Great Famine and Irish independence struggle linked by geography and history

The chances of somebody being a rebel in the struggle for Irish independence was impacted by the extent to which the Great Famine affected where they came from, new research shows.

Revenge for Skibbereen is a song about how future generations of Irish rebels were motivated by the ancestral memory of the Great Famine to rebel against British rule.

Skibbereen, and west Cork in general, was one of the worst affected parts of Ireland during the Great Famine between 1845 and 1851 and it produced some crucial figures in the Irish independence struggle including Michael Collins, Tom Barry and Jeremiah O’Donovan-Rossa.

A study by two economists entitled The Deep Roots of Rebellion, employed methodologies from the field of economics to measure the impact of the Great Famine (1845-50) on future generations.

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The research was conducted by Dr Gaia Narciso, director of the Centre for Economics, Policy and History at the Department of Economics at Trinity College Dublin in collaboration with Dr Battista Severgnini, associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School and was recently published in a paper in the Journal of Development Economics.

They first conceived of the research in 2015 and it has taken eight years and 2.7 million data points to reach a conclusion.

They matched instances of potato blight and excess mortality at the barony (roughly analogous to the local authority area) level in Ireland during the Great Famine with the 1911 census, which reveals where people lived, and records from the military service pension collection files where more than 80,000 people, men and women, applied for medals and pensions.

The purpose of the research was to demonstrate how the ancestral memory of traumatic events can inspire future generations. By the time of the Irish independence struggle very few people who were alive actually remembered the Great Famine, but their descendants did.

The researchers found that every percentage above the norm in a barony for potato blight during the Great Famine brought a 0.033 per cent increase in the likelihood of a person being a rebel two generations later.

In other words, a place that experienced potato blight 50 per cent higher than normal during the Great Famine would expect to have a significantly higher percentage of rebels who participated in the Irish independence struggle.

Dr Narciso said their research showed how geography and history are intertwined.

“Overall, the results are robust across the three different measures of the famine: potato crop failure rate at county level, excess mortality at county level and presence of the blight at barony level,” she said. “We can conclude that, even when controlling for potential concurring factors, there is evidence in support of the famine’s legacy of rebellion.”