Despite the centrality of the Great Famine in Irish history, the politics of food supply during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received little historical attention, unlike Britain, Europe, and the USA. This dissertation assesses Ireland’s food supply politics in peacetime between 1895 and 1914 and during wartime conditions until 1923. Quantitative analysis of poor law relief data creates the first proxy measure of late nineteenth-century food supply levels. The measure establishes that contrary to the historiographical view, the 1898 food supply crisis was the most severe of three crises in the 1890s. A qualitative exploration of the 1898 crisis delivers the first comprehensive synthesis of the politics of food shortage since the Great Famine. It reveals the deeply politicised interplay of the cooperative movement, government, parliamentarians, clergy, nuns, shopkeepers, English women, Irish activists, newspapers and photography. Uniquely, this research identifies how William O’Brien and Michael Davitt successfully exploited the 1898 food crisis for their early mobilisation of the United Irish League. It also examines two food supply crises in the 1900s, school meals activism and Roger Casement’s funding of school meals in Connemara. This research demonstrates that Britain pursued two equally important strategic needs in Ireland during the First World War — military recruitment and food exports. It creates the first history of how the government gradually but firmly sequestered control of Ireland’s food production and supply away from the free market. It also uncovers how, a year before the Dáil Éireann counter state, the Sinn Féin Food Department operated nationwide in early 1918 as an executive — governmental — authority, purchasing, storing and distributing food supplies. Analysis of food supply dynamics provides new insights into the complex transition from constitutional to advanced nationalist politics and the early contrasting food supply fortunes of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.