Responsibility for the tremendous excess mortality associated with the Great Irish Famine of 1846-51 is a continuing topic of debate. One view blames an inadequate government response for much of the tragedy. These debates are hampered by a lack of detailed information on how well relief efforts...

Strange Times. There were back-to-back harvest failures in 1799-1800, coming fast on the heels of the insurrections of 1798. The result was massive and sustained inflation in food prices. The conundrum is why there was so little excess mortality. Our approach is to begin by discussing the...

The link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland has long interested economists. This paper re-visits the topic, harnessing the highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 Census of Ireland. Using population per value adjusted acre as a measure of...

Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine was a poor and backward economy. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s is accordingly often considered the classic example of Malthusian population economics in action. However, unlike most historical famines, the Great Famine was not the product of a harvest...

The link between demographic pressure and economic conditions in pre-Famine Ireland has long interested economists. This paper re-visits the topic, harnessing the highly disaggregated parish-level data from the 1841 Census of Ireland. Using population per value adjusted acre as a measure of...

This paper studies the relationship between pre-famine living conditions and famine severity. I digitise the parish-level returns of the Irish Poor Inquiry and use these to explain the co-variates of increasing poverty in the early nineteenth century and examine how they impacted the severity of...