Irish Thought for September 11...

Irish-American By The Numbers

The potato famine that struck Ireland in the mid-19th century - called An Gorta Mór ("The Great Hunger") - was a devastating blight that wiped out the entire potato harvest.  One-third of Ireland's people depended on the potato as their primary sustenance, and more than one million people died.  (It's now believed that many lives could have been saved had the English government responded more humanely (or at all humanely, if you ask me), since there were other crops and sources of food that could have been directed to the afflicted).  For America, the Great Potato Famine led to to a save of immigration that marked the beginning of the Irish-American experience - more than one million Irish came to the United States between 1845 and 1855.