Analysis: New research shows how the long‑term health impacts of the Famine varied by region and socioeconomic conditions
By Eoin McLaughlin, Heriot-Watt University and Chris Colvin, Queen's University Belfast.
We set out to understand how a disaster as terrible as the Great Irish Famine (1845–1852), one of the worst famines in history, can affect the long‑term health of the people who survived it. Logically, one might think that a famine would simply leave everyone in poor health.
But we found something surprising as we examined the data. In the hardest‑hit areas, the survivors did not display the expected stunting in height usually associated with malnutrition and disease. In some regions, the survivors' average adult height was comparable to—or even slightly greater than—that of individuals born before or after the Famine. This unexpected outcome led us to ask: How can a disaster that kills so many also leave behind survivors who appear physically "healthier" in one key way?
Scarring vs selection
When a famine strikes, two distinct processes may affect those growing up during that period. First, there is "scarring". This refers to the lasting damage that insufficient nutrition and widespread disease can cause during early childhood. With scarring, children born during a famine may not reach their full genetic potential for height because they were malnourished during a key developmental stage. In our study, this would show up as a drop in the average adult height of the Famine-born generation.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Breandán Mac Suibhne talks about his book The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland
The second process is "selection". In an extremely severe famine, only the strongest children survive. In other words, if the Great Irish Famine was harsh enough that many vulnerable children did not make it to adulthood, then the group of survivors would be composed largely of more physically robust individuals. In that case, even if the Famine created extreme hardship, the surviving population might not show the expected stunting because the frailest never survived long enough to be measured.
Our research set out to untangle these two effects by comparing the heights of individuals born before, during, and after the Famine across Ireland.
What prison registers tell us about height
To get a clear picture, we turned to an unusual yet valuable source of data: prison registers from Dublin and Clonmel. These records were kept by prison administrators in the 19th century to keep track of the prison population and include detailed information on each prisoner’s height, age, birthplace, occupation, religion and the nature of their crime.
Importantly, the registers provide us with individual‑level data for over 14,500 subjects born in the years surrounding the Famine. In the absence of other historical sources of individual-level health data, these prison registers are a surprisingly valuable to historians, economists and epidemiologists.
Adult height is widely accepted by as a measure of early‑life health. The period that human biologists have found to have most impact on adult height is what happens in utero. For our purposes, height serves as a proxy for the nutritional and health conditions during the crucial period from conception to the age of two. By comparing cohorts born before, during, and after the Famine, we can assess how early‑life conditions affected survivors in the long run.
Urban Dublin versus rural Tipperary
One of our most striking findings emerged from comparing different regions of Ireland. In urban areas like Dublin, where the Famine's direct death toll was much lower, the surviving children experienced what appears to be a clear scarring effect. In Dublin, those born during the Famine were, on average, about 0.7 centimetres (0.27 inches) shorter than those born before or after. This is a large number and suggests that insufficient nutrition and disease led to long‑term stunting in Dublin, where most vulnerable children survived.
By contrast, in rural areas such as Tipperary, the Famine was much more severe: excess mortality there was 35 per 1,000 population. With significantly higher mortality, most of the frail or vulnerable children did not survive.
In these regions, selection effects dominated: only the healthiest children survived, and as a result, there was little or no detectable drop in average population height. In fact, some of our statistical analyses even suggest that survivors from these severely affected rural regions were slightly taller than expected. In other words, the extreme nature of the Famine in Tipperary meant that the survivors were a highly selected group.
The role of migration to the city
Many families in rural areas attempted to escape the harsh conditions by moving to cities or emigrating abroad. This movement further "selected" the survivors in each region. In Dublin, net immigration meant that the urban population included many rural migrants—those who were forced to migrate because of malnutrition, and who were therefore less healthy than those who could remain in rural areas and who then survived into adulthood. This contributed to the overall drop in height among urban survivors.
Our study shows that the long‑term health impact of the Great Irish Famine is not straightforward. In regions where the Famine was less deadly, most vulnerable children survived into adulthood but suffered lasting effects, such as stunted growth. Meanwhile, in the most severely-affected regions of Ireland, the extreme loss of life meant that only the fittest survived, masking the damage by creating a population that, on average, appears healthier in terms of height. In essence, the Famine produced both scarring and selection, with the balance between these two forces varying by region and socioeconomic conditions.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The History Show, Blighted Nation explores how the Great Famine swept through Ireland in the mid 1800s and changed the country forever
Stunted growth is all we can measure from our archival sources, but we know from other works in the field of human biology that stunting has severe health consequences, is correlated with reduced cognitive abilities, and is also associated with worse mental health. Economists have also shown that shorter individuals earn less than taller individuals within the same population group.
These findings are important for how we understand catastrophic events today. When assessing the long‑term consequences of disasters—whether they are natural, man‑made, or climate‑related—we must account for the fact that survivors are not a random sample of the pre‑disaster population. Instead, the surviving group is "selected" in ways that can obscure underlying health deterioration. Our work uses a well-known historical context to provide a framework for disentangling these effects, which can inform future studies on the impacts of extreme events on population health and human capital.
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Prof Eoin McLaughlin is Professor of Economics and Head of Research in the Department of Accountancy, Economics, and Finance in the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University. He is a former Research Ireland awardee. Dr Chris Colvin is a Reader in the Centre for Economic History at Queen's University Belfast. He is part of a HEA-funded North-South Research Programme grant that helped establish the Centre for Economics, Policy and History.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
