The Story of Irish Coffin Ships Part I
Irish History Podcast
Fin Dwyer
4.7 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Between 1845 - 1855 over two million people left Ireland to escape hunger, poverty and disease during the Great Hunger. The experience of these emigrants was often harrowing. The term Coffin Ship has became synonymous with their journeys across the Atlantic.
While the term conveys misery, what was the experience actually like?
In the first of two podcasts on the subject, I am joined by Dr Cian T. McMahon author of The Coffin Ship - Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine. Cian's work is deeply personal. Laced with hundreds of individual narratives he creates a vivid account of the complexities of escaping hunger in Ireland in the 1840s.
You can get a copy of The Coffin Ship - Life and Death at Sea here
If you want listen to more stories form the Great Hunger my 30 part podcast series is available here.
My exclusive series on the Irish Civil War with Dr Brian Hanley kicks off next week. Exclusively available for show supporters on Acast+ and patreon.com/irishhistory, the series will be an expert guide to one of the most formative conflicts in modern Ireland.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:22.7 | There's a statistic in Irish history that's hard to get your head around, no matter how |
| 0:29.2 | many times you hear us. |
| 0:31.3 | Even though I've spent years researching the Great Famine, I still double-take when |
| 0:35.4 | I come across the levels of migration from Ireland. |
| 0:38.9 | Between 1845 and 1855, just ten years, over two million people emigrated from Ireland |
| 0:46.6 | to escape the Great Hunger. |
| 0:48.5 | That number constituted in or around one quarter of the entire population of the island |
| 0:54.8 | at the time, and doesn't factor in the over one million people who died from |
| 0:59.2 | starvation and disease back in Ireland. |
| 1:02.7 | While these statistics can help us comprehend the scale of the catastrophe that was the |
| 1:07.7 | Great Famine, they can also obscure what it was actually like for the people who lived |
| 1:12.9 | through these times. |
| 1:14.7 | This is particularly the case with famine emigrants. |
| 1:18.1 | Their experience is often summarised by the term coffeinships. |
| 1:22.6 | While it might adequately evoke the hardship they endured, it doesn't help us understand |
| 1:28.2 | though what it was actually like to leave Ireland and emigrate to the US in particular. |
| 1:34.2 | For example, the overwhelming majority of famine emigrants did survive, the size and |
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