title: K-pop

text: Many Korean entertainment companies use social media platforms, especially Facebook, to promote and communicate about their global auditions. K-pop groups use Facebook pages to promote their music and other content to large numbers of fans. K-pop fans use Facebook to express their devotion, communicate with other members of the K-pop community, and consume K-pop content.


title: K-pop

text: Multiple entertainment companies use TikTok to market and promote their artists' music. Many K-pop songs have gone viral on TikTok and some K-pop artists and their labels were contacted for possible collaborations. The "Any Song" dance challenge by rapper Zico got 400 million views in less than two months, and around 830,000 videos have been uploaded featuring the sound.


title: K-pop

text: Following the lifting of WWII-era restrictions imposed on exchanges and trade between Korea and Japan in the late 1990s, the first-generation girl group S.E.S became the first Korean artists to debut in Japan in late 1998 and their first Japanese-language album Reach Out in 1999. Young K-pop star BoA had Japanese language training before her Korean debut and when she debuted in Japan in 2002, her Korean identity was inessential. Her music style and fluent Japanese led her to be considered a part of J-pop. BoA's debut Japanese album released in 2002, entitled "Listen to My Heart", was the first album by a Korean singer to debut at the top of the Japanese Oricon Charts and become an RIAJ-certified "million-seller" in Japan. Since her Japanese debut, BoA has released several albums, all of which have topped the Oricon Charts.


title: K-pop

text: Following BoA's successful Japanese debut, K-pop group TVXQ (동방신기, known as "Tōhōshinki" in Japan) debuted in Japan in 2005 under a procedure similar to BoA's. TVXQ did not promote that they were Korean and their ballad-style songs fit well into J-pop's typical sound. TVXQ's first and second albums released in Japan were minor successes, peaking on the Oricon Charts at twenty-five and ten respectively. However, on January 16, 2008, TVXQ reached the top of the Oricon Charts with their sixteenth Japanese single "Purple Line." This made them the first Korean male group to have a number-one single in Japan. They have since had remarkable success with their comebacks. In 2018 they even beat the legendary Japanese band B'z by accumulating over 1.2 million people to their concerts. Since the start of the Korean Wave, the Japanese market has seen an influx of Korean pop acts such as SS501, Shinee, Super Junior, Big Bang, Kara and Girls' Generation. In 2011, it was reported that the total sales for K-pop artists' increased 22.3% between 2010 and 2011 in Japan. Some Korean artists were in the top 10 selling artists of the year in Japan.


title: K-pop

text: As of 2019, several other K-pop groups have made their debut in the Japanese market including Exo, BTS, Got7, Seventeen, iKon, GFriend, Astro, Pentagon, Twice, Monsta X, FT Island, NCT 127 and Blackpink. Many of these groups debut with Japanese versions of their recent Korean releases, then later release original Japanese songs. Many groups such as NCT 127, Twice, and Pentagon also include Japanese members that auditioned in Japan and were brought to Korea, or came to Korea in order to become a K-pop singer.


title: K-pop

text: With tensions still remaining between Korea and Japan, the import of Korean popular culture has been met with different forms of resistance, in the form of the 'Anti-Korean Wave.' One demonstration against the Korean Wave with roughly 500 participants was broadcast on Japan's Fuji TV to an Internet audience of over 120,000. However, the chairman of the Presidential Council on National Branding cited this resistance as proof of "how successful Korean Wave is." The Korean Wave has also affected the dreams and goals of Japanese people, as is shown by the increase of young Japanese people going to Korea to become K-pop stars.


title: K-pop

text: The 1990s saw the rise of K-pop in China through groups like H.O.T. and Sechs Kies—sparking China's investment in Korea's entertainment industry. K-pop artists have achieved considerable success in China since then: in 2005, Rain held a concert in Beijing with 40,000 attendees. In 2010, the Wonder Girls won an award for the highest digital sales for a foreign artist, with 5 million digital downloads, in the 5th annual China Mobile Wireless Music Awards. Most recently, China has become the South Korean entertainment industry's biggest market for exports. Twelve percent of SM Entertainment's sales in 2015 went to China, and this number rose to 14.4 percent by the middle of 2016. China has found that K-pop is a profitable investment. According to Director of Communication for the Korea Economic Institute of America Jenna Gibson, sales for a certain shampoo brand rose by 630% after Super Junior endorsed it on a Chinese reality show. K-pop's popularity has also led China's e-commerce company Alibaba to buy roughly $30 million worth of SM Entertainment's shares in 2016 in order to help its expansion into the online music industry. Legend Capital China has also invested in BTS' label BigHit Entertainment. As of the beginning of 2017, China took up around 8-20 percent of major Korean entertainment companies' total sales. Chinese entertainment companies have also claimed stakes in the industry, partially overseeing groups like EXID and T-ara or representing groups which include both Chinese and Korean members like Uniq and WJSN.


title: K-pop

text: Having Chinese members in K-pop groups is one way that Korean entertainment companies increase K-pop's marketability and appeal in China. Other strategies include giving Korean members Chinese-sounding names, releasing songs or whole albums in Chinese, and making subgroups with members that predominantly speak Mandarin—like SM Entertainment's Exo-M and Super Junior-M, which has had successful results on the Kuang Nan Record and CCR.


title: K-pop

text: The K-pop industry's methods of producing idols have influenced the practices of Chinese entertainment companies, which aim to reproduce K-pop idols' success with their own stars so that Chinese entertainers can compete better globally. To achieve this, those companies have recruited K-pop industry experts, and some of these insiders have actively started moving into the Chinese music industry to capitalize on K-pop's increasing influence on market demands. Chinese reality show "Idol Producer" further highlights K-pop's impact on China's entertainment scene: closely mirroring Korea's "Produce 101".


title: K-pop

text: A number of Chinese K-pop idols, such as Super Junior-M's Han Geng and Exo-M's Kris, Luhan, and Tao, have left their respective K-pop groups in order to pursue solo careers in China. However, lately, Korean entertainment companies have allowed their Chinese K-pop idols more freedom in pursuing solo work in China. Got7's Jackson Wang, for example, has released several of his own songs in China and, in 2017, reached number one on Chinese music charts.


title: K-pop

text: Additionally, the rise of K-pop has led to an increase in the number of Chinese tourists in South Korea—3.8 million more Chinese toured South Korea in 2016 than 2015 according to the Union of International Associations. K-pop has also made China's youth find South Korean culture "cool", thus helping to facilitate greater understanding between Korea and China.


title: K-pop

text: Despite North Korea's traditionally strict isolationism, K-pop has managed to reach a North Korean audience. While consumption of South Korean entertainment is punishable by death in North Korea, it has still become increasingly more available with the global rise of technology and the implementation of underground smuggling networks over the past decades. The popular flash drive technology containing K-pop and K-dramas was preceded by the use of DVDs burned with such content. Because North Korean law enforcement had figured out how to catch people consuming the media from DVDs, few people accessed K-pop and K-dramas. Many North Koreans considered the risk too great, so it was not until the proliferation of the flash drive media type that watching the K-pop shows hit common homes. Utilizing the increasingly sophisticated smuggling networks, several thousands of USB drives and SD cards containing K-pop and K-dramas have been distributed and sold through care packages and the black market. Some South Korean humanitarians have also deployed drones and balloons carrying these flash drives in order to make the media more accessible. In fact, access to USB drives and SD cards exponentially rose from 26% to 81% in from 2010 to 2014 largely due to development in technology, with a large majority containing South Korean music and dramas. The expanding technology capabilities allowed the flash drives to be accessed by a wider North Korean audience. Flash drives that used to cost upwards of US$50, can now be purchased for under $10, making them more affordable and easier to send into North Korea. The content on these USB drives and SD cards are then viewed by plugging the device into a Notel, a small portable media player. Although this practice had originally begun with banned books and simple radios, there is now an even higher demand for South Korean media following the cultural phenomena of hallyu.


title: K-pop

text: Those near the border who choose to stay away from the banned media from flash drives often cannot escape it. Ever since the 1950s, both countries have blasted their own propaganda across the DMZ: North Korea broadcasting anti-south propaganda and South Korea broadcasting Korean and world news as well as K-pop. In 2004, both countries agreed to end the broadcasts. After an incident in 2015, South Korea resumed broadcasting anti-North news for four days, as well as in 2016, after North Korea tested its hydrogen bomb and has been broadcasting since. In April 2018, in preparation and out of respect for the meeting between North leader Kim Jong Un and South leader, Moon Jae In, the South Korean speakers ceased their broadcasts. These 11 loudspeakers can be heard up to into North Korean territory. This enables the broadcasts to influence possible defectors staying near the border as well as create bothersome propaganda that North Korean soldiers cannot escape.


title: K-pop

text: The dissemination of K-pop and Korean media has been crucial in presenting the realities of North Korea to its citizens. By detailing the basic conditions of life in South Korea and introducing foreign ideologies, Korean media has aroused civil unrest amongst both citizens and elites concerning the disparities between living conditions inside and outside North Korea. A defector explains that, when he escaped in 2012, only the wealthy families were the ones consuming the South Korean media because the costs of the flash drives and technology to use them were so high. Because most youths lacked the resources to afford the drives, most consumers of South Korean media before 2012 were the middle-aged elite who favored K-dramas over K-pop due to their more traditional behavior. The current high demand for Korean media continues to rise as now approximately 70% of North Koreans consume foreign media in their homes, which accounts for the higher youth following of South Korean media today. One researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification claims to have never met a single defector who had not seen or listened to foreign media before entering South Korea. Yet experts remain wary that a cultural uprising will occur because of the media. Consuming South Korean media serves many purposes for North Koreans such as enjoyment and education, but few consider uprooting a totalitarian regime because of the cultures they've experienced through K-pop and K-dramas.


title: K-pop

text: Even North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has shown a liking for K-pop music. In 2018, Kim stated he was "deeply moved" after attending a two-hour concert in Pyongyang featuring South Korean performers such as singer Cho Yong-pil and the popular girl band Red Velvet. This historic concert marks the first performance by South Korean artists attended by a North Korean leader in Pyongyang. The concert featuring over 150 South Korean artists, attended by 1500 North Korean elites, also displays growing relations between the North and the South. None of the song line ups, lyrics, or dance moves of the performers were asked to be changed by traditionalist North Korean officials. This acceptance of the K-pop genre and its content shows a stark contrast to Kim Jong Un's historically stringent policies on foreign media. The South Korean artists also performed alongside notable North Korean artists in the following week. Recordings of both performances have been made public to South Koreans, though no reports have been made of their release to the North Korean public. Despite all the previous events Kim Jong-un has changed his stance on K-pop since 2021 by referring to it as a "vicious cancer" and viewing it as a threat to North Korean society.


title: K-pop

text: Despite sharing a similar past, the Taiwanese did not carry a positive sentiment towards South Korea after 1992, which is when South Korea broke off its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in order to pursue one with mainland China. This changed in the early 2000s as the cultural dispersion of "Hallyu" has contributed to the reconstruction of South Korea's image among the Taiwanese. This change was partly prompted by the South Korean government, which wished to encourage goodwill between the two countries after the break of diplomacy. Many Taiwanese have since remarked that Korean popular music and Korean dramas have helped to foster a renewed interest and healthier relationship with South Korea.


title: K-pop

text: There is a thriving K-pop fanbase in Singapore, where idol groups, such as 2NE1, BTS, Girls' Generation, Got7 and Exo, often hold concert tour dates. The popularity of K-pop alongside Korean dramas has influenced the aesthetics image of Singaporeans. Korean-style "straight eyebrows" have become quite popular among many Singaporean females and males of Chinese, Malay and Indian descent. Singaporean beauty salons have seen an increase in the number of customers interested in getting Korean-style "straight eyebrows" and Korean-style haircuts in recent years. On August 5, 2017, Singapore hosted the 10th Music Bank World Tour, a concert spin-off of Music Bank, a popular weekly music programme by South Korean broadcaster KBS. This event proved the immense popularity of the "Hallyu" wave in Singapore.


title: K-pop

text: In Malaysia, among the three main ethnic groups—Malay, Chinese and Indian—many prefer to listen to music in their own languages, but K-pop and Korean movies and TV series have become popular among all three ethnic groups, which Malaysian firms have capitalized upon. The popularity of K-pop has also resulted in politicians bringing K-pop idols to the country in order to attract young voters.Malaysians have accepted the Korean Wave more rapidly and even more favorably, notably in the 2010s, despite the fact that it came to Malaysia later and that the first reaction there was relatively hostile compared to other nations. Approximately 80% of Malaysian respondents have begun learning the Korean language due to their keen interest in Korean culture. Malaysia is also seventh in the world for the quantity of travelers visiting Korea.


title: K-pop

text: K-pop along with Korean TV series and movies has turned into popular culture, especially among the young generation of Indonesia. This trend can be observed in any major city in the country. K-pop has also influenced music in Indonesia. Popularity of Korean culture has increased continuously in Indonesia since the early 2000s, starting with the East Asian popular culture boom.


title: K-pop

text: Korean telenovelas were aired locally in the Philippines starting in 2003, marking a further expansion of the Hallyu wave. K-pop took longer to catch on; it gained popularity through the internet, and through Korean expatriate celebrities like Sandara Park. Super Junior held a concert in the Philippines in 2010.


title: K-pop

text: Vietnam already had numerous contacts with South Korea in the past and even shared a similar political situation, notably the separation in half of both nations. Despite the tragedies of the Vietnam War, the country presently remains welcoming of the Korean influence on the Vietnamese population. Vietnamese pop music, known as V-pop, is heavily influenced by K-pop in terms of music production and music videos.


title: K-pop

text: In 2015, the northern capital city of Hanoi hosted the Music Bank World Tour. In the year of 2018, V Live and RBW Entertainment Vietnam launched special monthly mini-concerts called "V Heartbeat Live," inviting both V-pop and K-pop stars to perform, such as Winner, Momoland, IKon, Sunmi, and more. In the same year, Park Ji-yeon collaborated with a Vietnamese singer, Soobin Hoàng Sơn, releasing Vietnamese and Korean versions of the single "Between Us." K-pop, and Korean culture in general, gained popularity mainly because of the Vietnamese youth.


title: K-pop

text: South Korean entertainment companies are investing and searching for talent in Vietnam. For example, SM Entertainment announced plans for a Vietnamese sub-unit of the Korean boy group NCT, which executive producer Lee Soo-man called "NCT-V," to promote V-pop globally. Lee also said that Vietnamese culture is extremely similar to Korean culture, which is favorable for both countries in terms of global expansion. In 2018, SM Entertainment hosted their annual Global Audition in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City for the first time ever. Cube Entertainment held an audition session in 2018. On January 11–13 in 2019, Big Hit Entertainment established a joint venture with entertainment company CJ E&M to host an audition called the "2019 Belift Global Audition." SBS also announced that popular variety show "Running Man" will be getting a Vietnamese version. These are prime examples of "hallyu" and the rising popularity of K-pop in Vietnam.


title: K-pop

text: Bangladeshi youths, especially teens, have shown great attraction to Korean pop music as they described such songs make them feel better. Starting from 2015, Bangladesh began to participate in an annual event called K-Pop World Music Festival which started in 2011 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea in cooperation with The Korean Broadcasting System (KBS). The objective of the event is not only to bring the Hallyu fans all over the world to South Korea but also to bring people from different countries together in the name of culture.


title: K-pop

text: In the Northeast Indian state of Manipur, where separatists have banned Bollywood movies, consumers have turned to Korean popular culture for their entertainment needs. The BBC's correspondent Sanjoy Majumder reported that Korean entertainment products are mostly unlicensed copies smuggled in from neighbouring Burma, and are generally well received by the local population. This has led to the increasing use of Korean phrases in common parlance amongst the young people of Manipur.


title: K-pop

text: In order to capitalize on the popularity of K-pop in Manipur, many hairdressing salons have offered "Korean-style" cuts based on the hairstyles of K-pop boy bands. This wave of Korean popular culture is currently spreading from Manipur to the neighbouring state of Nagaland. K-pop is catching up in various other states of the country and K-pop festivals and competitions draw thousands of fans.


title: K-pop

text: In Nepal, K-pop gained popularity along with Korean dramas and films. K-pop has become influential in the Nepali music industry and K-pop music videos are often used as an accompaniment to Nepali music on YouTube.


title: K-pop

text: In 2006, Rain held sold-out concerts in New York and Las Vegas as part of his Rain's Coming World Tour.


title: K-pop

text: In 2009, the Wonder Girls became the first K-pop artist to debut on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. They went on to join the Jonas Brothers on the Jonas Brothers World Tour 2009. In 2010, they toured 20 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and were named House of Blues "Artist of the Month" for June.


title: K-pop

text: In 2010, SM Entertainment held the SMTown Live '10 World Tour with dates in Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, and New York. The same year, during the 8th Annual Korean Music Festival, K-pop artists made their first appearances at the Hollywood Bowl.


title: K-pop

text: Notable K-pop concerts in the United States in 2011 include the KBS Concert at the New York Korea Festival, the K-Pop Masters Concert in Las Vegas, and the Korean Music Wave in Google, which was held at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.


title: K-pop

text: 2012 marked a breakthrough year for K-pop in North America. At the start of the year, Girls' Generation performed the English version of "The Boys" on the late-night talk show "The Late Show with David Letterman" and also on the daytime talk show "Live! with Kelly", becoming the first Korean musical act to perform on these shows, and the first Korean act to perform on syndicated television in the United States. In the same year, the group formed their first sub-unit, entitled Girls' Generation-TTS, or simply "TTS," composed of members Taeyeon, Tiffany, and Seohyun. The subgroup's debut EP, "Twinkle", peaked at #126 on the Billboard 200. In May, SMTown returned to California again with the SMTown Live World Tour III in Anaheim. In August, as part of their New Evolution Global Tour, 2NE1 held their first American concert in the New York Metropolitan Area at the Prudential Center of Newark, New Jersey. In November, as part of their Alive Tour, Big Bang held their first solo concert in America, visiting the Honda Center in Los Angeles and the Prudential Center in Newark. The tickets sold out in only a few hours, and additional dates were added. On November 13, the American singer-songwriter Madonna and backup dancers performed "Gangnam Style" alongside Psy during a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Psy later told reporters that his gig with Madonna had "topped his list of accomplishments."


title: K-pop

text: On January 29, 2013, Billboard, one of America's most popular music magazines, launched Billboard K-Town, an online column on its website that covered K-pop news, artists, concerts, and chart information.


title: K-pop

text: In March of that year, f(x) performed at the K-Pop Night Out at SXSW in Austin, Texas, alongside The Geeks, who represented Korean rock. f(x) was the first K-pop group ever to perform at SXSW.


title: K-pop

text: In 2017, BTS was nominated for the Top Social Artist Award at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards. Their winning of the award marks the first time a Korean group has won a Billboard Award, and the second time a Korean artist has won the award, after Psy's win in 2013. BTS won the award at the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Billboard Music Awards, as well as Top Duo/Group in 2019. They performed at the 2017 American Music Awards and the 2018 Billboard Music Awards, making them one of the first Korean groups to have performed at either awards show. BTS's album reached #1 on the Billboard 200, making it the first Korean act to do so. Additionally, BTS's single "Fake Love" debuted at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100, making them the second Korean artist to chart in the top ten.


title: K-pop

text: On August 21, 2020, BTS' song Dynamite debuted at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it their first ever single to top the Billboard chart. Their next single, Life Goes On, also managed to top the chart upon release on November 20, 2020.


title: K-pop

text: Many idol groups have loyal fan bases in Latin America. Since 2009, about 260 fan clubs with a total of over 20,000 and 8,000 active members have been formed in Chile and Peru, respectively.


title: K-pop

text: In 2011, the United Cube Concert was held in São Paulo, shortly after the second round of the first K-Pop Cover Dance Festival was held in Brazil, with MBLAQ as judges.


title: K-pop

text: In March 2012, JYJ performed in Chile and Peru. When the group arrived at the Jorge Chávez International Airport in Peru for the JYJ World Tour Concert, they were escorted by airport security officials through a private exit due to safety reasons concerning the large number of fans (over 3,000). At the Explanada Sur del Estadio Monumental in Lima, some fans camped out for days in to see JYJ. In April, Caracol TV and Arirang TV jointly aired a K-pop reality show in Colombia. In September, Junsu became the first K-pop idol to perform solo in Brazil and Mexico, after the Wonder Girls in Monterrey in 2009. The concerts sold out well in advance. That year there were 70 K-pop fan clubs in Mexico, with at least 60,000 members altogether.


title: K-pop

text: In January 2014, Kim Hyung-jun performed in Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, becoming the first K-pop idol to perform in Bolivia. The tour proved his popularity in the continent as both fans and the media followed him everywhere he went, causing traffic on the roads and police to be called to maintain safety. Fans were also seen pitching their tents outside the concert venue for days before the actual concert.


title: K-pop

text: Korean media in Mexico experienced a surge in 2002 after Mexican governor, Arturo Montiel Rojas, visited South Korea. From his trip, he brought Korean series, movies, and other programs to Mexico State's broadcasting channel: Televisión Mexiquense (channel 34). Korean dramas exposed the Mexican public to Korean products and spurred interest in other aspects of Korean culture. K-pop began to gain ground in Mexico due to the series the music accompanied. Fans particularly sought out the music of soundtracks respective to Korean dramas that were broadcast.


title: K-pop

text: However, K-pop's arrival to Mexico is also attributed to the influence of Japanese media in Mexico and the introduction of "PIU" ("Pump It Up"). The comic convention, La Mole, commenced selling Japanese comics and music and later commenced to sell K-pop. PIUs combined gaming and dancing, introducing the Mexican youth to Korean gaming software and generating interest in Korean music.


title: K-pop

text: K-pop's presence in Mexico can be outlined through the growing number of Korean music acts in the country. In recent years, the number of K-pop concerts in Mexico has risen and branched into other portions of the country. Idol groups, including Big Bang and NU'EST, have visited Mexico through their respective world tours. JYJ's Kim Junsu became the first Korean star to perform solo. His concert held in Mexico City sold out in advance. The Music Bank World Tour also brought various acts to the Mexican public. Many of those groups covered widely known songs, such as Exo's cover of Sabor A Mi.


title: K-pop

text: In 2017, Mexico also became the first Latin American country to host KCON. The two-day convention held on March 17–18 brought over 33,000 fans to Arena Ciudad de México. Much like artists during Music Bank, idols covered Spanish songs.


title: K-pop

text: The strength and large number of fan clubs have continuously helped promote and support K-pop across the country. Over 70 fan clubs dedicated to Korean music are present in Mexico, bringing together around 30,000 fans. Although many fan clubs were created around 2003, they achieved a public presence in 2005 when Korea's ex-president Roh Moo Hyun visited Mexico for a meeting with Mexico's ex-president Vicente Fox Quesada. Around 30 Hallyu fan clubs held a "rally" asking Roh to bring actors Jang Dong-gun and Ahn Jae-wook to their country.


title: K-pop

text: Demonstrations have continued into recent years. On May 13, 2013, a large march was held in Mexico City's Zócalo. Called "KPOP: Massive March K–Pop Mexico II", it was the second mass march that brought together hundreds of avid K-Pop fans.


title: K-pop

text: However, larger fan club organizations in Mexico receive indirect or direct support from Korean cultural programs. KOFICE (Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange) and the Korean Cultural Center, Mexico City often work in conjunction with fan clubs. These larger organizations contain multiple fan clubs within their structure. The three largest are MexiCorea, Hallyu Mexican Lovers, and HallyuMx. Both MexiCorea and Hallyu Mexican Lovers are supported by KOFICE while HallyuMx previously worked with the Korean Cultural Center and the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Mexico.


title: K-pop

text: In 2010, both the SMTown Live '10 World Tour and the Super Junior Super Show 4 Tour were held in Paris.


title: K-pop

text: In February 2011, Teen Top performed at the Sala Apolo concert hall in Barcelona. In May, Rain became the first K-pop artist to perform in Germany, during the Dresden Music Festival. JYJ also performed in both Berlin and Barcelona. Big Bang flew to Belfast and won the Best Worldwide Act during the 2011 MTV EMAs in Northern Ireland. In Poland, the K-pop Star Exhibition was held in the Warsaw Korean Culture Center.


title: K-pop

text: In February 2012, Beast held their Beautiful Show in Berlin. According to the Berliner Zeitung, many fans who attended were not just from Germany but also from neighbouring countries such as France and Switzerland. Also in February, the Music Bank World Tour drew more than 10,000 fans to the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy. That year, artists such as Beast and 4Minute performed during the United Cube Concert in London, where the MBC Korean Culture Festival was also held. When Shinee arrived at the London Heathrow Airport for a concert at the Odeon West End in the same year, part of the airport became temporarily overrun by frenzied fans. The reservation system of the Odeon West End crashed for the first time one minute after ticket sales began as the concert drew an unexpectedly large response. At this time, Shinee also held a 30-minute performance at the Abbey Road Studio. The ticket demand for this performance was so high that fashion magazine Elle gave away forty tickets through a lottery, and the performance was also televised in Japan through six different channels. Also in 2012, Big Bang won the Best Fan category in the Italian TRL Awards.


title: K-pop

text: In March 2022, KPOP.FLEX took place at Deutsche Bank Park Stadium in Frankfurt, Germany. Over 65,000 fans attended from over 80 different countries.


title: K-pop

text: K-pop also saw a surge in popularity in Russia. On September 6, 2011, 57 dance teams took part in the K-pop Cover Dance Festival. During the second round of the competition, Shinee flew to Moscow as judges, also performing to Russian fans. The following year, Russian youths launched K-Plus, a Korean culture magazine, and the number of Russian K-pop fans was reported at 50,000.


title: K-pop

text: On February 3, 2014, Park Jung-min became the first ever Korean singer to hold a solo concert in Moscow. in club Moscow Hall 600 place with tour "Park Jung Min Reverso Tour."


title: K-pop

text: B.A.P held concerts during their tour "Live On Earth 2016 World Tour" in Adrenaline Stadium and their tour "2017 World Tour 'Party Baby!'" in YotaSpace.


title: K-pop

text: On June 6, 2018, Got7 performed in the concert hall Adrenaline Stadium in Moscow for their concert tour "Eyes on You."


title: K-pop

text: On October 7, 2018 Zico during concert tour "King Of the Zungle" performed at the club ГЛАВCLUB Green Concert in Moscow.


title: K-pop

text: On December 8, 2018, on the MTV Russia channel, the project of the mobile operator MTS, MTCamp, was launched (the acronym of their company name and the word amp and at the same time MTV Trainee Camp) the result of which is half a year should be the junior team from 5 members in the style of k-pop. The show is hosted by figure skater Evgenia Medvedeva, a fan of the Korean version of Exo, Exo-K. The show collaborates with the production company Avex Trax.


title: K-pop

text: On July 15, Exo's "Power" and BTS' "Fake Love" were played at the 2018 World Cup Final Match in Russia.


title: K-pop

text: K-pop has become increasingly popular across the Middle East over recent years, particularly among younger fans. In July 2011, Israeli fans met South Korea's Ambassador to Israel, Ma Young-sam, and traveled to Paris for the SMTown Live '10 World Tour in Europe. According to Dr. Nissim Atmazgin, a professor of East Asian Studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Many young people look at K-pop as culture capital—something that makes them stand out from the crowd." As of 2012, there are over 5,000 K-pop fans in Israel and 3,000 in the Palestinian territories. Some dedicated Israeli and Palestinian fans see themselves as "cultural missionaries" and actively introduce K-pop to their friends and relatives, further spreading the "Hallyu" wave within their communities.


title: K-pop

text: In 2012, the number of fans in Turkey surpassed 100,000, reaching 150,000 in 2013. appeared for a fan meet-and-greet session in Dubai and a concert in Abu Dhabi. In Cairo, hundreds of fans went to the Maadi Library's stage theater to see the final round of the K-POP Korean Song Festival, organized by the Korean Embassy. In January 2018, boy group Exo was invited to Dubai, United Arab Emirates for the Dubai Fountain Show. Their single "Power" was the first K-pop song to be played at the fountain show. In 2019, boy band BTS was invited to perform at King Fahd International Stadium by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. They are the first boy band to play a solo stadium tour in Saudi Arabia.


title: K-pop

text: The K-pop Wave has led to the creation of a number of dance groups that perform dance covers of K-pop music and teach K-pop choreography. In the K-Pop World Festival competition, AO Crew has represented Australia three times—in 2013, 2014, and 2016. Also, another dance cover group, IMI Dance, was the opening show for the RapBeat Show in 2017. Several dance studios provide classes that are based on K-pop choreography. Dance group Crave NV teaches a K-pop class every Saturday at their dance studio in New Zealand. A Sydney-based agency, The academy, began offering K-pop boot camps and other programs in 2016.


title: K-pop

text: A number of K-pop idols have hailed from Oceania. Australian-Korean artists include Blackpink's Rosé, ZE:A's Kevin Kim, One Way's Peter Hyun, C-Clown's Rome, Stray Kids' Bang Chan and Felix, EvoL's Hayana, and LEDapple's Hanbyul.


title: K-pop

text: In 2011, the K-Pop Music Festival at the ANZ Stadium was held in Sydney, featuring Girls' Generation, TVXQ, Beast, Shinee, 4minute, Miss A, 2AM, and MBLAQ. There was also demand for concerts from New Zealand.


title: K-pop

text: In August 2012, NU'EST visited Sydney Harbour and the University of New South Wales, as judges of a K-pop contest being held there. The following year, 4Minute were judges at the same contest in Sydney. In October, Psy toured Australia after his single "Gangnam Style" reached number one in Australia on the ARIA charts.


title: K-pop

text: In May 2016, B.A.P held a concert in Auckland, becoming the first K-Pop group to perform in New Zealand.


title: K-pop

text: KCON, an annual K-pop music and cultural convention, was launched for the first time in Australia in September 2017. They are the seventh country to host KCON since 2012. It was held at Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney. The lineup for the event was Pentagon, Wanna One, Girl's Day, Cosmic Girls (WJSN), Exo, SF9, Victon, Monsta X, and UP10TION.


title: K-pop

text: On May 25, 2010, South Korea responded to the alleged North Korean sinking of a navy ship by broadcasting 4Minute's single "HuH" across the DMZ. In response, North Korea affirmed its decision to "destroy" any speakers set up along the border. That year, "The Chosun Ilbo" reported that the Ministry of National Defense had considered setting up large TV screens across the border to broadcast music videos by several popular K-pop girl groups such as Girls' Generation, Wonder Girls, After School, Kara and 4Minute as part of "psychological warfare" against North Korea.


title: K-pop

text: In September 2012, North Korea uploaded a video with a manipulated image of South Korean president Park Geun-hye performing the dance moves of "Gangnam Style." The video labeled her as a "devoted" admirer of the Yusin system of autocratic rule set up by her father, Park Chung-hee.Since the early 2010s, several political leaders have acknowledged the global rise of Korean pop culture, most notably U.S. President Barack Obama, who made an official visit to South Korea in 2012 and mentioned the strong influences of social media networks, adding that it was "no wonder so many people around the world have caught the Korean wave, "Hallyu"." A few months later, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivered a speech in front of the National Assembly of South Korea, where he noted South Korea's "great global success" in the fields of culture, sports and the arts, before pointing out that the Korean Wave was "making its mark on the world." This occurred a few days after U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland remarked in a daily press briefing that her daughter "loves Korean pop," which sparked a media frenzy in South Korea after a journalist from the country's publicly funded Yonhap News Agency arranged an interview with Nuland and described Nuland's teenage daughter as "crazy about Korean music and dance."


title: K-pop

text: In November 2012, the British Minister of State for the Foreign Office, Hugo Swire, addressed a group of South Korean diplomats at the House of Lords, where he emphasized the close ties and mutual cooperation shaping South Korea–United Kingdom relations and added: "As 'Gangnam Style' has demonstrated, your music is global too." In February 2013, the Vice President of Peru, Marisol Espinoza, gave an interview with South Korea's Yonhap News Agency, where she voiced her desire for more South Korean companies to invest in her country and named K-pop as "one of the main factors that made Peruvian people wanting to get to know South Korea more."


title: K-pop

text: According to an article published by the international relations magazine "Foreign Policy", the spread of Korean popular culture across Southeast Asia, parts of South America, and parts of the Middle East are illustrating how the gradual cessation of European colonialism is giving way and making room for unexpected soft power outside of the Western world. On the other hand, an article published by "The Quietus" magazine expressed concern that discussions about "Hallyu" as a form of soft power seems to bear a whiff of the "old Victorian fear of Yellow Peril."


title: K-pop

text: In August 2016, it was reported that China planned to ban Korean media broadcasts and K-pop idol promotions within the country in opposition to South Korea's defensive deployment of THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles. The reportage of these planned regulatory measures caused an immediate negative impact on shares in Korean talent agencies, although stock prices later recovered.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Great Famine ( ), also known within Ireland as the Great Hunger or simply the Famine and outside Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis which subsequently had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. 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 , literally translated as "the bad life" (and loosely translated as "the hard times"). The worst year of the period was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". During the Great Hunger, roughly 1 million people died another 1 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 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The proximate cause of the famine was a potato blight that infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, causing an additional 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influencing much of the unrest in the widespread European Revolutions of 1848. Longer-term causes include the system of absentee landlordism and single-crop dependence. Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, and only resumed later. The refusal of London to bar export of food from Ireland during the famine was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than 1/4 acre of land.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The famine was a defining moment in the history of Ireland, which was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape, producing an estimated 2 million refugees and spurring a century-long population decline. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory. The strained relations between many Irish and their ruling British government worsened further because of the famine, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions and boosting nationalism and republicanism both in Ireland and among Irish emigrants around the world. English documentary maker John Percival said that the famine "became part of the long story of betrayal and exploitation which led to the growing movement in Ireland for independence." Scholar Kirby Miller makes the same point. Debate exists regarding nomenclature for the event, whether to use the term "Famine", "Potato Famine" or "Great Hunger", the last of which some believe most accurately captures the complicated history of the period.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The potato blight returned to Europe in 1879 but, by this time, the Land War (one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in 19th-century Europe) had begun in Ireland. The movement, organized by the Land League, continued the political campaign for the Three Fs which was issued in 1850 by the Tenant Right League during the Great Famine. When the potato blight returned to Ireland in the 1879 famine, the League boycotted "notorious landlords" and its members physically blocked the evictions of farmers; the consequent reduction in homelessness and house demolition resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of deaths.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Since the Acts of Union in January 1801, Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom. Executive power lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Chief Secretary for Ireland, who were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish representative peers elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli stated in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien established Protestant church, and in addition, the weakest executive in the world". One historian calculated that, between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland, and that "without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Lectures printed in 1847 by John Hughes, Bishop of New York, are a contemporary exploration into the antecedent causes, particularly the political climate, in which the Irish famine occurred.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: During the 18th century, the "middleman system" for managing landed property was introduced. Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the landlord of a regular income and relieved them of direct responsibility while leaving tenants open to exploitation by the middlemen.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Catholics, the majority of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, made up 80% of the population. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land and held more or less unchecked power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast; for example, the Earl of Lucan owned more than . Many of these absentee landlords lived in England. The rent revenue—collected from "impoverished tenants" who were paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export—was mostly sent to England.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root or foundational cause of disaffection in the country. They established a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon, to enquire into the laws regarding the occupation of land. Daniel O'Connell described this commission as "perfectly one-sided", being composed of landlords, with no tenant representation.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Commissioners concluded they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain". The Commission stated that bad relations between landlord and tenant were principally responsible. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie, or mitigating tradition of paternalism as existed in Britain, as the Anglo-Irish aristocracy that supplanted the Gaelic aristocracy in the 17th century was of a different religion and newer. In 1800, the 1st Earl of Clare observed of landlords that "confiscation is their common title". According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, landlords regarded the land as a source of income, from which as much as possible was to be extracted. With the peasantry "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" (in the words of the Earl of Clare), the landlords largely viewed the countryside as a hostile place in which to live. Some landlords visited their property only once or twice in a lifetime, if ever. The rents from Ireland were generally spent elsewhere; an estimated £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland in 1842.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The ability of middlemen was measured by the rent income they could contrive to extract from tenants. They were described in evidence before the commission as "land sharks", "bloodsuckers", and "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country". The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they sublet as they saw fit. They would split a holding into smaller and smaller parcels so as to increase the amount of rent they could obtain. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were high), or a landlord's decision to raise sheep instead of grain crops. A cottier paid his rent by working for the landlord while the spalpeen, an itinerant labourer, paid his short-term lease through temporary day work.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: As any improvement made on a holding by a tenant became the property of the landlord when the lease expired or was terminated, the incentive to make improvements was limited. Most tenants had no security of tenure on the land; as tenants "at will", they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. The only exception to this arrangement was in Ulster where, under a practice known as "tenant right", a tenant was compensated for any improvement they made to their holding. According to Woodham-Smith, the commission stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquillity of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Landlords in Ireland often used their powers without compunction, and tenants lived in dread of them. Woodham-Smith writes that, in these circumstances, "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of in size, while 40% were of . Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of people depended on agriculture for their survival but rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system that forced Ireland's peasantry into monoculture since only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity to meet nutritional needs.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The potato was introduced to Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. By the late 17th century, it had become widespread as a supplementary rather than a principal food; the main diet was still based on butter, milk, and grain products.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: With the "expansion of the economy" between 1760 and 1815 due to the Napoleonic wars (1805–1815), which had increased the demand for food in Britain, the tillage increased to such an extent, that there was less and less land for small farmers, and the potato was chiefly adopted by the people because of its quick growth on a comparatively small space. By 1800, for one in three of the population, the potato had become a staple food, especially in winter. It eventually became a staple year-round for farmers. The widespread dependency on this single crop, and a disproportionate share of the potatoes grown in Ireland being of a single variety, the Irish Lumper i.e. the lack of genetic variability among the potato plants in Ireland and Europe, were two of the reasons why the emergence of "Phytophthora infestans" had such devastating effects in Ireland and in similar areas of Europe.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Potatoes were essential to the development of the cottier system; they supported an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer, "a potato wage" shaped the expanding agrarian economy. The potato was also used extensively as a fodder crop for livestock immediately prior to the famine. Approximately 33% of production, amounting to , was normally used in this way.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Prior to the arrival in Ireland of the disease "Phytophthora infestans", commonly known as "blight", only two main potato plant diseases had been discovered. One was called "dry rot" or "taint", and the other was a virus known popularly as "curl". "Phytophthora infestans" is an oomycete (a variety of parasitic, non-photosynthetic organisms closely related to brown algae, and not a fungus).


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1851, the Census of Ireland Commissioners recorded 24 failures of the potato crop going back to 1728, of varying severity. General crop failures, through disease or frost, were recorded in 1739, 1740, 1770, 1800, and 1807. In 1821 and 1822, the potato crop failed in Munster and Connaught. In 1830 and 1831, Mayo, Donegal, and Galway suffered likewise. In 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1836, dry rot and curl caused serious losses, and in 1835 the potato failed in Ulster. Widespread failures throughout Ireland occurred in 1836, 1837, 1839, 1841, and 1844. According to Woodham-Smith, "the unreliability of the potato was an accepted fact in Ireland".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: How and when the blight "Phytophthora infestans" arrived in Europe is still uncertain; however, it almost certainly was not present prior to 1842, and probably arrived in 1844. The origin of the pathogen has been traced to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, whence it spread first within North America and then to Europe. The 1845–1846 blight was caused by the HERB-1 strain of the blight.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1844, Irish newspapers carried reports concerning a disease that for two years had attacked the potato crops in America. In 1843 and 1844, blight largely destroyed the potato crops in the Eastern United States. Ships from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York City could have carried diseased potatoes from these areas to European ports. American plant pathologist William C. Paddock posited that the blight was transported via potatoes being carried to feed passengers on clipper ships sailing from America to Ireland. Once introduced in Ireland and Europe, blight spread rapidly. By mid-August 1845, it had reached much of northern and central Europe; Belgium, The Netherlands, northern France, and southern England had all already been affected.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: On 16 August 1845, "The Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette" reported "a blight of unusual character" on the Isle of Wight. A week later, on 23 August, it reported that "A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop ... In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market ... As for cure for this distemper, there is none." These reports were extensively covered in Irish newspapers. On 11 September, the "Freeman's Journal" reported on "the appearance of what is called 'cholera' in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the north". On 13 September, "The Gardeners' Chronicle" announced: "We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Nevertheless, the British government remained optimistic over the next few weeks, as it received conflicting reports. Only when the crop was lifted (harvested) in October, did the scale of destruction become apparent. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel wrote to Sir James Graham in mid-October that he found the reports "very alarming", but reminded him that there was, according to Woodham-Smith, "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Crop loss in 1845 has been estimated at anywhere from one-third to as high as one-half of cultivated acreage. The Mansion House Committee in Dublin, to which hundreds of letters were directed from all over Ireland, claimed on 19 November 1845 to have ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt that "considerably more than one-third of the entire of the potato crop ... has been already destroyed".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1846, three-quarters of the harvest was lost to blight. By December, a third of a million destitute people were employed in public works. According to Cormac Ó Gráda, the first attack of potato blight caused considerable hardship in rural Ireland, from the autumn of 1846, when the first deaths from starvation were recorded. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847. Few had been sown, so, despite average yields, hunger continued. 1848 yields were only two-thirds of normal. Since over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food, hunger and famine were inevitable.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Corporation of Dublin sent a memorial to the Queen, "praying her" to call Parliament together early (Parliament was at this time prorogued), and to recommend the requisition of some public money for public works, especially railways in Ireland. The Town Council of Belfast met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to John Mitchel, one of the leading Repealers.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In early November 1845, a deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, Daniel O'Connell and the Lord Mayor, went to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury, to offer suggestions, such as opening the ports to foreign corn, stopping distillation from grain, prohibiting the export of foodstuffs, and providing employment through public works. Lord Heytesbury urged them not to be alarmed, that they "were premature", that scientists were enquiring into all those matters, and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts, and there was no "immediate pressure on the market".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: On 8 December 1845, Daniel O'Connell, head of the Repeal Association, proposed several remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of "Tenant-Right" as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements. O'Connell noted actions taken by the Belgian legislature during the same season, as they had been hit by blight, too: shutting their ports against the export of provisions and opening them to imports. He suggested that, if Ireland had a domestic Parliament, the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland, as the Dublin parliament had done during the food shortages of the 1780s. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament would provide both food and employment for the people. He said that repeal of the Act of Union was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, "The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)", published in 1861. It proposed that British actions during the famine and their treatment of the Irish were a deliberate effort at genocide. It contained a sentence that has since become famous: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine." Mitchel was charged with sedition because of his writings, but this charge was dropped. He was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: According to Charles Gavan Duffy, "The Nation" insisted that the proper remedy, retaining in the country the food raised by her people until the people were fed, was one which the rest of Europe had adopted, and one which even the parliaments of the Pale (i.e., before the union with Great Britain in 1801) had adopted in periods of distress.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Contemporaneously, as found in letters from the period and in particular later oral memory, the name for the event is in , though with the earlier spelling standard of the era, which was Gaelic script, it is found written as in Droċ-Ṡaoġal. In the modern era, this name, while loosely translated as "the hard-time", is always denoted with a capital letter to express its specific historic meaning.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. A more radical Young Ireland group seceded from the Repeal movement in July 1846, and attempted an armed rebellion in 1848. It was unsuccessful.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1847, William Smith O'Brien, leader of the Young Ireland party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation to campaign for a Repeal of the Act of Union, and called for the export of grain to be stopped and the ports closed. The following year, he helped organise the short-lived Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in County Tipperary.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: When Ireland experienced food shortages in 1782–1783, ports were closed to exporting food, with the intention of keeping locally grown food in Ireland to feed the hungry. Irish food prices promptly dropped. Some merchants lobbied against the export ban, but the government in the 1780s overrode their protests.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Historian F. S. L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early, less severe phase of the famine as "prompt and relatively successful". Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be "very much" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as "Peel's brimstone".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In October 1845, Peel moved to repeal the Corn Laws—tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread high—but the issue split his party and he had insufficient support from his own colleagues to push the measure through. He resigned the premiership in December, but the opposition was unable to form a government and he was re-appointed. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland, but the famine situation worsened during 1846, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. On 25 June, the second reading of the government's Irish Coercion Bill was defeated by 73 votes in the House of Commons by a combination of Whigs, Radicals, Irish Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives. Peel was forced to resign as prime minister on 29 June, and the Whig leader, Lord John Russell, became prime minister.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Russell, proved inadequate as the crisis deepened. The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire, believed that the market would provide the food needed. They refused to interfere with the movement of food to England, and then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without access to work, money, or food. Russell's ministry introduced a new programme of public works that by the end of December 1846 employed some half a million but proved impossible to administer.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of government relief, limited the Government's food aid programme because of a firm belief in laissez-faire.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In January 1847, the government abandoned this policy, realising that it had failed, and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouses through the Irish Poor Laws, the latter through soup kitchens. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, some of whom in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In June 1847, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed which embodied the principle, popular in Britain, that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. However, it was asserted that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in "The Illustrated London News" on 13 February 1847: "There was no law it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On 24 March, "The Times" reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P., prohibited anyone who held at least from receiving relief. In practice, this meant that, if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay rent and taxes, should be reduced, as many thousands of them were, to applying for public outdoor relief, he would not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Of this Law, Mitchel wrote that "it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed—if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies". This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse"—a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1849, the Encumbered Estates Act allowed landlord estates to be auctioned off upon the petition of creditors. Estates with debts were then auctioned off at low prices. Wealthy British speculators purchased the lands and "took a harsh view" of the tenant farmers who continued renting. The rents were raised, and tenants evicted to create large cattle grazing pastures. Between 1849 and 1854, some 50,000 families were evicted.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Royal Navy squadron stationed in Cork, Ireland under the command of Rear-Admiral Hugh Pigot undertook significant relief operation from 1846 to 1847, transporting government relief into the port of Cork and other ports along the Irish coast, being ordered on 2 January 1846 to assist distressed regions. On 27 December 1846, Trevelyan ordered every available steamer to Ireland to assist in relief, and on 14 January 1847, Pigot received orders to also distribute supplies from the British Relief Association and treat them identically to government aid. In addition, some naval officers under Pigot oversaw the logistics of relief operations further inland from Cork. In February 1847, Trevelyan ordered Royal Navy surgeons dispatched in order to provide medical care for those suffering from illnesses that accompanied starvation, distribute medicines that were in short supply on the island, and assist in proper, sanitary burials for those already deceased. These efforts, although significant, were insufficient at preventing mass mortality from famine and disease.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Many Irish people, notably Mitchel, believed that Ireland continued to produce sufficient food to feed its population during the famine, and starvation resulted from exports. According to historian James Donnelly, "the picture of Irish people starving as food was exported was the most powerful image in the nationalist construct of the Famine". However, according to statistics, food imports exceeded exports during the famine. Though grain imports only really became significant after the spring of 1847 and much of the debate "has been conducted within narrow parameters," focusing "almost exclusively on national estimates with little attempt to disaggregate the data by region or by product." The amount of food exported in late 1846 was only one-tenth the amount of potato harvest lost to blight.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in "" that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland "as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation". While in addition to the maize imports, four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland at the height of the famine as exported, much of the imported wheat was used as livestock feed. Woodham-Smith added that provision via the Poor law union workhouses by the Act of 1838 had to be paid by rates levied on the local property owners, and in areas where the famine was worst, the tenants could not pay their rents to enable landlords to fund the rates and therefore the workhouses. Only by selling food, some of which would inevitably be exported, could a "virtuous circle" be created whereby the rents and rates would be paid, and the workhouses funded. Relief through the workhouse system was simply overwhelmed by the enormous scale and duration of the famine. Nicolas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, wrote in October 1845:


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: On my most minute personal inspection of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined and testimony the most solemn can I tender, that in the great bulk of those fields all the potatoes sizable enough to be sent to table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the sure and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: For their respective inhabitants England, Holland, Scotland, Germany, are taking early the necessary precautions—getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal Government?


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone. Let those, too, who have sheep, and oxen, and haggards. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Infinitely more precious in the eyes of reason in the adorable eye of the Omnipotent Creator, is the life of the last and least of human beings than the whole united property of the entire universe. The appalling character of the crisis renders delicacy but criminal and imperatively calls for the timely and explicit notice of principles that will not fail to prove terrible arms in the hands of a neglected, abandoned starving people.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Dr. McEvoy, in his grim forebodings and apocalyptic fear, was closer to the truth than the sanguine rationalists quoted in the newspapers, but McEvoy, like many others, overestimated the likelihood of mass rebellion, and even this great clerical friend of the poor could hardly have contemplated the depth of social, economic and cultural destruction which would persist and deepen over the following century and beyond.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: It was politics that turned a disease of potatoes and tomatoes into famine, and it was politics which ensured its disastrous aftereffects would disfigure numerous future generations.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Total charitable donations for famine relief might have been about £1.5 million of which £856,500 came from outside Ireland. Donations within Ireland are harder to trace; £380,000 of donations were officially registered but once some allowance is made for less formal donations the Irish total probably exceeds that of Britain (£525,000). People of Irish descent also contributed to funds raised outside of Ireland and those donations would be included in the region where the donation was made. English Protestants donated more to Irish famine relief than any other source outside of Ireland.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Large sums of money were donated by charities; the first foreign campaign in December 1845 included the Boston Repeal Association and the Catholic Church Calcutta is credited with making the first larger donations in 1846, summing up to around £14,000. The money raised included contributions by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company. Russian Tsar Alexander II sent funds and Queen Victoria donated £2,000. According to legend, Sultan Abdülmecid I of the Ottoman Empire originally offered to send £10,000 but was asked either by British diplomats or his own ministers to reduce it to £1,000 to avoid donating more than the Queen. U.S. President James K. Polk donated $50 and in 1847 Congressman Abraham Lincoln donated $10 ($307 in 2019 value). Pope Pius IX also made a personal contribution of 1,000 Scudi (approximately £213) for famine relief in Ireland and authorized collections in Rome.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Most significantly, on 25 March 1847, Pius IX issued the encyclical Praedecessores nostros, which called the whole Catholic world to contribute moneywise and spiritually to Irish relief. Major figures behind international Catholic fundraising for Ireland were the rector of the Pontifical Irish College, Paul Cullen, and the President of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, Jules Gossin.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: International fundraising activities received donations from locations as diverse as Venezuela, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, Russia and Italy. In addition to the religious, non-religious organisations came to the assistance of famine victims. The British Relief Association was the largest of these groups. Founded on 1 January 1847 by Lionel de Rothschild, Abel Smith, and other prominent bankers and aristocrats, the Association raised money throughout England, America, and Australia; their funding drive was benefited by a "Queen's Letter", a letter from Queen Victoria appealing for money to relieve the distress in Ireland. With this initial letter, the Association raised £171,533. A second, somewhat less successful "Queen's Letter" was issued in late 1847. In total, the Association raised approximately £390,000 for Irish relief.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Private initiatives such as the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers) attempted to fill the gap caused by the end of government relief, and eventually, the government reinstated the relief works, although bureaucracy slowed the release of food supplies. Thousands of dollars were raised in the United States, including $170 ($5,218 in 2019 value) collected from a group of Native American Choctaws in 1847. Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper "Biskinik", wrote that "It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and they had faced starvation ... It was an amazing gesture." To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Contributions by the United States during the famine were highlighted by Senator Henry Clay who said; "No imagination can conceive—no tongue express—no brush paint—the horrors of the scenes which are daily exhibited in Ireland." He called upon Americans to remind them that the practice of charity was the greatest act of humanity they could do. In total, 118 vessels sailed from the US to Ireland with relief goods valued at $545,145. Specific states which provided aid include South Carolina and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania was the second most important state for famine relief in the US and the second-largest shipping port for aid to Ireland. The state hosted the Philadelphia Irish Famine Relief Committee. Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Moravian and Jewish groups put aside their differences in the name of humanity to help out the Irish. South Carolina rallied around the efforts to help those experiencing the famine. They raised donations of money, food and clothing to help the victims of the famine—Irish immigrants made up 39% of the white population in the southern cities. Historian Harvey Strum claims that "The states ignored all their racial, religious, and political differences to support the cause for relief."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Landlords were responsible for paying the rates of every tenant whose yearly rent was £4 or less. Landlords whose land was crowded with poorer tenants were now faced with large bills. Many began clearing the poor tenants from their small plots and letting the land in larger plots for over £4 which then reduced their debts. In 1846, there had been some clearances, but the great mass of evictions came in 1847. According to James S. Donnelly Jr., it is impossible to be sure how many people were evicted during the years of the famine and its immediate aftermath. It was only in 1849 that the police began to keep a count, and they recorded a total of almost 250,000 persons as officially evicted between 1849 and 1854.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into "voluntary" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854), the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons. While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of "voluntary" surrenders, she notes also that there was "precious little voluntary about them". In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, "cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November. The Mahon family of Strokestown House evicted 3,000 people in 1847 and were still able to dine on lobster soup.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, who owned over , was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying that "he would not breed paupers to pay priests". Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, he then used the cleared land as grazing farms. In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying that he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1847, Bishop of Meath, Thomas Nulty, described his personal recollection of the evictions in a pastoral letter to his clergy:


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The population in Drumbaragh, a townland in County Meath, plummeted 67 per cent between 1841 and 1851; in neighbouring Springville, it fell 54 per cent. There were fifty houses in Springville in 1841 and only eleven left in 1871.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: According to Litton, evictions might have taken place earlier but for fear of the secret societies. However, they were now greatly weakened by the Famine. Revenge still occasionally took place, with seven landlords being shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847. Ten other occupiers of land, though without tenants, were also murdered, she says.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: One such landlord reprisal occurred in West Roscommon. The "notorious" Major Denis Mahon enforced thousands of his tenants into eviction before the end of 1847, with an estimated 60 per cent decline in population in some parishes. He was shot dead in that year. In East Roscommon, "where conditions were more benign", the estimated decline in population was under 10 percent.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Lord Clarendon, alarmed at the number of landlords being shot and that this might mean rebellion, asked for special powers. Lord John Russell was not sympathetic to this appeal. Lord Clarendon believed that the landlords themselves were mostly responsible for the tragedy in the first place, saying that "It is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges ... but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future." The Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise, and additional troops were sent to Ireland.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The "Gregory clause", described by Donnelly as a "vicious amendment to the Irish poor law", had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, although not in advance. At first, the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as a valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective. According to Donnelly, it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was "indirectly a death-dealing instrument".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: At least a million people are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine. There were about 1 million long-distance emigrants between 1846 and 1851, mainly to North America. The total given in the 1851 census is 967,908. Short-distance emigrants, mainly to Britain, may have numbered 200,000 or more.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. The beginning of mass emigration from Ireland can be traced to the mid-18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland over a period of 50 years to settle in the New World. Irish economist Cormac Ó Gráda estimates that between 1 million and 1.5 million people emigrated during the 30 years between 1815 (when Napoleon was defeated in Waterloo) and 1845 (when the Great Famine began). However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with western Ireland seeing the most emigrants.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Families did not migrate "en masse", but younger members of families did, so much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigrations throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrants would send remittances (reaching a total of £1,404,000 by 1851) back to family in Ireland, which, in turn, allowed another member of their family to leave.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Emigration during the famine years of 1845–1850 was primarily to England, Scotland, South Wales, North America, and Australia. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the McCorkell Line. One city that experienced a particularly strong influx of Irish immigrants was Liverpool, with at least one-quarter of the city's population being Irish-born by 1851. This would heavily influence the city's identity and culture in the coming years, earning it the nickname of "Ireland's second capital". Liverpool became the only place outside of Ireland to elect an Irish nationalist to parliament when it elected T. P. O'Connor in 1885, and continuously re-elected him unopposed until his death in 1929. As of 2020, it is estimated that three quarters of people from the city have Irish ancestry.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Of the more than 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle, Quebec, an island in the Saint Lawrence River used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. Overcrowded, poorly maintained, and badly provisioned vessels known as coffin ships sailed from small, unregulated harbours in the West of Ireland in contravention of British safety requirements, and mortality rates were high. The 1851 census reported that more than half the inhabitants of Toronto were Irish, and, in 1847 alone, 38,000 Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, Hamilton, and Saint John also received large numbers. By 1871, 55% of Saint John residents were Irish natives or children of Irish-born parents. Unlike the United States, Canada could not close its ports to Irish ships because it was part of the British Empire, so emigrants could obtain cheap passage in returning empty lumber holds.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In America, most Irish became city-dwellers; with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The famine marked the beginning of the depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. The population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century; between 1831 and 1841, the population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. By the 1830s, they were seen as overly simplistic, and Ireland's problems were seen "less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment". The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: It is not known exactly how many people died during the period of the famine, although it is believed that more died from disease than from starvation. State registration of births, marriages, or deaths had not yet begun, and records kept by the Catholic Church are incomplete. One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s. A census taken in 1841 recorded a population of 8,175,124. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of over 1.5 million in 10 years. The census commissioners estimated that, at the normal rate of population increase, the population in 1851 should have grown to just over 9 million if the famine had not occurred.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: On the in-development "Great Irish Famine Online" resource, produced by the Geography department of University College Cork, the population of Ireland section states, that together with the census figures being called low, before the famine it reads that "it is now generally believed" that over 8.75 million people populated the island of Ireland prior to it striking.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, and the cause, season, and year of death. They recorded 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade and 400,720 deaths from diseases. Listed diseases were fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, smallpox, and influenza, with the first two being the main killers (222,021 and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the true number of deaths was probably higher:


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The greater the amount of destitution of mortality ... the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form;—for not only were whole families swept away by disease ... but whole villages were effaced from off the land.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Later historians agree that the 1851 death tables "were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality". The combination of institutional and figures provided by individuals gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Cormac Ó Gráda, referencing the work of W. A. MacArthur, writes that specialists have long known that the Irish death tables were inaccurate, and undercounted the number of deaths.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: S. H. Cousens's estimate of 800,000 deaths relied heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census and elsewhere, and is now regarded as too low. Modern historian Joseph Lee says "at least 800,000", and R. F. Foster estimates that "at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera in the latter stages of the holocaust". He further notes that "a recent sophisticated computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to 1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 ... after a careful critique of this, other statisticians arrive at a figure of 1,000,000".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Joel Mokyr's estimates at an aggregated county level range from 1.1 million to 1.5 million deaths between 1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. The true figure is likely to lie between the two extremes of half and one and a half million, and the most widely accepted estimate is one million.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of their relatives' deaths. Though the 1851 census has been rightly criticised as underestimating the true extent of mortality, it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine. The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories: famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases, the most commonly experienced were starvation and marasmus, as well as a condition at the time called dropsy. Dropsy (oedema) was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which, kwashiorkor, is associated with starvation.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: However, the greatest mortality was not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, these were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of nutrition. The best example of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest death toll. In the popular mind, as well as medical opinion, fever and famine were closely related. Social dislocation—the congregation of the hungry at soup kitchens, food depots, and overcrowded workhouses—created conditions that were ideal for spreading infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, and relapsing fever.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Diarrhoeal diseases were the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation, and dietary changes. The concluding attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera, which had visited Ireland briefly in the 1830s. In the following decade, it spread uncontrollably across Asia, through Europe, and into Britain, finally reaching Ireland in 1849. Some scholars estimate that the population of Ireland was reduced by 20–25%.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Ireland's mean age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.5 for men, where they had once been 21 for women and 25 for men, and those who never married numbered about 10% of the population; in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7. In the decades after the Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men, and as many as a third of Irishmen and a quarter of Irishwomen never married, due to low wages and chronic economic problems that discouraged early and universal marriage.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: One consequence of the increase in the number of orphaned children was that some young women turned to prostitution to provide for themselves. Some of the women who became Wrens of the Curragh were famine orphans.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The potato blight would return to Ireland in 1879, though by then the rural cottier tenant farmers and labourers of Ireland had begun the "Land War", described as one of the largest agrarian movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: By the time the potato blight returned in 1879, The Land League, which was led by Michael Davitt, who was born during the Great Famine and whose family had been evicted when Davitt was only 4 years old, encouraged the mass boycott of "notorious landlords" with some members also physically blocking evictions. The policy, however, would soon be suppressed. Despite close to 1000 interned under the 1881 Coercion Act for suspected membership. With the reduction in the rate of homelessness and the increased physical and political networks eroding the landlordism system, the severity of the following shorter famine would be limited.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: According to the linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux, surprisingly, for a country renowned for its rich musical heritage, only a small number of folk songs can be traced back to the demographic and cultural catastrophe brought about by the Great Famine, and he infers from this that the subject was generally avoided for decades among poorer people as it brought back too many sorrowful memories. Also, large areas of the country became uninhabited and the folk song collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not collect the songs they heard in the Irish language, as the language of the peasantry was often regarded as dead, or "not delicate enough for educated ears". Of the songs that have survived probably the best known is Skibbereen. Emigration has been an important source of inspiration for songs of the Irish during the 20th century.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir Robert Peel's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures within the strict rule of economical science".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, wrote a letter to Russell on 26 April 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief measures: "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act, which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6d in the pound levy on all rateable properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow-subjects to die of starvation". According to Peter Gray in his book "The Irish Famine", the government spent £7 million for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one per cent of the British gross national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the £20 million compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Other critics maintained that, even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote in 1860:


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a "dispensation of Providence"; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.