Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), pp. 24–40

This article utilizes the recently-discovered archive of a firm of Irish land agents to investigate landlord-assisted emigration from some of the firm's client estates during the 1840s, and during the famine years in particular. Such emigration was not merely a response to starvation in Ireland: much of it was also a precondition for improvement of estates, especially in western parts of Ireland. It is concluded that landlord- assisted emigration during the famine was probably on a larger scale than modern historians have hitherto assumed: however, precise and verifiable estimates of the numbers involved will remain an impossibility. 

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