Great Potato Blight Of Ireland

Great Potato Blight Of Ireland. More than 1 million people died of starvation and disease during the irish potato famine (also known as the great famine), between 1845 and 1852—a. Many of the potatoes were found to have gone black and rotten and their leaves had withered.

The short term cause of the great famine was the failure of the potato crop, especially in 1845 and 1846, as a result of the attack of the fungus known as the potato. Although scientists have known that a funguslike organism caused the potato blight that triggered the great famine in ireland in the 1840s, they didn’t know.