THE ULSTER CONFLICT resumed its role as a major orgarnzmg force in uniting the peasantry and the middle classes into what was a nascent nationalist movement. By 1840 many members of the AngloIrish Ascendancy in the south saw that their economic base was being eroded and they began to seek out alternatives. One group under the leadership of Thomas Davis saw the best chance for them was join the Repeal movement and influence its development so that it would produce a secular democratic nation in which they could take a leading role. Davis founded the radical Young Ireland section of the movement and he was tolerated by O'Connell for several years until they clashed over the education issue. Davis imagined that the nationalist movement would opt for co-denominational education so that religious differences could be overcome in the new nation, but O'Connell opted uncompromisingly for religious control of education. Davis tried to oppose this line within the Repeal organisation but he was decisively defeated. O'Connell's main contribution to the debate was to remark that Davis was a Protestant. THE FAMINE OF THE 1840s. By now another catastrophic fact of Irish history was altering the equation of forces within the southern nationalist movement: the famine of the 1840s. The main effect of the famine was to alter the structure of the social classes in the south for the rest of the century. The main cause of the famine was repeated failures in the potato crop which was the main staple in the diet of the landless labourers and the « cottier » class. Between 1845 and 1851 the number of labourers and cottiers fell by 40%, the number of farmers by 20%; at least 800,000 people, about 10% of the population, died from hunger and disease consequent on reduced resistance to fever. Combined with a related upsurge in emigration (mainly to America and English colonies such as Australia and Canada) this reduced the total population of Ireland from an all-time high of 8 million before the famine to 6.6 million in 1851. Judged against the standard of pre-industrial sussistence arises, there was nothing unique about these figures; indeed the death rate had often been equalled in European famines of the previous century including the Irish famine of 1740/41, but previously population had usually recovered rapidly. In Ireland however it continued to decline, from 6.6 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1911, and the population has 79
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