Coogan's insistent examining of the moral dimensions of that nation's policies, and how they fueled the horrors on the ground, represents his greatest contribution to the voluminous scholarship on the Irish famine, and is this book's greatest strength.I continually find myself involved in an internal argument–how can I respect and appreciate Great Britain’s contributions to the world without despising the way the Empire was actually run? While the catalogue of sins across their colonies is infamous, nowhere was their cold calculation of empire’s management more appalling than their treatment of Ireland.Īs Coogan demonstrates, the potato famine presented a golden opportunity for absentee landlords to rid their land of their least important asset–the people who actually created the wealth that gave landlords status. The spectrum of methods landlords used to accomplish this depopulation ranged from ‘merciful’ to monstrous. to encourage paupers to speedily'' leave, Coogan writes.Ĭoogan bemoans that so many historians treaded so gingerly around England's responsibility for the death and suffering, even after Prime Minister Tony Blair's 1997 official apology for the famine. "Life inside the workhouses was made as unpleasant as possible.
As Coogan makes clear, receiving public relief in Ireland was utterly inconsistent with maintaining the slightest shred of human dignity, as state-operated workhouses were overcrowded, disease-ridden, and highly-unwelcoming places by design. Coogan describes how Ireland's absentee landlords, many living in London, were happy to have their numerous Irish tenants forced off the small plots they farmed, so land holdings could be consolidated, enhancing their market potential.Įven the inadequate relief efforts organized by Trevelyan were marked by a punitive, stigmatizing intent aimed at forcing the starving to fall back on their own resources. Once the potato blight emerged - a significant part of the population was dependant on the potato for food - the fate of the Irish was entirely in the hands of English leaders.Ĭoogan notes that English economic ideas came inextricably entwined with moral ones - "straightforward anti-Catholic prejudice, and the view that the laws of commerce were the laws of God." As Coogan puts it, the Victorian attitude was that "poverty was a self-inflicted wound incurred through bad habits."Ĭoogan describes in horrific, heart-breaking detail how the famine struck hardest in the west of Ireland, where mass evictions led small farmers, who generally paid their rent with potatoes, to choose among begging, slowly dying, or emigrating.
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