December 29

A violent easterly storm introduced the ‘Great Frost’, prelude to the first major famine in modern Irish history. Unlike the Great Famine (1845–9), which mainly affected people dependent on the potato, the eighteenth-century event was a meteorological one that affected all classes. The frost lasted some seven weeks. All the major rivers—the Liffey, the Shannon, the Boyne—froze over in days and the entire eco-system was traumatised. Sheep and cattle perished from the cold and lack of fodder, and the entire potato crop was wiped out. When the thaw finally arrived, it was followed by months of drought, leading to rocketing food prices. By Christmas 1740 food prices had reached record levels and people were starving. Landlords, local clergy and the authorities sponsored relief schemes but failed to check the tide of hunger. The catastrophe reached its climax in the spring and summer of 1741, when a cluster of deadly diseases—smallpox, dysentery and typhus—began to appear, initially amongst the undernourished poor and, in the case of typhus, amongst the wealthy as well. Revd Philip Skelton, a curate in Monaghan, wrote about ‘whole parishes left almost desolate’ and ‘the dead being eaten in the fields by dogs for want of people to bury them’. Then, in September 1741, a series of abnormal floods swept the country, seemingly purging the land of disease, and the subsequent harvest was reckoned to be the best for 60 years. During the 21 months of the crisis between 310,000 and 480,000 people perished out of a total population of c. 2.5 million—in relative terms more devastating than the Great Famine a century later.