Introduction

In 2005, the world seemed no closer to ending the problem of famine, despite the high-profile interventions of rock musicians and political activists.¹ In July of that year, ‘Live8’ concerts took place in cities across the world, with the aim of influencing politicians meeting in the G8 Summit in Edinburgh to ‘make poverty history’.² Twenty years previously, Live Aid, a similar project, had raised millions of pounds for famine relief in Africa.³ But famine did not disappear and, within the intervening period, HIV/AIDS joined poverty, hunger and disease as a major force of destruction in Africa and other parts of the world.⁴ The chief organiser of both events was an Irishman, Bob Geldof, who, in advance of Live8, warned that the alternative to such dramatic media exposure was that ‘we continue to watch the carnival of death every night on our television screens, in glorious colour, all the better to indulge in the pornography of poverty’.⁵ In 1984, the remedy to world poverty had been expressed in simple terms; Africa was starving and the solution, according to the Band Aid chorus, was to ‘Feed the World’.⁶ In contrast, the Live8 concert was more concerned with raising consciousness and putting pressure on the leaders of the eight richest countries in the world. Significantly, the statements issued from the G8 Summit showed that ending poverty and famine had become an integral part of the political rhetoric of statesmen of diverse ideological backgrounds in the early twenty-first century. Four weeks after the Summit, the world media announced the onset of famine in Niger in Africa.⁷ Famine remains with us, but in the two decades since Live Aid, there has been a general recognition that money alone cannot solve the problems of starvation and financial inequality, and that famine is a political rather than an economic problem which needs to be addressed within the context of social justice and human rights, not simply by charitable interventions and intermittent fund-raising.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, how is it possible that hunger and want still exist in the midst of plenty? Will future generations of historians define and judge the developed world in 2005, with its access to wealth and vast resources, by how it co-existed alongside deprivation and famine? And will the poor themselves be blamed for perpetuating conditions that allowed poverty to flourish? Alternatively, will the suffering of the poor and marginalised be a footnote in general histories of the early twenty-first century, explained and justified by reference to the needs of the international economy, free market economics and prevailing ideological restraints? Is it appropriate to blame politicians who are caught between the competing (and conflicting) demands of various interest groups for not doing more?

Any student of the Irish Famine will feel a sense of déjà vu when hearing such questions being raised today. This Great Calamity: the Irish famine 1845–52, first appeared in 1994 and attempted to deal with some of these questions in the specific context of the holocaust that had swept through Ireland in those tragic years. The fact that the world seems no closer to preventing and alleviating such disasters means that a study of the Irish Famine continues to have a relevance that goes far beyond a mere understanding of a crucial period of change in Irish history. The impact of the Great Famine in Ireland remains unsurpassed—in relative terms—in terms of demographic decline, with the Irish population falling by approximately 25 per cent in just six years, due to a combination of excess mortality and mass emigration.⁸ Moreover, once the Famine floodgates had opened, the haemorrhage continued and, even today, despite a recent reversal of emigration trends, the population of the whole of Ireland remains smaller than it was in 1845. This type of demographic profile is unique within the European context, where there has been sustained population growth over the last 200 years. The lethal intensity and the longevity of the tragedy, therefore, continued even into the twenty-first century. Clearly, the Irish Famine was no ordinary or short-term subsistence crisis, and the issues it raises have global rather than local relevance.

In the twelve years that have passed since the first appearance of This Great Calamity, Ireland (North and South) has changed dramatically. The Peace Process, the dawn of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, the undermining of the authority of the Catholic Church and concurrent liberalisation of social legislation, as well as the explosion of interest in Irish culture, have been significant contributors to this process. Consequently, Ireland is no longer viewed from the outside (and sometimes from the inside) as lagging behind her European neighbours and relying on emigration for economic stability. Perhaps most extraordinary of all is the fact that there is a net inflow of people to Ireland (including, controversially, a number of economic and political refugees with no Irish background). All these developments have helped to transform Ireland socially, politically, culturally and economically in an extraordinarily short space of time. In this sense, the decades 1845 to 1855 and 1995 to 2005 can both be regarded as watersheds in the development of modern Ireland.

Despite both the immediate and longer-term significance of the Famine, until recently it was publicly invisible while, paradoxically, remaining part of most Irish people’s consciousness. No official monuments existed to its victims, although in some parts of Ireland the significance of unmarked pauper graves, abandoned potato ‘lazy’ beds, ‘famine’ roads and walls,⁹ crumbling workhouses and even deserted villages were embedded in local oral traditions. In general, the one million people who had died remained nameless and unrecorded, hard to know or to mourn. Ironically, the largest marked Famine mass grave was situated in Canada, at Grosse Île, where as many as 7,000 Famine emigrants were buried.¹⁰ A monument was first erected on this site in 1847, in memory of the physicians who died while tending to the Irish sick. Unusually, it included the names of many of the dead, an honour that was not accorded to them in their own country. Lord John Russell, the British Prime Minister after 1846, refused to keep a register of Famine mortality, a request made by Benjamin Disraeli and other MPs in the British House of Commons.¹¹ A second monument was unveiled on the same site in 1909 by the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, who dedicated it both to the medical attendants and to the famine dead, who ‘ended here their sorrowful pilgrimage’.¹² The 1909 monument was a Celtic cross, unveiled on 15 August, Assumption Day, a significant feast day in the Catholic calendar. In 1898, a Celtic cross was unveiled in Liverpool in memory of ten Catholic priests who caught fever while attending to the sick in 1847.¹³ By so doing, the Hibernians and the people of Liverpool were reinforcing a myth, which remains hard to dispel, that the Famine was a Catholic tragedy only. What these monuments also highlighted was that the impact of the Famine was not confined to Ireland and the memory of it remained important to descendants of the Diaspora even if, as Deborah Peck has found, it was rarely spoken about in public by earlier generations of emigrants.¹⁴ The strong desire amongst the Diaspora to remember the Famine became especially evident after 1995. Within Ireland, too, there was an unspoken silence about the Famine, with those who attempted to forge a collective memory being accused of being politically motivated, intellectually facile or anti-British. For people residing within Northern Ireland, it could be dangerous to talk publicly about such issues, a philosophy articulated by Nell McCafferty, a feminist writer who grew up in Derry in the 1950s and 1960s, who admitted that her attitude to the Famine and other disputed aspects of Irish history was based on a philosophy of ‘whatever you say, say nothing’.¹⁵

Even more surprising than the lack of artefacts and public debate was the absence of a Famine curriculum within Irish education. Why was an event as important as the Famine, with both national and international significance, so little written about and so rarely taught in Irish schools and universities? To some extent, the explanation lies in the marginalisation of the Famine as an event of consequence within the development of modern Ireland by a group of historians known as revisionists. Collectively, they dominated Irish historical discourse between the 1930s and 1990s. Thus, Roy Foster, probably the most influential Irish historian of his generation, claimed that:

Revisionism had its roots in the 1930s, when, inevitably in a newly independent state,‘definition and consolidation of national feeling was high on many agendas, and the function of symbols of national identity was taken seriously’.¹⁷ The justification of revisionist writing had been to counter the crude nationalist interpretations of Irish history written in the early decades of the twentieth century, which was given legitimacy in the school curriculum of the newly established Free State. A consequence was that ‘history was debased into a two dimensional, linear development, and the function of its teaching interpreted as “undoing the conquest”’.¹⁸ In challenging this simplistic approach, revisionism could assert, with some justification, that it offered a ‘liberal and pluralistic’ alternative to an anti-British polemic in which Ireland’s colonial status was (wrongly) blamed for all of its ills. ¹⁹ More problematically, it claimed that it had no political agenda, but was objective and value-free in its approach. The influence of revisionism was amplified following the onset of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969, when national identity became linked with the armed struggle in the six counties of Northern Ireland. Within this highly charged atmosphere, it became hard to sustain the claim that this viewpoint was objective or value-free, especially as the language employed by the new generation of revisionists ‘was far from dispassionate, and [did] not suggest tolerance, liberalism, or anything of the kind’.²⁰ Moreover, rather than presenting an objective view of Irish history, distortions, omissions and censorship were prevalent, with history being used as a political weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds in the context of Ireland in the late twentieth century.²¹ Consequently, while revisionism had set out to destroy myths and to challenge a simplistic heroic view of Irish history, the approach taken was increasingly partial and partisan, with the overwhelming focus on challenging nationalist and Catholic myths, rarely on Protestant or unionist myths, especially regarding the creation of Protestant identity.²² That revisionism did have an ideological agenda and was not averse to self-censorship was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in 1995 when Mary Daly, a historian based in Dublin, stated in a lecture given in Belfast that, ‘Now we are in a cease-fire situation, we can talk about aspects of our history which we may previously have felt uncomfortable with.’²³

In relation to the Famine, revisionism was especially unconvincing. The impact of the tragedy was played down, largely on the grounds that it was not a watershed in modern history.²⁴ Moreover, issues of mortality and suffering were minimised, while inevitability and continuity were emphasised. The actions of the British government and its administrators were generally exonerated on the grounds that, within the context of the time, they did all that they could to save lives. These ideas, in varying degrees, were part of the dominant academic orthodoxy regarding the Famine until it was challenged in the 1990s. Significantly, such pronouncements were confidently made without actual examination of the extant government records or publication of anything based on original research.²⁵ Between 1921 and 1994 only two substantial accounts of the Famine were produced; the first reluctantly, and the second by a female non-academic, who misleadingly had a man’s name.²⁶ The Irish Famine: studies in Irish history, edited by R.D. Edwards and T.D. Williams, was the result of an initiative by the then Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, who wanted a publication to be available in 1945 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the appearance of the potato blight, which triggered the Famine. Despite offering a subvention for the writing of a comprehensive Famine narrative, he found it difficult to find either willing editors or contributors to the volume. When it appeared twelve years later, long after the centenary had passed, he admitted that he found the result disappointing.²⁷ Overall, the episode demonstrated that leading Irish historians had no interest in the Famine as a topic of significance. The placatory nature of the volume in relation to the role of the British government was clearly evident in the Introduction, which asserted that, ‘The scale of the actual outlay to meet the Famine and the expansion in the public-relief system are in themselves impressive evidence that the state was by no means always indifferent to Irish needs.’²⁸ Furthermore, the approach of the contributors was so cautious that little sense of loss, devastation or trauma was conveyed, with the Introduction also stating that the sensitive issue of mortality would be avoided, although it acknowledged that ‘many, many had died’. By avoiding the central issues of mortality and culpability, controversy had been avoided, but intellectual honesty had been compromised. Privately, however, even one of the editors described the publication as ‘dehydrated history’.²⁹

Six years after The Irish Famine appeared, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger was published.³⁰ She was the first modern historian to carry out comprehensive research amongst government papers and workhouse records, leading her to conclude that the British government and some of its administrators were culpable of abandoning the Irish poor. Woodham-Smith was attacked by leading Irish academics both at the time of publication for offering a simplistic interpretation of events and twenty-four years later, when she was described as a ‘zealous convert’.³¹ Such personal attacks, even on the dead, have not been unusual in contested areas in Irish Studies. The enduring popularity of her publication, however, was not diminished and The Great Hunger became one of the best-selling Irish history books of all time, far outselling The Irish Famine. It informed a generation who had not been able to study the Famine formally in school or university, but who were in the forefront of the Famine commemorations in the 1990s. It also inspired a wave of literary explorations of this topic.³² Additionally, many of the post-revisionist historians who wrote about the Famine after 1994 acknowledged the important contribution made by The Great Hunger.³³ The success of Woodham-Smith’s book exposed the tension between the prevailing academic orthodoxy and the popular memory of the Famine; but no Irish historian appeared willing to either explain or bridge over the gulf.³⁴ Furthermore, the book’s popularity revealed the desire for more information about the Famine, both in Ireland and overseas. Yet the publication of The Great Hunger marked an end, rather than the beginning, of Famine research, with little of note being published for a further thirty-two years. Instead, Irish history books in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s continued to play down the significance of the Famine in the development of modern Ireland.³⁵

Despite producing little quality research on the Famine, the revisionist orthodoxy was dominant throughout the period of recent conflict in Northern Ireland, thus giving it an added political edge and relevance, despite claims of it being a value-free approach. During these years, those who challenged this interpretation were labelled republican sympathisers, a damaging label in the context of what was happening in Ireland after 1969.³⁶ The revisionist domination was helped by the fact that a number of leading journalists were sympathetic to this interpretation, and they used their positions to promote this viewpoint.³⁷ Nonetheless, revisionism had a small number of critics who were willing to make their views public, regardless of the risk of academic and personal opprobrium. An uncompromising early critic was Brendan Bradshaw, an Irish academic based at Cambridge University. In 1989, in one of the earliest, and now most famous, critiques of revisionism, he lambasted Irish academics for avoiding writing about tragic episodes in Ireland’s history. He singled out the Famine as having especial significance, because it demonstrated ‘more tellingly than any other episode of Irish history the inability of practitioners of value-free history to cope with the catastrophic dimensions of the Irish past’. In particular, he reproached Mary Daly, who had published a small overview of the Famine in 1986, for refusing to engage with the unpalatable reality of the catastrophe ‘by assuming an austerely clinical tone, and by resorting to sociological euphemism and cliometric excursi, thus cerebralising and thereby de-sensitising the trauma’.³⁸ Bradshaw’s analysis, however, was outside the prevailing mindset of the time and resulted in his being castigated by some fellow academics.³⁹ Nevertheless, his challenge created a slipstream for a new generation of researchers to explore issues previously considered beyond the pale of legitimate academic pursuit.

In 1991, the historian Kevin Whelan made a further plea for a post-revisionist agenda for Irish history, and censured a number of historians for removing national identity and the colonial experience from Ireland’s past, for their own political and ideological reasons.⁴⁰ The concern that Irish history was being distorted was championed by a small but vociferous group of journalists. In 1994, John Waters, a writer at the Irish Times, echoing some of Whelan’s concerns, asked more generally, ‘Why are we so afraid to confront the ghosts of our past?’ Like Bradshaw, he viewed the Famine as a prism for understanding the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain, averring, ‘Revisionist semantics about the source of the blight or the feasibility of aid efforts once the blight had taken hold are utterly irrelevant to the meaning of that experience … it is meaningless to discuss the Famine outside of the context of the colonial process in which it was rooted.’⁴¹ At that stage, nobody imagined that the sesquicentenary of the Famine and the resultant wave of new publications would be in the vanguard of a sustained challenge to revisionism. Significantly, many of those who took the lead in the subsequent debates in the 1990s were based in universities and colleges outside Ireland, or outside the discipline of history, with literary and cultural criticism providing a particularly dynamic contribution to opening up the debate.⁴²

One of the aims of This Great Calamity when it first appeared at the end of 1994 was to break the long academic silence about the Famine and to challenge the prevailing academic orthodoxy that had minimised the significance of the tragedy. It also reclaimed the centrality of the role of the British government in choosing relief policies that were inappropriate to the needs of a starving and vulnerable people. The research upon which this publication was based took almost fifteen years to complete and made wide-ranging use of records in Ireland (North and South) and Britain, where the bulk of papers relating to government ministers and officials were held. Extensive use was made of workhouse records, many of which were scattered in various libraries throughout the island of Ireland, in order to assess the impact of the Famine over the whole of the country, not merely in the south and west. Consequently, the response of the British government was counterbalanced with an examination of the effect of the food shortages and relief policies on local communities, demonstrating the diversity of the impact of the subsistence crisis. By doing so, an attempt was therefore made to understand the complex interplay between what was happening at the level of high politics in London juxtaposed with the impact of these decisions on the people in Ireland. These records confirmed that the Irish people (poor and landlords alike) were viewed by the British governing classes through a colonial lens, based on a variable combination of cultural stereotyping, providentialism, economic aspirations and political pragmatism, which believed that government interventions should seek to bring about long looked-for changes in Ireland, not merely provide relief.⁴³

The role of Dublin Castle, especially the offices of Viceroy and Chief Secretary, provides a compelling insight into how views of the disaster were distorted by distance. The vast correspondence that was carried out between London and Dublin, and Dublin and the rest of Ireland, has remained largely intact but little used. The letters testify that both the Irish administration in Dublin Castle and the relief officials in London were fully appraised of the deteriorating situation and the inappropriateness of many of the relief policies. Interventions and pleas for more or for different relief from successive Lord Lieutenants and from relief officials in Ireland were ignored. Instead, the Famine became a tool in the long-desired aim to modernise and regenerate Ireland. The social and human cost of such actions was high and, even to many mid-nineteenth-century observers, unacceptable. Thus, the correspondence presents unequivocal evidence that, as the Famine progressed, relief measures were driven increasingly by a moral, a financial and an ideological imperative that gave priority to changing Ireland above the needs of a starving and desperate people. A theme explored in This Great Calamity was that, even in the context of the time, the relief policies chosen by the government were parsimonious and inappropriate; consequently, many of the deaths were preventable. Ireland’s Great Famine, therefore, as had been suggested by a number of revisionist writers, was not inevitable.

Whose Memory?

As a topic for research and writing, the Famine presents particular difficulties. Is it correct to refer to the Famine as an event, suggesting an identifiable beginning and a precise end. When did the Famine commence? For most historians the starting point is autumn 1845, when the potato blight first appeared in Ireland. But, as This Great Calamity and other studies show, nobody died in the first year of food shortages. Can it be labelled a famine if there are no deaths?⁴⁴ Excess mortality only really commenced, with a vengeance, towards the end of 1846. Even more of a problem is providing an end date for the Famine. This Great Calamity chose to end in 1852, when the potato blight had virtually disappeared and the special relief measures had ended, but the effects of the food shortages and government relief policies lasted far beyond this date. What recent research has confirmed is the longevity of the crisis, moving away from a previous view that ‘Black 1847’ was the Famine year, recent research suggesting that just as many people died in 1849. A further concern to some ‘faminists’, especially in North America, related to the use of the word ‘famine’. In general, they preferred the phrase ‘Great Hunger’, which they believed was more appropriate to describe a situation in which large amounts of food were still being produced and exported, while people starved.⁴⁵ As the work of Amartya Sen, a world authority on twentieth-century famines, has shown, the decline in food availability is only one of the ingredients that results in famine and he has urged historians to pay more attention to food distribution and ‘entitlement of the poor to resources’.⁴⁶ In this regard, what occurred in Ireland in the 1840s has parallels with many twentieth-century famines.

While groups who are poor or marginalised often remain hidden from the historian’s view, the fact that during the Famine whole families, villages and communities disappeared left a void that official accounts could not fill. Since 1994, writers on the Famine have looked beyond official records to understand the meaning of the Famine for those who experienced it. To some extent, this gap has been narrowed through the use of folk memories, made accessible by Cathal Pórtéir’s work in the Folk Archives in Dublin. But despite the immediacy and poignancy of these testimonies, they were based on interviews given almost 100 years after the event.⁴⁷ And, as Cormac Ó Gráda reminds us, it is difficult to gauge their accuracy given the passage of time and lack of alternative sources relating to the poor.⁴⁸ Although contemporary poetry has been made available through the work of Chris Morash, often it was written by outsiders looking in, not the poor themselves.⁴⁹ At the same time, most ‘Famine’ songs were penned many years after the event.⁵⁰

A further problem when writing about the Famine is the fact that language is inadequate to convey the true horrors of starvation, a fact pointed out by Margaret Kelleher in 1995 in her excellent study entitled The Feminisation of Famine: expressions of the inexpressible?⁵¹ In it, she quotes Elihu Burnitt, an American visitor to Ireland in 1847, who wrote:

But even in the post-revisionist world of historical writing, many accounts of the Famine remain sanitised, with the true horror of the process of starvation rarely mentioned.⁵³ Moreover, although there is a willingness to engage with issues such as excess mortality, all too often deaths are reduced to a statistic (usually, one million dead and two million emigrated), thus giving no sense of personal bereavement, especially for the survivors who had seen loved ones die. Some recent literature, borrowing heavily from the experience of Holocaust survivors, has explained how grief at the loss was mixed with guilt, thus contributing to a long period of silence. This silence and this grief appear to have been trans-generation and trans-national. Tom Hayden, an Irish-American, has brought a welcome human dimension to Famine studies in his ground-breaking publication from 1997, looking at personal reflections on the legacy of the Famine.⁵⁴

If the experience of famine is difficult to convey in words, can other types of representation fill in the vacuum? The opening of the Famine Museum in Strokestown in Co. Roscommon in 1994, and a smaller one in Dunfanaghy in Co. Donegal in the following year, were indications that some people in Ireland were willing to explore and make public this aspect of their past. The challenge, however, was how could the awfulness of such trauma be conveyed in images, especially when words had proved inadequate for the task? By the end of 1994, therefore, there were some indications of the emergence of a renewed interest in the Famine; however, few people were prepared for the interest that the 150th anniversary of the blight would unleash, not only in Ireland but internationally.

A further indication of the growing interest in the Famine as the sesquicentenary approached was the announcement by the government of the Irish Republic that it was willing to be involved in the commemoration process. Consequently, in May 1994 an interdepartmental committee was established, with Avril Doyle, TD as chairperson.⁵⁵ Following Doyle’s appointment, and encouraged by the paramilitary ceasefire in the North of Ireland, the Famine Commemoration Committee was officially launched in June 1995. The links between history and contemporary politics were immediately evident, with Doyle declaring that, ‘the Peace Process allows us all the more freely to explore the truth’. The committee’s programme was described as being wide and varied, with special emphasis on ‘education, on scholarships and on famine relief projects in the modern world’. The centrality of the Famine in Irish history was made clear at its inauguration when Doyle announced, ‘The Irish government wholeheartedly shoulders its responsibilities in acknowledging the importance of the Famine, which so signally marked us as a people, which vastly expanded our Diaspora, and in which modern Ireland itself was born.’⁵⁶

The first official Famine event took place in Co. Fermanagh, where blight was allegedly first observed in 1845, giving recognition to the fact that the Famine was an ‘all-Ireland tragedy’. Despite the inclusive start, the focus of the commemorations then relocated to the Irish Republic and to locations, including London, Liverpool, New York and Sydney, where there were large Irish settlements. Unfortunately, therefore, the impact of the Famine on the Protestant and unionist community was generally ignored, and so Famine memory and Famine historiography remained divided along established religious and political patterns. But if the Irish government’s commemorations were not truly national, a bold aspect of the official programme was the inclusion of the British dimension, with Doyle declaring, ‘the Famine is not just an Irish event, it was just as much a British event, a shared experience. Together we will face up to what happened and move forward. It is in a spirit of understanding and reconciliation that we are now commemorating the Great Famine.’ Her description of the Famine as ‘shared experience’ was felt to be insensitive by some, as it suggested that British people had suffered equally. John Major, the British Prime Minister, however, chose not to support the Famine commemorations in Britain, describing them as being of concern only to Ireland.⁵⁷ Political tensions between the two countries were heightened when, midway through the commemorations, the IRA ceasefire was brought to an abrupt end with the bombing of Canary Wharf in London. The election of Tony Blair as British Prime Minister in 1997, however, heralded a new phase in Anglo-Irish relations and in Northern Ireland politics, facilitated by a renewed IRA ceasefire.

The Famine Committee had a budget of €250,000, 50 per cent of which was given to four historians, all based in Dublin, to oversee new areas of Famine research. Although they organised a conference in Dublin in 1997 and published the papers, both the conference and the publication featured the work of established historians rather than making the new research available. In some ways, therefore, the official involvement of professional historians after 1995 paralleled the situation of half a century earlier. Apart from its scholarly contributions, Avril Doyle had suggested that commemoration of the Famine would be part of a healing process, stating that, ‘For our sakes we need the catharsis of a commemoration which fully recognises the pain and loss the Famine represented. I am very confident that the Government’s programme of commemoration will make a significant contribution to that process.’⁵⁸ The timescale for healing was limited, however, as the official programme of commemoration was to end in 1997, conveniently allowing time for a fresh programme of government commemoration to be put in place for the 200th anniversary of the 1798 uprising.⁵⁹ By choosing to conclude in 1997, the Famine Committee reinforced the traditional and erroneous view of the Famine as lasting only for two years. In reality, blight-free harvests did not return to Ireland until 1852, while the imprint of famine remained evident in continuing high levels of workhouse relief, disease, mortality and emigration for much longer.

At the launch of the Famine Committee, the importance of the Irish experience in understanding contemporary hunger was stressed, with a promise to support contemporary famine relief projects.⁶⁰ It quickly became clear, however, that overseas aid was not a priority of the Committee. Just as disappointingly, the ecumenical nature of the early commemorations also faded and was overtaken by a less commendable desire to promote tourism and bring the Famine Diaspora back to Ireland for a final closing ceremony. Initially, it had been intended that the concluding ceremonies would incorporate a Service of Commemoration, to be attended by the leaders of the main denominations in Ireland. But by 1997 the emphasis had changed and, instead, Millstreet in Co. Cork was chosen to host a ‘Great Irish Famine Event’ to mark the official closure of the government’s programme in the first weekend of June. The celebratory tone and overt commercialism of the closing ceremony appalled some people in Ireland. Joe Murray of Afri, a non-government relief agency, believed it was equivalent to ‘dancing on the graves of the dead’, while John Waters suggested that, ‘The famine dead are offered on the altar of Tourism.’⁶¹ The weekend was marketed widely in North America, where it was greeted with some scepticism. The fact that alcohol and music were part of the occasion was regarded as particularly inappropriate.⁶² A more sombre note was briefly achieved through the reading of messages of condolence and commiseration by the actor Gabriel Byrne, which included separate statements of sympathy sent by the then American President, Bill Clinton, and from the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Although not directly offering an apology for the actions of the British government 150 years earlier, Blair acknowledged that, ‘Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy.’⁶³ It was a landmark declaration. By interceding so publicly, Blair ensured that the Famine became part of the fabric of the Peace Process, and symbolic of a new departure in Britain and Ireland’s historical relationship. The admission of blame by a British Prime Minister, albeit belatedly, was condemned in both the unionist and conservative press in Britain and Northern Ireland. The Daily Telegraph, for example, even before the official release of the speech, accused Blair of giving succour to ‘the self-pitying nature of Irish nationalism [and] the grievance culture which allows nationalist Ireland to place the blame for all the country’s ills at the door of the Brits, ultimately justifying terrorism’.⁶⁴ What the involvement of Clinton, Blair and other international figures in the Famine commemorations demonstrated was that a tragedy that had occurred in Ireland 150 years earlier still had political relevance, even at the highest levels. The criticisms of Blair, however, revealed that despite two years of concentrated remembrance and the availability of new research for some, the Great Famine was not regarded as a national tragedy, but as a nationalist grievance.

If the Irish government’s commemorations did not live up to its initial promises, one of the remarkable aspects of the anniversary of the Famine was that the official commemorations were only a small part of a much larger international desire to remember and honour its victims and the survivors. Consequently, Famine symposiums, exhibitions, concerts, the issue of commemorative postal stamps, musical suites, walks and wakes took place in a variety of places throughout the world, although they were concentrated in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, most intensely, the United States. The erection of statues, plaques or monuments also became a commonplace way of creating a permanent memorial to Famine victims, which was in strong contrast to the absence of public statuary prior to 1995. Again, the choice of appropriate iconography presented a problem, as statues and monuments were more generally used to glorify a national past and celebrate the heroes of that past.⁶⁵ How could a famine be adequately represented in a way that was meaningful, but not maudlin or trite? The fact that remembering the Famine victims was still a source of controversy in Britain was demonstrated by the delay in erecting a monument in Liverpool, the main port for Famine immigration to England and for onward emigration to the United States. And, as recently as 2001, the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, cancelled a visit to unveil a Famine monument in Carfin in Lanarkshire, Scotland, due to fear that it would inflame sectarian violence as it coincided with a Celtic–Rangers soccer match.⁶⁶ Clearly, the commemoration of certain events in Irish history continued to divide some communities, even those beyond Ireland.

Outside Ireland, the majority of statues were erected in the United States, demonstrating the continuing interest in the Famine, or, as it was widely referred to there, the Great Hunger.⁶⁷ Some of the most elaborate were located in affluent public areas, notably at Battery Park in New York, on the riverside in Philadelphia, at West Chester in New York State, downtown in Phoenix in Arizona and a million-dollar memorial park in central Boston. The fact that the monuments were placed in public, secular spaces, where they could be viewed by the wider community, demonstrated that Irish-Americans were not ashamed of their heritage, even if they were creating an identity that was linked with poverty, hunger and exile. Most of the monuments were conceived and financed by local Irish societies. The Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park, however, was largely the initiative of Governor George Pataki of New York. ⁶⁸ The half-acre site (in a prime Manhattan location, overlooking the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island) cost $5 million and included an authentic Famine-era cottage from Co. Mayo, native Irish flora and a stone from each county in Ireland.⁶⁹ While some of the monuments included overtly political, anti-British sentiments, a common theme was to link the Irish Famine with poverty today. Hence, the memorial in Manhattan described its purpose as being not only to raise public awareness of the conditions that led to the Irish Famine, but to ‘encourage efforts to address current and future hunger worldwide’.⁷⁰ Inevitably, the desire to memorialise the Famine and create lasting tribute to its victims was contested, with accusations that the monuments were ahistorical, sentimental, ugly and part of a cottage industry in remembering the Famine by ‘rich Americans with deep pockets’.⁷¹ Nevertheless, what they confirmed was the strong desire to honour the Famine outside Ireland and to reclaim it as something that had also shaped American, Australian and British history.

If the erection of Famine monuments in the United States and elsewhere caused some ripples of discontent, it was when the desire to remember moved into the field of education that a torrent of anger was unleashed. In 1995, in response to a mandate by the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission to ‘study and recommend curricular materials on a wide range of genocides’, James Mullin (a former librarian) and Jack Worrall (Chairman of the Rutgers University Economics Department) proposed that a study unit on the Irish Famine should be included. The Commission, which was largely composed of Jewish educators, including some death camp survivors, agreed.⁷² The Famine was to be taught alongside other units, including slavery and the Holocaust, all of which were dealt with under the broad heading of human rights. However, the inclusion of the Famine in this programme drew widespread criticism, with both Irish historians and journalists suggesting that the Famine curriculum was promoting the idea of the Irish Famine as a genocide with similarities to the Holocaust. The Sunday Telegraph, for example, accused it of being the work of ‘hard line Irish American nationalists’ who were denigrating the memory of Holocaust survivors.⁷³ The newspaper conveniently ignored the fact that the initiative had the support of the Holocaust Education Commission, whose members did not feel that their history was being compromised by the inclusion of this topic in the public school curriculum.

The controversy intensified when it was decided to introduce a Famine curriculum into New York State schools. Again, support for its inclusion cut across party and ethnic divisions, with American-Cuban Congressman Bob Mendenez, who sponsored it, claiming that, ‘The Irish Famine teaches an important lesson about intolerance and inhumanity and the indifference of the British government to the potato blight that led to the mass starvation of one million people.’⁷⁴ The conservative press in both Britain (where a Conservative government led by John Major was in power) and the United States disliked the anti-British sentiments expressed. Again, a common tactic was to suggest that supporters of the Famine curriculum were drawing unsustainable comparisons with the Holocaust, despite this not being the case.⁷⁵ The seriousness with which the British government regarded the teaching of Famine history was evident from the fact that the British Ambassador was recalled to New York so that he could make a formal protest to Governor Pataki. His objections were based on the fact that, ‘Unlike the Holocaust, the Famine was not deliberate, not pre-meditated, not man-made, not genocide’, thus reinforcing the link the critics repeatedly assumed between representations of the Famine and the Holocaust.⁷⁶ The intervention of the British Ambassador led the New York Daily News, which opposed the introduction of the curriculum, to suggest that, ‘Even after 150 years, the British still obviously fear the facts.’⁷⁷ The New York Times, however, upbraided Pataki for holding ‘half-baked ideas about Irish history’.⁷⁸ The London Times was even less restrained, accusing Governor Pataki of pandering to Irish-American voters, while promoting a version of Irish history that was rooted in ‘the Fenian propaganda version which ambitious American politicians tend to prefer’.⁷⁹ The episode demonstrated that the history of the Irish Famine, from which the British government had distanced itself only a few months earlier, still remained a source of political concern, even after the passage of 150 years.

It took a further two years for money to be made available for the writing of the New York Famine curriculum. By this time, a second ceasefire had commenced and Tony Blair was Prime Minister of Britain. Moreover, the volatile crucible in which some of the earlier Famine commemorations had occurred between 1995 and 1997 had lost its edge, helped by Blair’s unexpected and unprecedented apology. The committee chosen to develop the curriculum was far from being hardline; in fact, most were educators who had no background in researching or writing about the Famine. The New York curriculum was made available in 2001, when much of the interest in the Famine evident only five years earlier had dissipated. Ironically, the main critics of the new curriculum were some Irish-Americans, with James Mullin, who was responsible for the New Jersey curriculum, describing it as ‘a thousand pages of revisionist history’.⁸⁰ The episode, however, demonstrated that the Famine, even as a topic to be taught in schools in the United States, remained a contested area.⁸¹ The introduction of the curriculum in New Jersey and in New York, however, meant that schoolchildren in the United States had an opportunity to learn about the Famine, unlike those in Ireland and Britain, where the Famine was not part of the school curriculum.

Edna Longley, a literary critic from Northern Ireland, has warned that, ‘Commemorations are as selective as sympathies. They honour our dead not your dead.’⁸² How apposite is this comment in relation to the Irish Famine? Do the Famine commemorations have a wider relevance for Irish history and the politics of commemoration? Was the commemoration appropriate and historically accurate? Did it have any lasting value? Who controls memory, especially when the state plays a large part in the commemorative experience? Was a new, but no less inaccurate, orthodoxy of the Famine being shaped to suit the needs of a post-ceasefire Ireland? Did two years of intense activities in Ireland and further afield achieve anything? Overall, the willingness of the Irish state to be publicly involved contrasted with many earlier anniversaries when the government had maintained a low profile. Kevin Whelan, who was involved in commemorations for the anniversaries of both the Famine and the 1798 uprising, welcomed this development as a sign of the Irish state’s political maturity, suggesting that ‘a state that doesn’t respect its own history is a bankrupt one’.⁸³‘’⁸⁴‘’é’