1 00:00:09,650 --> 00:00:27,980 The Great Irish Famine is one of the most important events in the history of Ireland. 2 00:00:28,100 --> 00:00:32,439 It's a key event that took place in the 19th century, in the 1800s, 3 00:00:32,820 --> 00:00:37,740 and it also changed the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. 4 00:00:37,979 --> 00:00:44,039 They had had a bad relationship with them, but since then it has become even worse. 5 00:00:44,579 --> 00:00:48,140 It also has had a great impact in the future history of Ireland, 6 00:00:48,140 --> 00:00:53,020 and it's probably one of the causes why Ireland is an independent country today. 7 00:00:53,539 --> 00:00:57,500 And also, it's a very controversial topic because people nowadays, 8 00:00:58,020 --> 00:01:03,939 mostly historians, still discuss towards then this crisis was made worse 9 00:01:03,939 --> 00:01:07,000 by the way the British government reacted. 10 00:01:11,299 --> 00:01:20,400 Now, we are going to talk about the causes of this horrible event 11 00:01:20,400 --> 00:01:26,959 and they are very complicated and historians will talk about many different causes but we are going 12 00:01:26,959 --> 00:01:35,120 to focus on two or three things the most important is probably the unequal distribution of land 13 00:01:35,120 --> 00:01:43,459 the island have been colonized by by the british the english and scottish and that means that 14 00:01:44,420 --> 00:01:52,019 rich people from great britain had taken all the land basically all the land was theirs and 15 00:01:52,019 --> 00:01:58,659 the irish people have become poor peasants poor workers that didn't have their own land they had 16 00:01:58,659 --> 00:02:06,260 to work very hard for the british british land owners the owners of the land to grow different 17 00:02:06,260 --> 00:02:12,500 crops for them so they could send them abroad sell those crops and earn lots of money 18 00:02:12,500 --> 00:02:22,319 And that means that the Irish farmers, the Irish families have very little land, very small plots of land to grow their food. 19 00:02:22,500 --> 00:02:31,159 And that is going to connect with the second cause that brought about this horrible, this dreadful and terrible famine. 20 00:02:32,319 --> 00:02:41,199 The idea is that when you have so little land to grow all your own food, you need to use a crop that is very productive to give food to your whole family. 21 00:02:41,199 --> 00:02:44,199 and the Irish people were using the potato 22 00:02:44,199 --> 00:02:46,659 and a specific variety called the Irish Lamper. 23 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:49,400 And it was a very productive type of potato 24 00:02:49,400 --> 00:02:52,599 and it could give lots of production to feed, 25 00:02:52,699 --> 00:02:54,240 to give food to the whole family. 26 00:02:54,599 --> 00:02:58,419 But the problem is when you rely on just one crop, 27 00:02:58,740 --> 00:03:01,180 when you just have one crop to give food to everybody, 28 00:03:01,620 --> 00:03:03,159 if there's a problem with that crop, 29 00:03:03,240 --> 00:03:05,180 like a disease, something goes wrong 30 00:03:05,180 --> 00:03:08,060 and kills that potato, everybody will die. 31 00:03:08,199 --> 00:03:09,099 And this is what happened. 32 00:03:09,099 --> 00:03:23,240 There was a kind of disease, an illness called the potato blight, that was a type of mouth, that killed all the potatoes and therefore people didn't have enough food to eat. 33 00:03:23,240 --> 00:03:39,039 And also, this is not a ghost, but we're also going to talk about how the British government tried to pass some pieces of legislation, to pass some laws to help people, but they were very inefficient and that made things even worse. 34 00:03:40,060 --> 00:03:52,659 Now we are going to start talking about the development of the famine. 35 00:03:53,180 --> 00:03:59,900 The catastrophe started in 1845 with a little mole. 36 00:03:59,939 --> 00:04:03,300 A mole is like a type of fungus called Phytophthora infestans. 37 00:04:03,300 --> 00:04:09,759 And this mole created that disease that we have talked about before called the potato blight. 38 00:04:10,020 --> 00:04:16,699 And this is something that kind of kills the potatoes while they are in the ground and they haven't been picked up by the farmers. 39 00:04:16,699 --> 00:04:25,100 So this potato blight started to kill all the potatoes and then people started to have not enough food to eat. 40 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:35,160 This catastrophe, anyway, could have been avoided if both the Irish and British government had acted in a better way. 41 00:04:35,160 --> 00:04:42,160 But the British government, what they tried to do was to try to force the Irish landlords 42 00:04:42,160 --> 00:04:49,620 to provide some help to the poor tenants that didn't have enough money to buy other food 43 00:04:49,620 --> 00:04:54,199 than the potatoes that had died in their gardens. 44 00:04:55,079 --> 00:05:02,360 But what these landlords made instead of that, they have started to evict. 45 00:05:02,360 --> 00:05:06,439 Evict means kind of kick out someone who is living in your house. 46 00:05:06,699 --> 00:05:10,519 So they have started to evict the tenants. 47 00:05:10,839 --> 00:05:16,860 Tenant means someone who lives in your land and you are renting that land to him. 48 00:05:17,060 --> 00:05:21,759 And they have started to expel these people and to kick them out into the streets. 49 00:05:22,519 --> 00:05:30,839 And also at the same time, the Irish rich people were exporting food. 50 00:05:30,839 --> 00:05:37,120 They were selling food to other countries while people in Ireland were dying of hunger. 51 00:05:38,139 --> 00:05:44,959 Then the harvests of the year 1846 and 1847 were also horrible. 52 00:05:45,639 --> 00:05:53,000 And many more people were being evicted, were being kicked from their houses, from their land. 53 00:05:53,100 --> 00:05:57,759 And they were losing their jobs and nobody, a lot of people didn't have enough money for food. 54 00:05:57,759 --> 00:06:10,759 The worst year was the year 47 to 48, where like crowds of people were already walking from town to town and from village to village trying to get some food. 55 00:06:11,060 --> 00:06:24,459 And they could only find some money or some food working in something called workhouses that were like some dreadful or horrible places where they would give you some food or some money. 56 00:06:24,459 --> 00:06:31,000 But in exchange, you have to work for the whole day in horrible conditions as if you were a slave. 57 00:06:31,879 --> 00:06:43,079 Then finally, things started to become better and the British government started to realize that they have made a series of very big mistakes. 58 00:06:43,500 --> 00:06:47,560 And they have started to create soup kitchens to feed people. 59 00:06:47,839 --> 00:06:52,480 Soup kitchens are the equivalent of the Spanish comedores sociales. 60 00:06:52,480 --> 00:06:59,220 there are places where you can cook food for people that don't have enough money to pay for 61 00:06:59,220 --> 00:07:04,199 it and you just give it for free but it was too late and lots of people had already died 62 00:07:04,199 --> 00:07:22,800 the consequences the consequences were terrible today historians estimate that about 1 million 63 00:07:22,800 --> 00:07:29,740 people probably died because of this famine if we think about how small the population of ireland 64 00:07:29,740 --> 00:07:35,339 was at the at that moment it was probably about 15 percent or even more of the total population 65 00:07:35,339 --> 00:07:41,040 of the time it also had a great impact in the irish language because some of the regions that 66 00:07:41,040 --> 00:07:46,300 were more affected were like poorer regions that were in the west and it was the places where 67 00:07:46,300 --> 00:07:53,279 people still speak gaelic that is the original irish language that was almost lost as a consequence 68 00:07:53,279 --> 00:07:57,759 and now the majority of Irish people speak English due to that reason. 69 00:07:58,819 --> 00:08:04,500 And it also created a large emigration to both the United States and the UK. 70 00:08:04,899 --> 00:08:09,079 That's why we have so large communities of Irish people 71 00:08:09,079 --> 00:08:13,199 in places like New York or Boston, etc., or in cities like Liverpool. 72 00:08:13,899 --> 00:08:18,860 Also, this crisis created a hatred towards the British authority 73 00:08:18,860 --> 00:08:26,899 that still persists and still many Irish people hate the British government and the British institutions.