Join the Topsfield Town Library on Monday, March 11 as we welcome historian Sean Murphy. This lecture will focus on Ireland's Great Hunger/Great Famine of 1845-1852 (in Gaelic, An Gorta Mór), which led to the deaths of over one million Irish, and the emigration of another one to two million more. This is a virtual program that will held via Zoom.

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The lecture will examine the famine years to clarify the reasons why people died of starvation and disease while the food they produced was taken out of Ireland under armed guard, and the lasting effects of the famine 175 years later. For context, the population of Ireland in 1841 (before the famine) was approximately 8.2 million people. Ten years later, the population of Ireland had declined at least 20%; 175 years later, the population of the Island of Ireland still has not reached its pre-famine levels.

For Ireland the famine was existential: the death and destruction of rural Irish communities; the cataclysmic decline in the use of the Irish language; the post-famine emigration of an additional three million of people; the almost final destruction of its ancient customs and values that had sustained the people throughout their long history; and a psychological and sociological legacy that drove many to depths of despair that few can even imagine. The famine may have solved one of Britain's biggest fears associated with a rising Irish population, but it also brought closer the day when they would be forced, in the 1920's, to evacuate a large part of Ireland after 750 years of failed colonial rule.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Sean Murphy was born and reared in Dublin and came to live on Cape Cod in 2005. He has a passion for his homeland and loves to share his knowledge and interest about his heritage through classes, workshops and conversation. He worked as a math teacher in public schools until he retired in 2017. He is a teacher of Irish history, music, and dance. Over the past fifteen years he has taught courses at the Irish Cultural Center of New England in Canton, Cape Cod Sons of Erin, Cape Cod Cultural Center, the Cotuit Center for the Arts, and at venues on Nantucket.