Why was my reply cut, the Penal Laws contain half as much again.

In 1839 a French visitor to Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont, wrote, " In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered, but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland.
To explain the social condition of such a country, it would be only necessary to recount its miseries and its sufferings, the history of the poor is the history of Ireland.

From the 15th through the 19th centuries, successive English monarchies and governments enacted laws designed to suppress and destroy Irish manufacturing and trade.
These repressive Acts, coupled with the Penal Laws, reduced the Irish people to dire poverty in a direct and puposeful way.

The destitute Irish then stood at the very brink of the bottomless pit.When the potato blight struck in 1845, it was time for the final push.

The famine initiated a century of population decline, the famine was responsible for the great fow of emigration, so that by 1900 the Irish population was 4 and a half million, the English population in that time rose from 12 million to 50 million.