Ireland and immigration
Since the British, Acts of Union 1801, Ireland had been under the control of officials who had been hand picked by the British Government. The British and the Irish Catholics have always had a sort of tumultuous relationship.Catholicism in general has been the cause of many wars in the United Kingdom, and all around the world for that matter.This was especially true throughout the 1830’s, a decade that “opened with plague and closed with rebellion”.
From 1801 to the mid-1840s, English landlords who had been given land in Ireland began forcing their new ‘subjects’ to pay taxes, for the use of land. Ireland was already an extremely poor nation, “in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water”.
It was with the arrival of ‘Phytophtrora infestans’, also known as ‘dry rot’, that the entire nation of Ireland was flipped on its head. The Great Irish Famine, was a time that can be characterized by mass starvation, illness , and emigration. As the first crops began to fail in 1845, this signaled the dawn of a new age in both Ireland and, consequently, North America.