> No matter what degree of culpability should be assigned to Britain, the consequences of the famine to Ireland are indisputable: it broke the nation in half. At a million or more fatalities, it was one of the deadliest famines in history, in terms of percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost forty million people. Only the famine of 1918-22 in the Soviet Union may have been worse.
> Within a decade of the blight another two million fled Ireland. Many more followed in subsequent decades, inexorably driving its population down. The nation never regained its footing. As late as the 1960s its population was half what it had been in 1840.
> Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.
-- Transcribed from the book "1493" by Charles C. Mann.
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