The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy

by Tim Pat Coogan

Paper Book, 2012

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A painful and infuriating examination of the root (no pun intended) causes of the 19th century Irish potato harvest failure and the subsequent famine that changed the face of Ireland forever. Coogan is following in the footsteps of the great Cecil Woodham Smith, whose The Great Hunger laid the

ultimate blame for the depth of the tragedy at the feet of the British government, which refused to provide sufficient if any relief for the millions of starving Irish. Both Woodham Smith and Coogan carefully document the ways in which British society at the time considered the Irish little better than animals, perhaps explaining but not excusing the appalling lack of intervention. Coogan goes a bit further, discussing in minute detail specific members of the British government and related staff who he feels were most responsible for the extent of the suffering. It's a difficult book to read at time, with its heart-searing descriptions of desperate Irish peasants and its rage-inducing condemnation of British governmental attitudes. Well worth reading for anyone who wants to dig deeper (pun again not intended) into this dark time in Anglo-Irish relations.

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During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diasporaof nearly 80 million people today.… (more)