The Great Famine of 1845-1851 killed over a million Irish people in all parts of Ireland, but it impacted the Catholic majority regions worst of all. For Catholic nationalists this event, known in Irish as Gorta Mor, came to symbolise everything bad about British rule and fuelled the struggle for independence. The British government viewed the potato blight as an act of God and the famine that followed the result of overpopulation and over-dependence on one crop, something they could do little to remedy.