HOW THE POTATO SAVED THE IRISH FOR A TIME.
HOW THE POTATO SAVED THE IRISH FOR A TIME. Potatoes allowed Irishmen to survive after Cromwell’s forced resettlements in the 1650′s.. (This wikipedia article says: “The remaining Catholic landowners were allocated poorer land in the province of Connacht—this led to the Cromwellian attributed phrase “To hell or to Connacht”. Under the Commonwealth, Catholic landownership dropped from 60% of the total to just 8%.”) Mcneill says:”…subsistence on amazingly small potato patches sufficed to keep the Irish alive, first in Connaught and by 1780 or so, also allowed them to displace English settlers from nearly all the rest of the island.”