A Case of Genocide?

The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy
by Tim Pat Coogan

Most people know about the so-called Irish Famine...that time in 1846 when a blight started infecting Ireland's Potato crop, and best estimates indicate 1.1 million people were killed by famine and its associated diseases.  Another 1.3 million were forced to emigrate.  This is how the history books primarily portray this tragic moment in Irish history.  What most people don't know is that the Irish people do not refer to this time period as a Famine.  Instead it is called the Great Hunger.  The other aspect of the Famine not known is the role the British government played in actually causing it, not the blight itself of course, but the starvation of the Irish people.

Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles this dark period in Irish history and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide.  Through meticulous research and documentation, Coogan presents a vivid and horrifying picture of this catastrophe and holds specific individuals within the British government to account.

As with most tragedies of this magnitude, there is usually a villain.  In the case of the Great Hunger, that role falls squarely on the shoulders of British civil servant, Sir Charles Trevelyan.  While Trevelyan may have been just a civil servant, it was his responsibility to implement and enforce any policies and programs proposed by the British government.  The British response to the tragedy primarily consisted of evictions, emigration and a policy of laissez faire economics. Trevelyan believed the fate of the Irish people should be left in the hands of Providence.  In other words, according to Trevelyan, those who died of starvation were meant to because they deserved it.  In reading this book, I felt I was listening to the Republican party's response to poverty here in the United States.  According to some of the rhetoric one hears in the media, it is a poor person's own fault if they are poor, and the federal government should not do anything to help them.  The rhetoric makes it sound as if they borrowed that philosophy directly from the British government's response to the Irish "famine".

Coogan does not totally condemn the British government.  There were attempts with some government policies to alleviate the suffering of the Irish people.  For example, Prime Minister Robert Peel made some effort to assuage the problem, however misguided, allowing the purchase of Indian maize from America.  There also were efforts to set up workhouses and soup kitchens, but Trevelyan made sure there was not adequate funding for these programs to work.  In disturbingly graphic images and compelling language based on true stories from the Famine archives and using the actual language from the United Nations Articles on Genocide, Coogan clearly shows intentional culpability for the famine by the British government.