. . . and famine and hatred
Kevin Myers
THE IRISH FAMINE by Colm Toibin and Diarmaid Ferriter Profile Books, £15, pp. 214. ISBN 1861972490 Here is a book I opened in trepidation, not because of what I know of the authors, but because the Famine in Ireland is rather like those provocations which turned mildmannered Bill Bixby into the Incredible Hulk, destroying cities with his teeth. The sweetest and most reasonable people can become profoundly unsweet and unreasonable when the subject of the Famine is broached, and it is not hard to see why.
The combined French experience of the two world wars, plus those in Algeria and Vietnam, does not even begin to compare with the scale of the calamity delivered to Ireland by the Famine. Some Irish observers, especially those who cherish oppression and woe as a badge of identity, insist the Famine was genocide, a fatuous expression which has of course been seized with glee by the professional Anglophobes in the USA. But one can see how conveniently the term comes to hand; after all, the entire cottier class vanished without trace almost overnight, and Ireland's demography and landscape were changed for ever.
The surprising truth about the Famine is how little work has been done on it by Irish historians. Whereas the Holocaust has generated a vast business park of scholarship, the Famine — the word always takes the upper case in Ireland — was for years barely more than a cottage industry in the country it ravaged. As Colm Toibin points out, the first official academic history of the Famine, to be 1,000 pages long and under the editorship of Robin (not Robert) Dudley Edwards, was commissioned by the Irish government in the early 1940s. It
finally appeared in 1956, a decade late, and was a thy and spiritless affair of just 436 pages. It took a non-academic Englishwoman, Cecil Woodham-Smith, to light the fire of ardent faminology in Ireland. with her impassioned work The Great Hunger.
Though it has its flaws, and its simplifications grate on modern sensibilities. The Great Hunger is one of the most important books in Irish historiography, most significantly in its influence on Irish academic historians: love it or hate it, they were obliged to react to it. Yet as Cormac 0 Grada has pointed out, vast areas of the Famine — the connection between relief, wages and work effort, the economic relationship between farmers and employees, the nature of the food distributed in soup kitchens, how many were saved by interventions, what was needed to have saved more, and the role of the middle classes in the Famine — still await serious research.
Recent history should have made the genocide school of Irish faminologists more measured in their judgments. In terms of available communications, roadless, trainless, telegraphless, C-130-less Mayo was infinitely further away from London in the 1840s than was Ethiopia from Europe in the 1980s — and how many hundreds of thousands of people died there 17 years ago? Nor was it merely a question of a technology deficit: how do you feed millions of people when an entire crop has vanished, not just for a season but for nearly five years, without completely destroying local agriculture and making the population permanently indigent?
Lord Clarendon shrewdly observed to Lord John Russell in 1847:
We shall equally be blamed for keeping [the Irish] alive or letting them die and we have only to select between the censure of the Economists or the Philanthropists — which do you prefer?
The question is as pertinent today. Remove the landlords and the British from the equation, the horrible truth — the unbearable, but unavoidable truth — remains: something was needed to cause the Irish to abandon lands to which they were passionately attached, and which they were occupying in economically and nutritionally unsustainable numbers.
What finally triggered this historically inevitable departure was the Famine, one of the most dreadful events in world history. Even now it is difficult to contemplate the details of this calamity without experiencing those deep emotions which hinder proper historical judgment. This is what makes Co1m Toibin's opening essay to this selection of contemporary documents quite outstanding. It is a very model of wisdom, of profound moral engagement and of scholarship, the very same qualities which inspired Diarmaid Ferriter's choice of documents. This small but brilliant book reaches right into the heart of the most tragic period in Irish history. I recommend it unreservedly.
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