In all, the famine years consigned some one million people to the grave, a further million to emigration and probably condemned a further million to a half-life of poverty and near-starvation. Previously there had been heavy emigration from Ireland, particularly after the Napoleonic wars when agricultural prices fell steeply. But this swelling tide of human misery carried with it, to America in particular, a lasting characteristic of anti-British feeling that forms part of the tradition of continuing support for physical force which, to a degree, continues to assist the IRA today.
