Great Famine (Ireland)
The Great Famine ( ), also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland), was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as , loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). The worst year of the period was 1847, known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, about 1 million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20%–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1851. Between 1845 and 1855, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barks—one of the greatest mass exoduses from a single island in history.