In November 2025 I began thinking seriously about how people outside academic settings learn about the Irish Famine.
So much of the knowledge about An Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger, seemed to exist in two places: held within universities, archives, and specialist scholarship, or scattered across the internet in fragments. For anyone who wanted to learn a fair, factual, and balanced history of the Famine, there was no single place to begin that was free, accessible to a variety of learning styles, and built for the public.
That frustration became the starting point for "The Great Irish Famine: History, Diaspora, and Global Legacy," the free online course developed by Dr. Elizabeth Stack and myself through Ireland Reaching Out in partnership with Alison, the Irish online education platform for higher education that provides certificate courses and accredited diploma courses.
I contacted Mike Feerick of Alison and Ireland Reaching Out and pitched the idea of creating an Irish Famine curriculum on Alison that could also connect learners with Ireland Reaching Out’s wider diaspora network.
The goal was to bridge people in Canada, America, Australia, Britain, and other parts of the world with a free educational tool that could also point them toward historians, genealogists, archives, and local knowledge in Ireland.
The course was launched as a free educational initiative designed to bring the history of An Gorta Mór to anyone who wanted to learn at their own pace and depth. It was built for different learning styles, with podcasts, videos, reading materials, graphics, and links to deeper resources. The course launched on May 18, the day after Irish Famine Commemoration Day in my hometown of Portumna, County Galway. To date, more than 200 learners are enrolled.
For me, the reason for building the course was straightforward, and it tied in closely with my own PhD research at Trinity College Dublin. As my research deepened, I kept returning to the same thought: if so much valuable material was already available online, why not help learners find it, understand it, and use it responsibly?
Most of the materials were freely accessible online. Some required subscriptions or access through libraries or institutions, but for serious researchers and scholars, those pathways were also worth identifying.
Irish Famine history should not be difficult to find, expensive to learn, or available only to people who already know which books to read, which archives to search, or which historians to follow.
This history belongs to the public. It belongs to descendants of Famine emigrants, to local historians, genealogists, educators, students, museum visitors, heritage organizations, and anyone willing to sit with the evidence and think seriously about what happened.
It also belongs to local communities far beyond Ireland. When people hear the words Irish Famine history, they often think first of Ireland itself: blighted fields, ruined cottages, workhouse records, eviction scenes, famine roads, mass graves, and ships leaving crowded ports.
That is where the story begins for most people, but it is not where the story ends. Tracing the roots of the conditions that made the crop failure so catastrophic was one of the most difficult parts of building the course.
Where and when did the Irish Famine really begin? And just as importantly, it did not end neatly on December 31, 1852. The aftereffects were felt economically, geographically, politically, and culturally long after the worst years of hunger had passed, sending ripples of change across the world as the Irish fled to foreign shores.
For millions of people in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Britain, Irish Famine history is local history. It is written into the ports where people arrived, the cemeteries where they were buried, the churches they built, the neighborhoods where they settled, the railways and canals they worked on, and the families and communities they formed.
That is also why local history becomes global history when we teach the Irish Famine properly. The Famine cannot be understood only as something that happened in Ireland during seven years of blight. It reshaped migration, labor, politics, religion, public health, urban life, family memory, burial practices, and community development across the world.
It is in the quarantine stations of Canada, New York, and Boston, to name only a few. It is in the immigrant neighborhoods of America, the industrial cities of England, and the orphan girl histories of Australia. It is in local archives, parish registers, cemetery records, ship lists, workhouse ledgers, newspapers, monuments, and family stories that are often passed down in fragments.
Dr. Elizabeth Stack and I wanted the course to reflect that wider geography of memory and evidence. We wanted learners to understand the Famine as Irish history, but also as diaspora history, migration history, public history, and local history in places far from Ireland.
We also wanted the course to act as a one-stop portal for learners who want to go deeper. The goal was to open doors into archives, eyewitness accounts, historical documents, visual sources, podcasts, videos, scholarly resources, memorial sites, and public history projects. A learner should be able to watch a lesson with a cup of coffee, listen to related material on a commute, return to a source they missed, or follow an archival thread into their own research.
The Irish Famine has too often been simplified. It is still reduced to a failed potato crop, a few familiar names, or a single story of hunger and emigration. Those versions may be easier to repeat, but they do not do justice to the dead, the survivors, or the millions of descendants across the diaspora. A serious public course has to make room for complexity without making the material so dense that ordinary learners feel shut out.
The course asks learners to think critically about the Famine in a fair and consistent way. It does not ask learners to accept one narrow interpretation. It asks them to examine evidence, consider multiple perspectives, and reach their own informed conclusions. That means looking at British government policy, landholding, poverty, ideology, workhouses, relief efforts, disease, eviction, migration, charity, resistance, public memory, and the long history of inequality that made Ireland so vulnerable before the blight arrived.
History will remember figures such as Charles Trevelyan and Queen Victoria, and it should. They are part of the story. But the system of failure that made the Famine so devastating began long before either of them was born. It grew out of centuries of land dispossession, colonial control, poverty, dependency, political exclusion, and unequal power. By the time potato blight arrived in 1845, millions of people were already living inside a fragile structure. The blight exposed that structure, and the response deepened the catastrophe.
More than 70 million people worldwide claim Irish heritage, and many trace family origins to the Famine period and the waves of emigration that followed. The course was created in part to help those learners connect family memory to wider historical forces, not in a sentimental way, but in a grounded way that respects both personal connection and historical evidence.
For someone in Montreal, Irish Famine history may be connected to Grosse Île, Black Rock, fever sheds, and the arrival of ships carrying sick and starving emigrants. For someone in New York, it may be connected to Staten Island quarantine burials, Five Points, parish communities, labor struggles, and immigrant politics. For someone in Liverpool, it may be connected to docks, poor relief, overcrowded housing, and Irish neighborhoods that changed the shape of the city. For someone in Sydney, it may be connected to the Earl Grey orphan girls, Hyde Park Barracks, assisted emigration, domestic service, and colonial life.
Those are not separate histories. They are connected histories. Local places hold pieces of a global story. This is at the heart of why Dr. Stack and I developed the curriculum. We wanted to create something useful, accurate, and accessible. We wanted a course that could serve adult learners, educators, genealogists, heritage organizations, museums, libraries, students, and descendants. We wanted learners to see that the Famine was not simply a tragedy of the past, but an event whose consequences shaped the modern Irish diaspora and the local histories of communities across the world.
The course is available free online through Alison, and learners who complete the assessment successfully can meet Alison’s completion requirements for graduate status. But I would encourage anyone taking the course not to rush through it simply to finish. Take your time with it. Follow the sources. Read eyewitness accounts. Look at the archival material. Listen for the voices of officials, emigrants, clergy, journalists, landlords, tenants, reformers, critics, and survivors.
The Irish Famine deserves to be understood as a layered catastrophe shaped by natural disaster, human systems, political choices, and moral failure. It also deserves to be studied as a global story, because wherever the Irish went, they carried the consequences of those years with them.
For millions of people, Irish Famine history is local history. That is why this course was developed after years of research and months of collaboration. It gives learners a free place to begin, and a serious way to keep going. There are more modules on the way. And, because Famine history is local history, you can’t get more local than you and a cup of coffee learning about the Great Hunger in your own home and at your own pace.
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