According to the Census returns, the deaths from the several causes connected with the famine were as follows in the respective years:

Year Fever Dysentery
(with Diarrhoea)		 Starvation
1845 7,249 — —
1846 17,145 5,492 2,041
1847 57,095 25,757 6,058
1848 45,948 25,694[522]}9,395
1849 39,316 29,446[523]
1850 23,545 19,224 —

According to this table, fever caused more deaths than dysentery. But there are reasons for thinking that the deaths from dysentery, anasarca and other slow effects of famine and bad food really made up more of the extra mortality of the famine-years than the sharp fever itself. In the returns from the workhouses, dysentery is actually credited with about one-half more deaths than fever. It is known that most of the mortality at the beginning of the famine, the winter of 1846-47, was from dysentery and allied chronic forms of sickness. Dysentery also followed the decline of the relapsing-fever epidemic of 1847-48. Dillon, of Castlebar, says that many, who had gone through the fever in the autumn of 1847, fell into dysentery in 1848, during which year it was very prevalent. Mayne says that dysentery often attacked those recovering from fever, and proved fatal to them[524]. In the General Hospital of Belfast the fatality of fever-cases was 1 in 8, “but this included dysentery.” Probably the same explanation should be given of the high rates of fatality in the Fever Hospital of Ennis, the chief centre of relief for the greatly distressed county of Clare: 1846, 1 in 12½; 1847, 1 in 5¾; 1848, 1 in 5½.

It will be noticed that some thousands of deaths were put down to starvation in the Census returns. Perhaps a more technical nosological term might have been found for a good many of these, such as anasarca or general dropsy. But even if physicians had made the returns, instead of the priests or relatives, they would have put many into a nondescript class, for which starvation was a sufficiently correct generic name. Scurvy was another disease of malnutrition which was far from rare during the famine; the deaths actually set down to that cause were some hundreds over the whole period.

The deaths from all causes in the decennial period covered by the Census of 1851 were 985,366. But these returns were made, as we have seen, on a population which had been reduced by a fourth part in the course of ten years, so that they fall considerably short of the reality. If the population of Ireland had multiplied at the same rate as that of England and Wales from 1841 to 1851, namely, 1·0036 per cent. per annum, it should have been 9,018,799 in the year 1851; but it was only 6,552,385. Emigration beyond the United Kingdom had averaged 61,242 persons per annum from the 30th of June, 1841, to the 31st December, 1845; next year, 1846, it rose to 105,955, in 1847 it was “more than doubled,” in 1848 it was 178,159, in 1849, 214,425, in 1850 it was 209,054, and in 1851 it touched the maximum, 249,721. Nearly a million emigrated in the six years preceding the date of the Census, and there was besides a considerable migration to Liverpool, Glasgow, London and other towns of England and Scotland. It is probable that emigration accounts for two-thirds of the decrease of inhabitants revealed by the Census of 1851; but the extra mortality of the famine years, or the deaths over and above the ordinary deaths in Ireland during a decennial period, can hardly be estimated below half a million.

Decrease of Typhus and Dysentery after 1849.

The potato famines of 1845-48 were a turning-point in the history of Ireland. From that time the population has steadily declined and the well-being of the people steadily improved. By the Census of 1871 the population was 5,386,708, by that of 1881 it was 5,144,983, by that of 1891 it was 4,704,750. Registration of births and deaths, which began in 1864, shows the following samples:

Year Births Deaths
1867 144,318 98,911
1871 151,665 88,720
1880 128,010 102,955
1888 109,557 85,892

The enormous amount of pauperism which followed the great famine was at length brought within limits: from 1866 to the present time it has been marked by a steady increase of out-door relief, and by some increase in the numbers within the Union Workhouses; the out-door paupers have increased from 10,163 on 1 Jan., 1866, to 53,638 on 1 Jan., 1881, the absolute number of indoor paupers having remained, on an average of good and bad years, somewhat steady in a declining population.