potato crops whither and die at a time when the ‘clearances’ of people from the land was still ongoing. In comparison to the Irish experience it was less extensive given the at risk population numbered around two hundred thousand consequently the scale of mortality was small in comparison to that in Ireland. Government policy had no short-term answer of how to deal with the effects of the famine in human terms other than to suggest mass emigration of the population to Canada and Australia. To this end some landlords facilitated and paid for the emigration of tenants, thereby freeing land for sheep, while

The Central Relief Committee (1847-1850) and the Highland and Island Emigration Society (1851-1859) were absorbed into officially approved policies by none other than Charles Trevelyan a point observed by Historian Tom Devine as being thinly disguised government activities. The Scottish diet did not have the same dependence on the potato as the Irish did expect for possibly those living in the outer islands. Similarly out-migration from the western highlands was already a fact of life before