There can be no doubt but that the single most devastating event ever on the Mizen Peninsula was the Great Famine of 1845—1850. Numbers tell the story in a succinct but coldly, emotionless way. The 1841 census enumerated 24,548 people on the Mizen Peninsula. Ten years later the Mizen’s population had been reduced by forty percent to 14,799. Over 150 years later the 2022 census for the exact same electoral districts returned a total of 3,997 people, 16.3% of what it was in 1841.

The country as a whole suffered terribly from the famine however, the west of the country suffered most and the further west, the greater the suffering. West Cork generally was stricken, the Mizen particularly so. 

The cause of the repeated failure of the potato crop is well known. Tragically, lack of food did not cause the famine, for the duration of the famine Ireland was a net exporter of food. The famine was created by English/British colonialism, which created of a potato-dependant class subservient to the creators and purveyors of a plantation economy. Land was the central issue: who owned it, who managed it, who lived on it, who worked it. The native Irish had been dispossessed by successive waves of English invasions and subsequent plantations of loyalists from England and Scotland. Ireland was divided into approximately two-thousand estates of between two-thousand and four-thousand acres (although some were as big as fifty-thousand) whose owners typically lived sumptuously in England from the rents achieved from these estates.

If you would like to know more about how the Great Famine devastated the Mizen: www.buythebook.ie/this-is-the-mizen/