Without question, the most traumatic event in nineteenth-century Ireland that affected practically the entire population in some way was the Great Famine of 1845–51. The Irish famine, also known among its many designations as “an Gorta Mór” in Irish (i.e., the Great Hunger), is generally estimated to have resulted in more than a million deaths and directly contributed to the emigration of nearly twice as many people—often under horrific conditions in their long voyage to distant lands—with large-scale emigration from Ireland continuing for decades to come. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ireland's population of four-and-a-half million was just over one-half of the island's population at the start of the century. The Great Famine, having directly touched the lives of nearly the entire population of the island in some form—as victims, observers, and/or those working to ameliorate the mass suffering of the population, and so on—became ingrained in the transmitted “historical” memory of subsequent generations of the Irish, constituting one of the most enduring components of so-called collective memory of the Irish at large, both in Ireland and in Irish diasporic communities. For the majority of those leaving Ireland during the famine and in the years immediately following the catastrophe, the famine was the most direct cause of their geographic and accompanying forms of dislocation, whether or not these emigrants found greater economic and/or social opportunities in their new diasporic settings, including in mainland Britain. Whereas in mainland Britain, the Irish transplants continued to be identified as “Irish,” or as ethnic sub-categories of the Irish population (such as “Anglo-Irish”), the diasporic Irish population elsewhere often assumed, or were accorded, new hyphenated identity labels (such as “Irish-Americans”). For the remaining ordinary Irish, whether or not internally displaced by the famine, the very soil and localities of Ireland were saturated with the melancholy memory of suffering and death. For decades, following the sharply dwindling population of villages and towns through death and the large-scale exodus of survivors during the famine, parts of the island, particularly in the hardest-hit western provinces, remained largely depopulated virtual ghostlands. With or without visible signposts, much of the land was pervaded with corpses of famine victims in rapidly expanded cemeteries and the remembrance of immense suffering and loss.