Irish famine

This paper reports on the Irish Famine project which continues the work done under the National Famine Commemoration Project (1996-99) and was conducted as part of the UCD Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive (IVRLA) series of demonstrator research projects. The principal investigators on the National Famine Commemoration Project were Mary E. Daly and Cormac Ó Gráda from UCD and David Dickson and David Fitzpatrick from Trinity College Dublin. The remit of the IVRLA demonstrator projects was to provide digital research resources and to show how digital repositories could not only provide access to archival research materials but could also present material in new ways and suggest themes for further research. Hence, the focus of the current IVRLA research project was on collecting the data from the earlier project into a form that can be easily accessible through the IVRLA. The original project covered workhouses in eight Poor Law unions; this project drew from original research reports for four of those unions (Ennistymon, Inishowen, Parsonstown, and Rathdrum) which had been compiled and researched by Andrés Eiríksson and Catherine Cox. Original data collected directly from the workhouses has been made available, together with tables and graphs analysing that data. This paper gives an overview of the sources from which data was collected for the original project, details the work done in creating the resource provided by the current IVRLA project, and offers a brief commentary on each of the four unions that have been dealt with as part of this project. Finally, it suggests ways in which this research resource could be further developed.