A deeply stricken country

When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says everything about the book, claims that ‘fully a quarter’ of Ireland’s population died of starvation or emigrated. John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking puts the proportion at one third. There is a huge difference between one third and one quarter. Which is correct?

There is also much emotion. Coogan writes:

If ever one required an object lesson as to the validity of a saying I first heard in Vietnam — ‘when elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled and the people are the grass’ — one need look no further than Ireland.

But if the analogy is to make any sense at all, who are the elephants? Again, Coogan quotes A.J.P. Taylor in one of his wilder moments, making the comparison with Belsen: ‘All Ireland was a Belsen.’ John Kelly cites the literary critic Terry Eagleton calling the famine ‘the greatest social disaster of 19th-century Europe — an event with something of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack’. Since no such low-level attack has ever taken place, how can it be used for purposes of comparison with a famine or anything else?

Fortunately the third of these books does not deal in such nonsense. Cork University Press’s Atlas of the Great Irish Famine is a sober and serious undertaking, and a great deal of thought, industry, ingenuity and money has gone into it. There are 700-odd pages, over 200 specially compiled maps as well as many drawings and photographs, some of which are beautiful as well as fascinating.