The Causes and Consequences of the Great Irish Famine

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Principal Investigator: Alan Fernihough
Research Assistant: Áine Doran 
Funded by: The Economic and Social Research Council (Grant No. ES/N017323/1)
Project description: The Great Irish Famine was a watershed in global history. It was the last major famine to occur in a Western economy, and had a long-run impact both in Ireland and further afield. This research project, funded by the ESRC, re-examines the Famine using the wealth of newly-digitised data sources and cutting-edge methodologies from the fields of econometrics and spatial statistics.

Research questions:
  1. To what extent was Pre-Famine Ireland’s poverty driven by overpopulation?
  2. What key factors explain the loss of population between the 1841 and 1851 censuses?
  3. Do these aforementioned factors differ between mortality compared to migration?
  4. In what way does temporal variation in demographic events recorded in parish registers differ over the 18th and 19th centuries?
  5. Can we measure the economic, social, and demographic impact of the mass migration of the Irish to Britain?

Further information about the project is available on this website.