The great tide of emigration, interrupted only by the American War of Independence (1775-83) and the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), continued into
the nineteenth century from all parts of Ireland.

Emigration (The Great Famine 1845-9)
The Great Famine of Ireland resulted in a mass exodus from Ireland. Between 1845 and 1850, more than a million Irish people starved to death while massive quantities of food were being exported from their country. A half million
were evicted from their homes during the potato blight,
and 1,500,000 starving and destitute people emigrated to America, Britain and Australia, often on board rotting, overcrowded "coffin ships".

This is the story of how that immense tragedy came to pass. Despite the disastrous state of Ireland before the Great Famine, emigration was slow and sporadic.
Between the years 1841-44, the numbers leaving
the country averaged about 50,000 a year. To leave
Ireland was regarded as the most dreadful of fates,
and transportation was a most dreaded sentence.

The second successive failure of the potato crop in 1846 produced a revolutionary change of attitude; now the Irish people, plagued by starvation and disease, saw emigration as the only escape from a land of death. In 1846, 106,000 people emigrated and this number increased in thousands yearly, reaching 1/4 of a million in 1851. Between the years 1845-55 two million people had emigrated, after which there was a gradual decline. However, emigration has continued to remain a significant social problem up to the present time.

A notable characteristic of the Great Famine exodus was that whole families rather than individuals emigrated, and all social classes resorted to emigration as a means of escape from death and destitution. The poorest cottiers were the first to leave followed by small-holders, then the better off farmers and town and city dwellers.

Tens of thousands of the very poorest emigrants, who could not afford the Trans-Atlantic passage, went across the Irish Channel to Britain. Many, probably the majority, never escaped from destitution. They became the tramps who were to wander around the towns and cities of Britain. They were not only poor, emaciated and unemployable, but often fever-ridden as well. During the period 1836-51 about 3/4 of the emigrants who left the country went to the United States, 19,000 went to Australia and the remainder went to Canada. Not all of them could afford to pay their own fare.

Famine emigrants were offered three types of assistance:

Emigrant Remittances.
Emigrants who had already settled abroad and managed to save, sent home money to enable other members of their family to join them in exile. Landlord Assisted Emigration Prior to the famine, landlords anxious to clear their estates of wasteful tillage and uncertain rents of cottiers, had been assisting tenants to emigrate as an alternative to eviction. There was however great resistance to going. The Great Famine was to change all that.

Poor Law Assisted Emigration.
This consisted of two schemes: an Orphan Emigration Scheme and a General Emigration Scheme. The general emigration scheme was introduced in 1849, in order to allow Boards of Guardians to help paupers to emigrate to America and Canada. People who were judged as able to work and who had been in the workhouse for over a year were eligible. Between 1849-51, 1592 men, women and children emigrated under the terms of this scheme.

The Orphan Emigration Scheme
In 1848 the government introduced an emigration scheme to encourage suitable orphans to go to Australia. By May 1848, 68 unions, including Ennistymon, had provided the Poor Law Commissioners with lists of children suitable for emigration. 4,175 female orphans and 967 males had been nominated. Girls were in greater demand than boys because of the shortage of women in Australia. It seems only girls went from Ennistymon Union.
In June 1850 the minutes of the board of Guardians record that "the emigrant girls from this union conducted themselves remarkably well on their voyage to Sydney". Again in April 1850 there is a letter from the Commissioners referring to the emigrant girls from the Ennistymon Union sent to Port Adelaide. This particular scheme lasted only two years and its termination was due to the increasing difficulties of finding work for girls who were quite untrained as domestic servants and a growing anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment in Australia.
Altogether, this scheme was responsible for sending 4,175 girls out from Irish workhouses. Sydney received 2,253; 1,255 went to Port Phillip; 606 to Adelaide and the remaining 61 to the Cape of Good Hope.
Source: The Census for Ireland for the Year 1851

According to the report of the Census Commissioners for 1841, the annual average emigration between 1831 and 1841 was 40,346, and from 30th June in the latter year to the end of 1845 it averaged 61,242 per annum. Such, however, was the effect of the potato blight and the warning voice of the pestilence, that the number rose to 105,955 in 1846, after which the emigration seemed to become an epidemic. In 1847 the numbers who left the country more than doubled those who departed in the previous year.
Owing to a slight lessening of the potato blight, and a consequent improvement in the harvest of 1847, there was an arrest of the exodus in the beginning of 1848, when the numbers who emigrated only amounted to 178,159; but in the following year they again rose to 214,425. In 1850 the amount of emigration was 209,054.

The emigration reached its highest point in 1851, when the numbers amounted to 249,721, after which they gradually decreased to 150,222 in 1854. Long after the extreme poor, the panic-stricken, and the destitute, had passed to other countries, or had found a refuge in the workhouses, or a rest in the grave; one could see the remarkable spectacle of whole families - usually well-dressed, intelligent-looking people - of all ages and sexes, the mere infant as well as the extremely aged, passing through the metropolis on the way to the emigrant vessel.

Not the least peculiar feature in the extensive emigration of this period was the amount of money transmitted to their friends in Ireland by those who had already gone away - remittances which rose from the sum of £460,000, in 1848, to £1,404,000, in 1852, and according to the reports of the Emigration Commissioners, amounted in contributions, either in the form of prepaid passages, or of money sent home by the Irish emigrants, from 1848 to 1854, both inclusive, to as much as £7,520,000 - remittances "which afford so honorable a testimony of the self-denial and affectionate disposition of the Irish’.

Source: The Census for Ireland for the Year 1851.

This concentration, compared with the dispersion which uniformly occurs when unoccupied land can be had for nothing, greatly accelerates the attainment of prosperity, and enlarges the fund which may be drawn upon for further emigration. Before the adoption of the Wakefield system, the early years of all new colonies were full of hardship and difficulty: the last colony founded on the old principle, the Swan River settlement, being one of the most characteristic instances. In all subsequent colonization, the Wakefield principle has been acted upon, though imperfectly, a part only of the proceeds of the sale of land being devoted to emigration: yet wherever it has been introduced at all, as in South Australia, Victoria, and New Zealand, the restraint put upon the dispersion of the settlers, and the influx of capital caused by the assurance of being able to obtain hired labor, has, in spite of many difficulties and much mismanagement, produced a suddenness and rapidity of prosperity more like fable than reality.