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The Great Famine: Ireland's Agony 1845-1852 Hardcover – August 4, 2011

by Ciarán Ó Murchadha (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 27 ratings
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Over one million people died in the Great Famine, and more than one million more emigrated on the coffin ships to America and beyond. Drawing on contemporary eyewitness accounts and diaries, the book charts the arrival of the potato blight in 1845 and the total destruction of the harvests in 1846 which brought a sense of numbing shock to the populace. Far from meeting the relief needs of the poor, the Liberal public works programme was a first example of how relief policies would themselves lead to mortality. Workhouses were swamped with thousands who had subsisted on public works and soup kitchens earlier, and who now gathered in ragged crowds. Unable to cope, workhouse staff were forced to witness hundreds die where they lay, outside the walls. The next phase of degradation was the clearances, or exterminations in popular parlance which took place on a colossal scale. From late 1847 an exodus had begun. The Famine slowly came to an end from late 1849 but the longer term consequences were to reverberate through future decades.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    272 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Bloomsbury Academic
  4. Publication date
    August 4, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    6.1 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1847252176
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1847252173
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr Ciaran O Murchadha is based at the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His book about a single community in County Clare during the Great Famine — Sable Wings Over the Land — was published in 1998.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic; 1st edition (August 4, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847252176
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847252173
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 27 ratings

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Ciarán Ó Murchadha

Ciarán Ó Murchadha

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
27 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Joel C
5.0 out of 5 stars Adds greatly to my understanding of background, causes, handling, effects.
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2014
Verified Purchase
Outstanding summary, clearly written in language for an "amateur" like me. Helpful in understanding more about the possible scenarios for 4 great grandparents' emigration from very different parts of Ireland in the mid 1800s. I know I will return to this book as a great reference.
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Alphonse
5.0 out of 5 stars "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine." John Mitchel, 1861.
Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2015
Mitchel was "transported" (exiled) to Bermuda for 14 years for speaking the truth. Tim Pat Coogan will suffer no such fate for writing: "The Famine Plot; England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy." In America, he will suffer worse: the vast majority will never hear of, let alone read, his book. Of those of who do, almost all will view it as either a tale of "Olde Tyme Irelande" or as a political critique of, and only pertaining to, early Victorian England.

Coogan makes a well-researched, well-argued case for Mitchel's aphorism. Moreover, the faults of London's politicians and bureaucrats persist today, whenever government exploits tragedy to advance narrow, ideological, and partisan goals at the expense of ordinary citizens and in favor of the wealthy elite. It is a case history that Coogan's book can best assist our understanding of present day political culture.

The English Government, particularly after Russell succeeded Peel as Prime Minister in June 1847, put forward a number of reasons why it would not relieve Ireland's distress - even though Ireland, de jure, was an integral part of the so-called United Kingdom. I will summarize Coogan's arguments, which he includes as part of his chronological assessment, instead by topics.

Capitalism

Most Irish farmers were tenants, farming plots rented from often absentee landlords. Those landlords believed (often rightly) that they could receive more money if the small farms were extinguished, and the land use for "big farming" - cattle and export crops. The famine, though death and emigration, accomplished their goals.

Laissez faire economics

Prime Russel's Whigs were great proponents of laissez faire economics and the philosophies of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. So much so, they opposed food assistance as it would lower the price received by merchants. Nor was thought given to retaining food in Ireland - food exports continued in accordance with "sacrosanct" contracts. When at last public work programs were put in place, the roads were built in wildernesses -- "Boithre an ocrais (roads of hunger)" (p. 109), to not give private road builders competition.

Opposition to Government Welfare

Only with great reluctance did Russell's government provide welfare, and usually only under limited and demeaning circumstances, namely the infamous Dickensian workhouses. Coogan cites England's senior bureaucrat (Trevelyan) as asserting that any wages paid for public works should be lower the prevailing wage, and only enough to keep away starvation. (p. 108) Recipients of welfare were to be destitute, devoid of even the smallest plot of land on which subsistence could be made. The governing philosophy was that poor relief (welfare) must be "penal and repulsive" - Treveleyan again. (p. 117), ignoring the overcrowded and diseased conditions of the workhouse that prevailed in reality. Instead, the Whigs and their favorite newspaper, The Times (of London) imagined as late as 1848, after a million Irish had died or emigrated in "coffin ships" that the Irish "are sitting idle at home, basking in the sun, telling stories, going to fairs, plotting, rebelling, wishing death to the Saxon," all born "on the shoulders of the hard working" Englishman (p. 213).
Racism

Coogan does not spare his readers the racist epithets of the English leadership, wherein such lights of the Victorian age as Disraeli, Punch magazine, and many others lesser known to an American audience compared the Irish to apes and rats. In a passage reminiscent of W's "they hate our freedoms," Disraeli proclaimed, "The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion." (p. 57)
Austerity

Coogan underscores as well the objection of HMG to relief on the grounds of government expense. It is somewhat difficult to parse from Coogan what would have been the expense of a responsive plan, one that would have spared the Irish from the famine. It appears, however, to be on the scale of 15 million pounds - roughly the UK's annual defense budget, or 1/4th the total financial cost to the UK of its wholly unnecessary and thoroughly unproductive prosecution of the Crimean war ten years after the Famine.
Conclusion

There is much, much more in Coogan's magnificent book, and I whole-heartedly recommend to anyone interested in Irish history, English politics, or political behavior and philosophy in general.
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M. Lucey Bowen
5.0 out of 5 stars Must be added to your Irish shelf
Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2011
for two reasons:
1. Best use of primary sources: full range of contemporary newspaper accounts, workhouse records etc.
2. Best contemporary, deeply felt, not-just-academic review of older and recent historians of the Famine.
Ovid said "Everything changes, nothing dies." So it is with history. We have to think it again and again from time-to-time as painful as that may be. Closure is for doors.
10 people found this helpful
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Tony Marquise Jr.
3.0 out of 5 stars No Heart
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2014
This book has no heart. By this I mean that, while it gives a fairly comprehensive histoy of the potato famine in Ireland(1842-1852), the prose does not match the human tragedy. It is almost like reading tables of facts and figures. In truth, the famine was like a second "Black Death" that visited this country. While figures vary, the population of Ireland was reduced by at least a third(I have read of higher percentages in other books). Half of this third dying and half leaving Ireland-most to America. The sheer desperation of the people is what I felt was mostly missing. While the reader will learn much about Ireland and its tragedy from this book, I felt the descriptions of the plight of the desperate were light.
3 people found this helpful
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Chris Fogarty
1.0 out of 5 stars Famine Porn
Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2013
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A shockingly bad attempt to cover up Britain's "Holocaust of Humanity" in Ireland. Ne'er a mention that more than half of Britain's then-empire army starved Ireland, murdering five million innocents by usurping at gunpoint their harvests of grains, meats, etc. and escorting them to the ports for export.
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biogeek
4.0 out of 5 stars A good concise history of the famine
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2012
I read this book several months after reading Cecil Woodham-Smith's tome "The Great Hunger." While obviously there was some overlap, I found this a good complement to Woodham-Smith's book. This book went into greater detail on the Poor Law, how it worked and the consequences, which I found enlightening. The author also described how tenants were evicted from their homes in more detail. His description of how the famine rolled up the various levels of Irish society (the poorest died first, then as their resources were used up the smaller farmers became destitute and so on up the chain) made a lot of sense. The background on life before the famine was very useful, but I was surprised that there was no mention of the anti-Catholic laws (only recently repealed before the famine) that forbade land ownership, holding public office, schooling, and etc.

I gave the book four stars primarily because it contained not a single map. I am American and simply not familiar with every county and townland in Ireland. I think it would have been extremely useful to have a map to refer to to see which areas were worst affected or merely to see where the various towns mentioned were located.

Overall, I found the book very readable, interesting and informative.
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Top reviews from other countries

MARY REEVES
5.0 out of 5 stars never boring - a great read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2017
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For somebody who normally doesn't read history books, I found this book on the famine very educational, never boring - a great read. Whilst I always knew that Irish people suffered great hardship,deprivation, disease and death during this period, I was not aware of all the evictions, the way in which these were often carried out and the scrambling for places on the public works and entry into the workhouse. Ciaran O'Mhurchadha offers a very comprehensive account of this period in Irish history in my opinion. The many illustrations contained in the book help to demonstrate the desperate situations people found themselves in at this time.
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paul carrigg
5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2020
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Great
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