Irish in New Zealand

About how many people came from Ireland because of the potato famine and the disease that spread after it?

Well shall we just go to that Irish entry and see what we can find here about that? Here is the Irish entry, and one of the things you can do is go down to a gallery down here that’s got all the different images and so forth in that entry. This gives you a map of where most people died from the potato famine. And what is interesting, if you look at this map, the part of Ireland where something like one in every two people died from the potato famine in the 1840s, is over here in the sort of western part of Ireland in an area called Connaught. And they had huge, huge death rates.

Now the interesting thing is that if we go and find out where people came to from Ireland to New Zealand, and I will see if I can find a map that shows that one, here we are. Now, this shows a map of where people came from to New Zealand, and what we found is that they didn’t come from Connaught at all. They either came from the far south west, from places like County Cork or County Kerry, right down the far south west, or up in the north east around Belfast. So the interesting thing is that although large numbers of people suffered from the potato famine in Ireland, most of them didn’t actually come to New Zealand, most of them got on boats and went [on a] very cheap fare across to America. And most of the people who came to New Zealand, actually came as gold miners, and they came a little bit later, after the famine, and they actually came from different areas. They came from the far south west and from the areas around Belfast. So the answer really is actually, very, very few people came to New Zealand as direct victims of the famine.

But of course, you know, everywhere in Ireland in the 19th century it was a pretty tough life. You know there wasn’t a lot to eat at any point in time, so there was a big incentive to come across to a place like New Zealand. And as I said a lot of them originally came as gold miners, and a lot of them came first of all to Australia, and then when the gold ran out in Australia, they came across to the West Coast and to Otago and worked as gold miners there.