West Cork and North Tipperary

Abstract

West Cork was an outstanding and clear-cut version of the wider Irish experience, before and after the Famine. North Tipperary was not the most famine-ravaged part of Ireland, but it became the most turbulent. By the 1830s, Ireland was already becoming a primary supplier of emigrants to the great and insatiable needs of the United States. Emigration from south-west Ireland in the decades between 1770 and 1830 followed a clear sequence in the rural transformation. First came the amassment of population without any appreciable relief by migration. Much more significant was the emigration of Richard Talbot in 1818 from Tipperary to Upper Canada. T.J Elliott discovers the pathways and passages to America of the Protestant emigrants: using methods of family reconstruction and historical biography, he connects both ends of the ‘migration corridors’.