Ireland after the famine

The famine is the central defining event in modern Irish history. A social catastrophe of unprecedented proportions it obliterated a whole class of small rural landholders and peripatetic labourers who had for generations clung desperately to ever denuding portions of their native soil.  Among this economic strata; those whom it did not destroy outright were disgorged to the four corners; taking ship with whatever means left to them principally to America, Britain and Australia. In the crude mathematics of economic necessity it resolved at a stroke the Gordian knot of the Malthusian 'catastrophe', drastically depopulating the countryside and allowing at last the shift to more 'rational' and 'modern' modes of agricultural management. Such at least was the prevailing narrative quickly constructed to situate what for many remained an unutterable horror into some vaguely identifiable locus of meaning. One causative framework was erected for the consumption of the respectable 'propertied' middle and upper classes, generally those who stood to benefit from the mass depopulation, another, closer to the bone, conveying all the horrendous immediacy of those dark days was retold and recycled orally among the survivors and their kin as they fled from their ancestral homes across the Atlantic. On the pivot of these two starkly contrasted interpretative experiences emerged the essential bifurcation of subsequent nationalist separatism; the one constitutional and pacifist which sought redress within the confines of Westminster; the other Fenian,  republican and determinedly 'physical force' which repudiated the very legitimacy of the British 'liberal state'. The immediate impact of the famine therefore was to delegitimise the pre-existing constitutionalist O' Connellite Repeal movement not only in the eyes of the vast bulk of the dispossessed emigrés but also in the hearts of that huge swathe of small tenant holders who had suffered the most during 'the hunger'.