Staying Alive: Crime, Agency, and Trauma during the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852

This thesis argues that Famine-era criminality should be understood not simply as deviance but as a form of agency, revealing how the crisis of 1845/52 reshaped patterns of offending and turned law-breaking into a calculated response to hunger, displacement, and systemic neglect. Drawing on Irish prison registers from the agricultural year preceding the Famine (1844/5) and its worst year (1847/8), the study traces a marked shift in crime typologies across both rural Nenagh and urban Dublin, while the more limited records from Sligo also point to increased activity. For many of the destitute, crime became a survival strategy, whether through theft, imprisonment to secure food, or transportation as a route to a new life. Emigration offered another escape, though often at the cost of leaving families behind, some of whom resorted to crime out of necessity. By treating criminality as adaptive behaviour, the thesis challenges narratives of passive victimhood and highlights the resilience of individuals confronting catastrophe. It situates the Famine within wider debates in historical criminology, imperial governance, penal history, and the social consequences of mass crisis, while also engaging with current concerns over humanitarian response, systemic injustice, and inherited trauma. Tracing the lives of individual convicts across geographical and institutional contexts further uncovers the continuities linking British imperial control, carceral systems, and recurring patterns of hardship. Taken together, these findings offer fresh insight into how trauma, agency, and state power intersect in moments of crisis, and why the Famine remains deeply embedded in Irish historical identity today.