Editing Great Famine (Ireland) (section)

==After the famine==

{{Main|Legacy of the Great Irish Famine}}

Ireland's mean age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.5 for men, where they had once been 21 for women and 25 for men, and those who never married numbered about 10% of the population;<ref>{{cite book |last=Lee |first=Joseph J. |date=2008 |title=The Modernization of Irish Society, 1848–1918 |page=3 |isbn=}}</ref> in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7.<ref>{{cite book |last=Mokyr |first=Joel |date=2013 |title=Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800–1850 |publisher=[[Routledge]] |page=72 |isbn=}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=O'Neill |first=Kevin |date=2003 |title=Family and Farm in Pre-Famine Ireland: The Parish of Killashandra |publisher=[[University of Wisconsin Press]] |page=180 |isbn=}}</ref> In the decades after the Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men, and as many as a third of Irishmen and a quarter of Irishwomen never married, due to low wages and chronic economic problems that discouraged early and universal marriage.<ref>{{cite book |last=Nolan |first=Janet |date=1986 |title=Ourselves Alone: Women's Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920 |publisher=[[University Press of Kentucky]] |pages=74–75 |isbn=}}</ref>

One consequence of the increase in the number of orphaned children was that some young women turned to prostitution to provide for themselves.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Luddy |first=Maria |title=Prostitution and Irish society, 1800–1940 |date=2007 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=978-0-521-88241-5 |location=Cambridge |oclc=154706356}}</ref> Some of the women who became [[Wrens of the Curragh]] were famine orphans.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Luddy |first=Maria |date=1992 |title=An outcast community: the 'wrens' of the curragh |journal=Women's History Review |language=en |volume=1 |issue=3 |pages=341–355 |doi=10.1080/09612029200200014|issn=0961-2025 |doi-access=free}}</ref>

The potato blight would return to Ireland in 1879, though by then the rural cottier tenant farmers and labourers of Ireland had begun the "[[Land War]]", described as one of the largest [[agrarianism|agrarian]] movements to take place in nineteenth-century Europe.<ref name="cambridge.org"/>

By the time the potato blight returned in 1879, The Land League, which was led by [[Michael Davitt]], who was born during the Great Famine and whose family had been evicted when Davitt was only 4 years old, encouraged the mass [[Boycott#Etymology|boycott]] of "notorious landlords" with some members also physically blocking evictions. The policy, however, would soon be [[Plan of Campaign|suppressed]]. Despite close to 1000 interned under the [[Protection of Persons and Property Act 1881|1881 Coercion Act]] for suspected membership. With the reduction in the rate of [[homelessness]] and the increased physical and political networks eroding the [[landlordism]] system, the severity of [[Irish Famine (1879)|the following shorter famine]] would be limited.<ref name="muse.jhu.edu"/>

According to the linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux, surprisingly, for a country renowned for its rich musical heritage, only a small number of folk songs can be traced back to the demographic and cultural catastrophe brought about by the Great Famine, and he infers from this that the subject was generally avoided for decades among poorer people as it brought back too many sorrowful memories. Also, large areas of the country became uninhabited and the folk song collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not collect the songs they heard in the Irish language, as the language of the peasantry was often regarded as dead, or "not delicate enough for educated ears". Of the songs that have survived probably the best known is [[Skibbereen (song)|Skibbereen]]. Emigration has been an important source of inspiration for songs of the Irish during the 20th century.<ref name="Falc'her-Poyroux"/>