Rangers fans

[ONEDUNME]

I'm sorry chaps. I agree with the popular sentiment of this thread in that I think that using this sort of stuff to "wind up" fellow football fans is offensive and wrong but I can't help finding myself commenting on some of these claims. I'd hate the debate to be side tracked into people posting stuff from different websites in order to "prove" their point but some of the comments that I've read about the famine just defy belief.

It was however definitely a holocaust for the Irish. In 10 years from 1845 to 1855 ½ the population had died or emigrated

I've read a load of stuff and the estimates I've read range from well less than a million, up to about a million and a half dead in that time and facts such as the cholera epidemic during that time seem to be conveniently left out by some debators (even leaving aside other causes of death).

I suppose it depends where you get your "facts" from and which ones you chose to back up your point. The figures vary widely.


I've no doubt that you could find figures to show that the population was significantly lower after the famine but to attibute the reduction entirely to it is to conveniently ignores other causes of death and the massively reduced life expectancy compared to today.

Again, I don't mean to detract from the core issue which I agree entirely with. Nor from the part that my country played in the Irish famine (although that's just one line in a very long list of things not to be terribly proud of). I just think that with the historians disagreeing over the numbers involved, it's wrong to state numbers and percentages as if they are facts when it's impossible to say that they are.

[Kiko]

Thank fuck i support football for football and not all this rubbish of the past

[Wittmann 44]

I have probably overstated the short term effects of the famine's slightly but to say my statement defy's belief is overstating it in the other dirction - the population drop was 1/2 between the census of 1841 and 1901 with the population going from 8.2million to 4.4 million. These are figures from te very organised census the British govt ran every decade from 1821 on.

The exact numbers who died and emigrated will never be agreed on as the census records (detailed) between 1821 and 1891 were destroyed during fighting in the Civil War in 1922. A quick look at the headline numbers which were widely discussed and agreed after the Famine does give an idea of the scale of the population movement (death and emigration). All figures 32 counties (then 26 counties)

1821 - 6.8 M
1831 - 7.7 M
1841 - 8.2 M
1851 - 6.5 M
1861 - 5.7 M
1901 - 4.4 M (3.2 M 26 counties)

Assuming with some rough extrapolations the population in 1845 was probably around 8.5 M the 1855 population was probably somewhere around 6.1M - a drop of maybe 2.4M (28%) over the decade. This could be slightly higher or slightly lower. Numbers at this stage lose some meaning but if 28% of Burma's population was removed over a decade I think words like Holocast would probably be used.

The numbers of deaths I have seen as low as 775,000 and as high as 1,500,000. Cholera played a part but the population would have been a lot more resilient with food in its belly. As you say where you take your facts from makes a big difference as to how you will view it.

The whole area of estimateing population deaths during national traumas is pretty imprecise. The Soviets have officially revised the deaths during the WW2 of their citizens at least 4 times - usually when someone is trying to dicredit someone else. My wife has a diploma in epidemeolgy and has been involved in a number of studies of population movements including a number of controversial ones that have caused debates like this.