Booker shortlistee Toibin (The Blackwater Lightship, 2000, etc.)
collaborates with historian Ferriter (Dublin City Univ.) to
introduce and annotate contemporary documents from Ireland's
devastating mid-19th-century famine. This is not yet another
ringing indictment of Britain for solely inflicting the "Great
Hunger" that ravaged Ireland for nearly a decade beginning with the
onset of a potato blight in 1845. That notion, claims Toibin in his
prefatory essay, was abandoned decades ago by serious Irish
historians. Instead, he presses the question of why Irish
intellectuals and literati often seem reluctant to delve into a
disaster whose causes were as complex as its results were tragic.
Toibin's suggestion: the degree of profiteering engaged in by
landholding and mercantile Irish, even as they witnessed the
decimation of the poor among them, remains difficult for many to
confront. The Ferriter-collected documents do contain, however,
ample testimony to the role British incompetence, ethnic hatred,
religious bias, and sheer inhumanity played in the administration's
approach to what became more of an "Irish" problem as it deepened.
Factions in both countries found in the famine an opportunity to
effect the "removal" of one-quarter or more of the Irish population
through forced eviction from small holdings, with subsequent
emigration as the only alternative for most to starvation or its
companion ravages of disease. The collected letters, public
postings, journalism, speeches, etc., summon both fact and emotion:
personal accounts often resonate with agony but also chilling
understatement of one of the great human tragedies on record by
those forced to deal directly with it. They can still leave a
reader room, the authors suggest, to agree with John Mitchel (1861)
that "the almighty sent the potato blight but Britain caused the
famine," or to conclude as well, writes Toibin, that "the Irish
merchant classes and middlemen made a fortune out of the Famine . .
. on the ruins of the smallholding class." Socioeconomic surgery on
a national scale, with no anesthetic. (Kirkus Reviews)
This unique volume, comprising Colm Toibin's acclaimed short text
and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of
Ireland's leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of
one's of history's most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes.
This book will allow the reader to understand the complex way in
which the fragmentary past is both available to us ... and distant
from us.' We get those insights from Toibin's short history and
from a rich collection of documents -- government papers, recipes,
journalism, letters, statistics, personal statements, all linked so
the book can be read as a whole.
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