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The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845 - 1849

Cecil Woodham-Smith,

Charles Woodham

4.17 · Rating details · 1,005 ratings · 97 reviews

The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British ‘obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance’ – and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire ‘solutions’ – largely caused the disaste ...more

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Paperback, 528 pages

Published May 30th 1991 by Penguin (first published 1962)

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Mar 10, 2019 David Eppenstein rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, british-history, non-fiction

"It has been frequently declared the the parsimony of the British Government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and the parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance probably contributed more."

"As Sydney Smith, the celebrated writer and wit, wrote: The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barb "It has been frequently declared the the parsimony of the British Government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and the parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance probably contributed more."

"As Sydney Smith, the celebrated writer and wit, wrote: The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots".

I read a history of Ireland's Potato Famine a few years ago which gave me an insight into this enormous tragedy but in retrospect I believe the author of that work was more than slightly biased in his reporting of the events of that history. This book is far and away a much more objective and thorough review and is written in what I would term a journalistic manner which at times can be rather dry and dull but it is, nevertheless, compelling. In 1841 the population of Ireland was reported to be 8,175,124 though that number may be inaccurate and lower than reality. In 1851 the population had dropped to 6,552,385 with nearly a million people having emigrated to other countries, primarily Canada and the U.S. That's a population loss of just under 20% with nearly a third of that loss attributable to death from starvation and disease related to the starvation and that is what the Irish refer to this period as, The Starvation. The impact of the Starvation on Ireland was probably greater than the Holocaust was to European Jewry in the 20th century and it is no wonder why the Irish came to hate the British with such intensity.

Prior to the beginning of the Starvation in 1846 Ireland had been under the dominion of England for centuries and were regarded as a conquered people. Under this status the Irish were forbidden education and were not even permitted to send their children abroad to be educated. They were also denied occupation in many trades and businesses, the vote, and the ability to hold public office as well as numerous other common rights and privileges. It is no exaggeration to state that the Irish were probably regarded more harshly by their British occupiers than the slaves of the American South were during the same period. American slaves had value and were housed, fed, cared for, and frequently trained in a variety of trades. The Irish had no value to the English and that was made abundantly clear when the Famine began.

When the blight began in 1846 the English were totally committed to the principles of laissez-faire economy and that the government should do as little as possible to interfere with markets or the economy. This notion prevented them from offering any sort of meaningful assistance by way of purchasing and distributing food or stopping the exporting of food produced in Ireland and directing it to local relief. Even the assistance they did offer was not offered free but for sale at market prices only. The idea of giving people free food was thought to deny or rob the recipient of self-esteem and self-reliance. The following year, 1847, the entire crop failed and crisis was in full operation. The British government did, very reluctantly, assist Ireland with a commitment of 8 million pounds in funds primarily to avoid appearing heartless. The following year there was a successful crop but because of the evictions, deaths, disease, etc not as much acreage was planted as usual. While the crop was successful the yield was below normal and not enough to end the problem of hunger. Nevertheless, the British government declared the crisis over and immediately set about legislating a solution to any further such problems. Their solution was to dump all responsibility for the problem and its future requirements on Ireland and the Irish taxpayers. The author reveals in detail how disastrous this solution was due to the effects of the Famine on the Irish economy and population. The British solution was a total failure and the Famine continued in a repeating cycle for decades following the 1840's. The author alludes to the British refusal to effectively address Ireland's distress as the foundation for the Irish Independence movement of the early 2oth century.

This book is another chapter in the England's colonial history that illustrates how inept, arrogant, bigoted, and ignorant they were to people that were not English. That the English blamed the Irish for their situation without the slightest acknowledgment that the condition of the Irish was a result of English policies is unbelievable and totally English, English of that time at least. This is an incredibly sad history that is well worth becoming familiar with though it is hard to read. ...more

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Dec 04, 2010 Leslie rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, 19th-century

This is an older history of the famine (first published 1962), a good example of well-written general history. Its subject is, of course, thoroughly horrifying. What struck me as I read was how much history repeats itself and how little some learn from it. The Irish died not really because of the potato blight but because of insanely stupid laws governing land ownership and tenancy that were set up to benefit a tiny few and to exploit and degrade the many and were subsequently defended, even at ...more

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Mar 12, 2013 DoctorM rated it really liked it

Shelves: history-and-historiography

A fine introduction to one of the great disasters of the modern world--- the Irish Famine of the mid and late 1840s. Woodham-Smith tells the tale with both compassion for a land where perhaps a quarter of the population was destitute even in good years and with a subtle, icy coldness for the administrators in London who refused to take any of the steps that seem so obvious today. (Yes, I'm New Orleans-born, and my thought while reading "The Great Hunger" was that the relief efforts undertaken in A fine introduction to one of the great disasters of the modern world--- the Irish Famine of the mid and late 1840s. Woodham-Smith tells the tale with both compassion for a land where perhaps a quarter of the population was destitute even in good years and with a subtle, icy coldness for the administrators in London who refused to take any of the steps that seem so obvious today. (Yes, I'm New Orleans-born, and my thought while reading "The Great Hunger" was that the relief efforts undertaken in Ireland after 1845 managed to make the way the American administration handled the Katrina disaster seem like a model of planning and efficiency)

Woodham-Smith was writing at the end of the 1950s--- before demography and statistics were assimilated by historians, and she relies on prose rather than statistics to tell her tale. The more recent, more social-science look at the famine is Kinealy's "The Great Calamity, which should be read in tandem with Woodham-Smith. But Woodham-Smith's account is telling--- powerful and poignant both ---and she lays out a clear account of a period when one disaster (the potato blight, extreme weather, typhus, cholera) followed close on another, and where horror spread not only across Ireland, but to Montreal and New York as well, where refugees from the famine carried plague to new shores.

Woodham-Smith lays out the sheer backwardness of Ireland in the 1840s, of a land so impoverished that when the British government did import American wheat for famine relief, there were no mills to grind it--- since the bulk of the rural population could afford nothing but potatoes and almost never had bread. She points out the paradox of continuing grain exports at the height of the famine, since many small and middling landlords had no domestic market for grain, and were themselves dependent on exports to pay their own rents to the largely absentee big landlord class. She also skewers the bland, blind belief of the Treasury mandarins in London, with their unquestioning belief in free trade and laissez-faire that kept them from distributing free or cheap seed or provisions lest it "undermine the market". She catches the blindness, too, of the Young Ireland revolutionaries of 1848, who tried to lead a peasant uprising with no planning or weapons, and with no conception that the rural population were too starved and broken to have any energy for rebellion.

A fine book, and a fine introduction to a ghastly topic. Very much worth reading. ...more

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Nov 30, 2020 Czarny Pies rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Anyone living in the British Commonwealth.

Shelves: european-history

Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger" is a veritable tour de force in which the author demonstrates that the governing class of Great Britain failed utterly in its leadership role during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849. Woodham-Smith shows that the politicians never took the initiative. They consistently ignored reports of problems from the field and always acted too late. They were essentially indifferent to the sufferings of the Irish peasantry embracing the ideology of "laisse Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger" is a veritable tour de force in which the author demonstrates that the governing class of Great Britain failed utterly in its leadership role during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849. Woodham-Smith shows that the politicians never took the initiative. They consistently ignored reports of problems from the field and always acted too late. They were essentially indifferent to the sufferings of the Irish peasantry embracing the ideology of "laissez-faire" economics which seemed to justify a policy of not giving food to the starving. They did however facilitate the massing loading of peasants infected by typhus onto boats and shipping them to North America thus exporting an epidemic.
As an undergraduate, it was explained to me that this unconscionable was justified by ignorance. The necessary scientific discoveries needed to counter the problem were decades away. The Bordeaux Mixture which protected potatoes against blight did not exist before the late 1870s. There was no vaccine against typhus until the 1930s. Woodham-Smith, however, argues that there things that could have been done to reduced the magnitude of the suffering which were not done .
The politicians at Westminster repealed the Corn Laws prohibiting the import of foreign grain to the British Isles so that the peasants could buy food. This measure ignored the fact that the Irish peasantry lived in a pre-monetary economy. They had no cash with which to buy imported grain. Their rents were paid for with their potato harvest and they ate the surplus for their sustenance. For the next step, the politicians purchased American corn which the Irish lacked the equipment to mill.
To respond to the first wave of the famine in 1845, the British parliamentarians eventually bought food and sent it to Ireland to feed some of the hungry. Then in January 1847 they the shifted the responsibility for famine relief to the Poor Law which meant that local councils in Irish Districts had to bear the cost. Unable to do so, the landlords evicted their crop-less tenants and expelled them from their districts to reduce the expense of relief.
Woodham-Smith notes that the nationalist politicians of Ireland were totally cut off from the reality of the situation. Thus the Young Ireland Rebellion against British rule was launched in 1848. Failing within weeks, it accomplished nothing except to reduce financial aid from the British government and the English public.
Woodham-Smith correctly observes that Britain would pay the price for years for its mismanagement of the Potato Famine. It was one of the underlying causes for the Irish War of Independence and Irish neutrality during WWII. In addition, the mythology of the Great Hunger made it extremely difficult for both Wilson and Roosevelt to persuade the American public to go to war to assist England. She might also have added that the memory of the Potato Famine was a fundamental factor in the American decision to force Great Britain to divest itself of its Empire following WWII.
"The Great Hunger" is an outstanding book and extremely well-researched. As a Canadian reviewer, I must note that here treatment of the arrival of the "coffin ships" in Canada and her description of the operations of the quarantine station at Grosse Île is outstanding. Woodham-Smith's book stands up very well today almost 60 years after its initial publication and may never be truly superseded.
...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Arwen rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-biographical

I picked this book up at a time when I am researching my family history and at the moment in particular my 3 x great grandparents Hugh and Catherine who came from Roscommon, Ireland, to England in 1852. They would have been teenagers at the time of the great famine.. Having read the book, I'm surprised they or anyone else lived to emigrate. I know my ancestors were humble people who couldn't read or write, and I really wonder how they survived, and how many of their families perished.
It's easy h ...more

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Feb 20, 2012 Mary rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ireland-history

This is the best book I have ever read in my life. It is extraordinarily informative, gripping and horrifying. The catastrophe developed after centuries of colonialism, where the bountiful agricultural resources were extracted from Ireland while the Irish people were reduced to barely subsistence level lives: diet of one staple (in spite of the variety of exports they raised), starvation every year before the potato crop was ready, work to pay rent with hardly any currency exchanged, education a This is the best book I have ever read in my life. It is extraordinarily informative, gripping and horrifying. The catastrophe developed after centuries of colonialism, where the bountiful agricultural resources were extracted from Ireland while the Irish people were reduced to barely subsistence level lives: diet of one staple (in spite of the variety of exports they raised), starvation every year before the potato crop was ready, work to pay rent with hardly any currency exchanged, education and language outlawed, no professions allowed. The way the government handled the crisis is an early example of the deliberate subjugation of human suffering to the dynamics of market forces and profiteering. After a complete failure of the potato crop, the government expected the people to recover themselves with no seed and no currency to buy it. The people had sold even their clothes to get food.

The flight to America usually offered no relief as the people were sent off with little or no food for the voyage and insufficient water. Most arrived as skin and bones, many naked or nearly so, with typhus or cholera spreading through the ships. There was no welcome for these immigrants. They were detested for their extreme neediness and the disease they brought to American cities (Canada and US). There was no infrastructure to receive such an influx of destitute, unskilled, starving people. They died, along with their doctors, nurses, and priests in filthy off-shore fever hospitals or they were exploited in miserable death-trap slums.

The author uses primary sources, such as letters, newspapers, and government edicts to tell the story. Names are mentioned, both the good guys and the bad guys. (However, the author did miss the story of the Ottoman Sultan's exchange of letters with Queen Victoria and the assistance he sent to Drogheda secretly so as not to upstage her contribution.) Everyone who has Irish blood in their veins needs to know this story, which is much more complex and significant than the words "Irish potato famine" convey. This book should be life-changing for whoever reads and understands what happened and why. ...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Phillip Kay rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

How equipped are our governments to deal with emergencies? Supposing a worldwide epidemic, which many scientists forecast, or even a tornado, were to strike, would there be an effective support system with adequate funds to spring immediately into action? Do we want this to happen? Have we learnt anything from the past?

Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book in 1962 called The Great Hunger which implicitly asks these question. She had shown how slow the British Government was to learn from the mistakes How equipped are our governments to deal with emergencies? Supposing a worldwide epidemic, which many scientists forecast, or even a tornado, were to strike, would there be an effective support system with adequate funds to spring immediately into action? Do we want this to happen? Have we learnt anything from the past?

Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book in 1962 called The Great Hunger which implicitly asks these question. She had shown how slow the British Government was to learn from the mistakes made in the Irish famine in her book The Reason Why (1953), which details how administrative failure and ignorant leadership were able to destroy the British Army in the Crimea in the 1850s without the Russians having much to do with it. In The Great Hunger Woodham-Smith shows how doctrinaire adherence to laissez faire economic theory, ignorance of conditions in Ireland, hatred of the Irish and unchecked colonialism applied to what was officially part of Britain led to the deaths of more than four million men, women and children in Ireland, and the emigration of two or three million more, many of whom died on their journey, in the period 1845-49. (A note about figures: everything is ambiguous, none more so than statistics. A census of Ireland in the nineteenth century was impossible. Many districts could not be reached because of inadequate roads. The poor were often not counted. During the famine records could not be kept because of administrative breakdown. It is not known accurately what the population of Ireland was at the time of the famine, nor is it known how many died. Stick to official estimates if you want to downplay the tragedy, double those figures if you want to exaggerate it).

It started with bad weather, unseasonably damp and humid, the perfect conditions for the newly arrived potato blight to spread. A simple crop to grow, in Ireland the potato had become the staple food of the nation and was at the mercy of the weather: there had been regular ‘shortages’ for many years, during which the people went without. Now in 1846 the fungus phytophthora infestans, hitherto unknown in Europe, completely destroyed the Irish potato crop. The bulk of Ireland’s conservatively estimated 8 million people (possibly as high as 12-14 million as the western counties were never adumbrated effectively) had no food of any kind. This was just the beginning.

The whole of Europe was affected by an economic recess; food supplies were short across the continent and none available to help Ireland in her hour of need. Following starvation came fever, typhus and others. There was no effective way of dealing with widespread sickness in Ireland, and thousands and then millions died untreated and in some cases unburied. The humid summer was followed by one of the coldest winters on record, and people who had had to sell their clothes to feed their children died of exposure. Complete poverty meant that the Irish had no funds to buy seed for the following spring, widespread lack of education meant they had no knowledge of other crops or efficient cropping methods. In 1847 the weather was good and the crop of potatoes healthy, but only a tiny fraction of what it needed to be to feed the people. Then in 1848 the blight returned, destroying the entire crop for that year.

Ironically, Ireland is a fertile country. During the famine, farm produce which might have fed most of the starving was leaving Ireland for England in a steady stream. As Woodham-Smith explains, this anomaly had its roots in the system of land tenure, which goes back to Elizabethan times. Elizabeth I, Cromwell and many other British leaders followed a policy of dispossessing Irish nobility and awarding their lands to their own followers. Ireland was a plundered country, with no thought taken to integrate it with the rest of the nation or build its economy. Over the centuries the estates were broken down to smaller lots, but the revenues from them were spent in England by absentee landlords. Many of these became impoverished but remained improvident. Soon the only way to attract investment for produce was to sell competitively in foreign markets, hoping to squeeze income for establishments in Britain from the proceeds. Nobody worried about the Irish. They grew the food and sold it to pay their rents. They ate potatoes and lived in hovels. Nobody asked about crop failure.

The key figure in the way the Irish famine was dealt with in Britain was Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of Treasury. Others were Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord John Russell, Prime Minister. These men could be said to be responsible for what has been described emotively as genocide in Ireland. Of course they did not create the problem, which had existed for centuries and was a condition of England’s conquest of Ireland: it was a powder keg awaiting someone to throw a match.

Trevelyan’s contribution was to ignore the problem. Though there was a food shortage throughout Europe in the mid 40s, no planning or forecasts were made for the fragile economy of Ireland. Though the system of poor relief had been shown over many years to be underresourced and impossible to operate, reliance was made on it in the crisis. Throughout the famine Trevelyan was reluctant to send aid to Ireland because that would prohibit market forces from operating and be destructive for the economy (a doctrine of laissez faire Trevelyan rigidly adhered to, as did the government of which he was a part). The fact there was no market, and no economy after 1846, was ignored, along with the stream of reports which detailed the breakdowns in every system of administration in the country. If there was a problem in Ireland, Trevelyan thought, it was the fault of the Irish people, and it was up to them to fix it. The fact that Britain governed Ireland was effectively ignored in the process. Trevelyan was a true bureaucrat, and dealt with many problems merely by calling for further reports on them.

Through convoluted reasoning Trevelyan thought the people responsible for the mass of starving Irish were the landlords, who refused to fund relief funds. He caused rates to be levied, which the bankrupt landlords couldn’t pay, and their response was to clear the land, evicting tenants by police and military aid and demolishing their dwellings. The starving were thus forced on the parish and the poorhouses, which were also bankrupt and unable to cope with millions of new applicants for assistance. The British government did provide some slight assistance for poor relief, but as they thought that too was the responsibility of the landlords, they eventually withdrew it. The problem passed from hand to hand, and people died.

Perhaps this is one way tragedies happen. People who don’t know what to do do nothing, and ask, What problem? There’s no problem!

One of the saddest stories in Woodham-Smith’s book is that of the nationalists, the Repeal Association, the Young Ireland party and the revolutionary group lead by Fintan Lalor. With the passing of the great Daniel O’Connell the nationalist movement in Ireland was in the hands of leaders who knew less about the condition of the Irish than the British did. Breathing fiery rhetoric about driving the despoiling English from the land, they strove to organise forces of rebellion from starving men who only gathered in dozens, and mainly for food. But the British, which meant effectively Trevelyan, used this so-called rebellion as a further reason for withholding aid.

Woodham-Smith’s book has been criticised as simplifying the problem, and as anti-British. The same complaints have been made against her masterpiece The Reason Why. The Great Hunger tries to be objective. Woodham-Smith uses statistics a lot, refrains from judgmental remarks, quotes from a wide range of existing sources. But she does have a prejudice, against the entropy in large organisations and the tragedies they inflict. She says emigration to Australia was negligible (over one million came to Australia from Ireland), that this was because of the expense of the passage (there were several systems of assisted passage) and that there was no network of Irish to welcome them if they did arrive (there were many earlier Irish migrants, not to mention the convicts) so her information on Australia is deficient. Otherwise her uses of source material is impressive.

Inappropriate administrative procedures, rigid adherence to beliefs inapplicable to the situation encountered, racial prejudice, refusal to see problems arising or deal with them when they arrive – these methods kill as effectively as the gas chamber. Malthusian economists even forecast the deaths of millions of Irish people and saw it as a reasonable solution to the problem of overpopulation.

Today the world’s population is approaching seven billion. Crises involving millions of people are more likely to happen now than they were in 1845 in Ireland. Have the responses we are likely to make learnt from the past? ...more

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Oct 21, 2009 Louise rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

After reading this book I'm amazed my Irish ancestors survived long enough to be able to emigrate to England and for that I am truly thankful or I wouldn't be here to write this review. Truly harrowing in it's detail of the sufferings of the Irish people and what we now see as their callous treatment by the British government. I also hadn't realised that famine was a regular occurence in Ireland because of their reliance on the potato, although in this case it went way beyond anything that had e ...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Mark O'hagan rated it really liked it

It was only after visiting the Famine museum in Strokestown House that I felt compelled to investigate the full story of the famine. This book is an outstanding piece of research into Ireland's darkest hour and should be considered as essential reading for every student of Irish history ...more

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Aug 12, 2010 Suzanne rated it liked it

Recommends it for: serious students of European history

Shelves: history, non-fiction

Well , that wasn’t pretty. Well-researched, informative, and educational, but definitely not pretty.

I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ir Well , that wasn’t pretty. Well-researched, informative, and educational, but definitely not pretty.

I’d always wondered how the Irish potato famine happened, how a country could depend so heavily on one crop, one food source so completely, that its failure could have the kind of devastating effect this one did. The Great Hunger explains the perfect storm of conditions and forces that resulted in starvation for millions of people, emigration for hundreds of thousands more. At the time, all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the 1801 Act of Union, with a combined Parliament in Westminster that had assimilated the Irish economy and legislature with that of England. The famine was a result of, cumulatively: land use policy, landlord- tenant relations, cycles of repression and rebellion, political and religious strife, bureaucracy, the ease with which potatoes could be cultivated and therefore the extent to which the Irish poor with very little land became dependent on that crop, administrative ineptitude in averting anticipated disasters, export policy, food distribution snafus and public works mismanagement, and conservative laissez faire economic policy by the English Treasury. The head of the English Treasury did not want to interfere with commerce with too much welfare --when there was no commerce to interfere with and absolutely no money at all for people to engage in commerce. The situation was complicated by simultaneous crop failures all over Europe the same year the Irish potato fell to serious blight (1846), and a serious financial crisis in England in 1847. Soup kitchens and the distribution of imported corn meal, which was nutritionally inadequate anyway, didn’t make a dent in the vast need. It became impossible to collect taxes to fund relief efforts among the landed Irish gentry who were becoming insolvent. After two years of this, a second round of the potato blight occurred in 1848. A pathetic attempt at an uprising by the Young Irelanders led by William Smith O’Brien failed, as it’s pretty hard to get people who are literally starving very organized, but resulted in further animosity between the Irish and English as the insurrection was put down. It was a mess. Even children were so eager to get out of Ireland they would commit crimes serious enough to result in sentences of exile or “transportation” that would get them sent to North America or Australia.

Some parts of the book get a little dry, with talk of legislative acts, politics and taxation rates, but there are also heart-breaking stories about the people: terrible descriptions of starving people, especially the children, and of the horrendously bad living conditions of the destitute, sick and dying, landlords turning people off of their little plots for non-payment of rent and tearing down their homes. Whole families were living in tiny windowless cellars or literally in ditches and bogs, many “half-naked” because they’d sold all their clothes along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down or even remotely edible-- and the definition of “edible” became increasingly flexible as the crisis deepened. People were actually dying by the side of the road of starvation. Epidemics of dysentery, typhus and “ship fever” decimated not only the emigrants travelling to North America in horribly ill-equipped ships, but also the towns where they landed, because there were not enough quarantine sites or hospitals to control the spread of disease. This did not endear them to their new neighbors.

The complete devastation occurring over the four years covered was so extreme it’s hard to realize it was only 165 years ago, in a Western country. Sir John Russell, the Prime Minister at the time, said the famine was “such as has not been known in modern times, indeed . . . like a famine of the 13th century acting upon a population of the 19th.” The book points out that the English tried to help for the first couple of years, but seriously faltered in their later attempts. The author credits not maliciousness on the part of the English government, but rather “obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance.” But she generously allows that “it is doubtful if any Government in Europe, at the time, could have done more.” Still, the English don’t really come off looking that good.
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Feb 21, 2013 Viola rated it really liked it

Shelves: http-www-solidarityforeverbook-com

'Is Britain’s cover-up of its 1845-1850 holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?

The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide.
Consider: why does Irish President Mary Robinson call it “Ireland’s greatest natural disaster” while she conceals the British army’s role?

Potato blight, “phytophthora infestans”, did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn’t cause famine anywh ...more

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Jan 24, 2020 LibraryCin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 19th-century, agriculture, starvation, history, politics, ireland

2.75 stars

In the mid-1800s, the main food in Ireland was potatoes. A disease (blight) hit potatoes and was devastating for the people of Ireland. There was nothing else to substitute, as it’s what the most vulnerable populations ate.

This was an audio, and as soon as I heard the narrator, I had a bad feeling. I’m sure I’ve listened to this narrator before; also male and a British accent – sadly both of those are warnings that I am more likely to lose interest and miss a lot of what’s going on. A ...more

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Feb 11, 2021 Svajka rated it really liked it

An odyssey of my poor english. Half a year brothers and sisters, half a year!

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Mar 10, 2019 Alice rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019

Heartbreaking, thought provoking; a must-read for anyone interested in Irish history. Amazing how we survived as a race of people that were subjected to centuries of colonialism and the genocide of the famine years.

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Jan 27, 2021 Varapanyo Bhikkhu rated it really liked it

Michael Jones:

List's indictment of capitalism and the moral bankruptcy of England's ruling class elites received vindication from an unexpected quarter when the potato crop failed in Ireland in the fall of 1845.

Benjamin Jowett, the famous Oxford don, claimed that he had "always felt a certain horror of political economists," ever since "I heard one of them say that he feared that the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do muc ...more

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Dec 31, 2016 Niall Fitzpatrick rated it it was amazing

Having learned about the great famine during school in Ireland I was always aware of Britain's maltreatment but the potato crop failure seemed to be highlighted as the main culprit. The evil truth was always going to be too much for innocent young minds to fathom.

From the many sources used in this important book it is amazing that to this day the systematic policies of privation that kept Gaelic Ireland restrained in a constant precarious state of cyclical starvation have never been acknowledge ...more

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Aug 11, 2011 Jo rated it really liked it

This is excellent, a really comprehensive account of the famine. The digression about the life of the Irish emigrants in New York is too long, but on the other hand there's a good explanation of contemporary theories about the cause of the potato blight, and of the discovery of the real cause in the 20th century. ...more

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May 13, 2011 Katy Walters rated it it was amazing

This is such a heartbreaking and emotional read. It is also full of history, politics of the time and an indepth soul searching account of the suffering of the Irish people.It is a book that I keep close as my family suffered in that period.

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Aug 15, 2011 Matthew Bartlett rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-biography

A heart breaking, step by step retelling of how the Great Famine afflicted Ireland, causing a mass exodus by the population. It reveals a poor response to the famine as well as what diseases resulted and what happened to many who tried to flee and survive.

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Sep 11, 2017 Adrian Fingleton rated it it was amazing

I actually bought this book about (probably) ten years ago and put it off for so long possibly because I did not expect it to be a pleasant read. And I was right, it’s not, but it is an important book. And I certainly think that it’s a period which anyone who wants to understand modern Ireland should understand more fully.

The book is exhaustive, exhausting, horrifying and educational. I’m not especially interested in the politics of the tragedy, but with the cold light of 20-20 hindsight it’s ev ...more

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Jan 11, 2019 David rated it it was amazing

You don’t have to stretch your imagination too much to be able to make comparisons between the British treatment of the Irish in the mid 1800s and Russian oppression of Eastern Europe during and after WWII, Turkish treatment of Armenians in early 1900s, the treatment of Jews and Christians by radical Islam in the Middle East in the last hundred years, or even the Nazi genocide of the Jews during WWII minus the death camps and gas chambers. I was shocked to read about the Irish Potato famines of ...more

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Nov 16, 2017 Glen rated it really liked it

This is by now a classic on the subject, and fans of detailed documentation will not be disappointed. The human disaster that was the Irish Famine was an event defying easy explanation, though it stands as a grim reminder of the biologist's dictum that it is the little things that rule the world. In this case the spores of phytophthora infestans--the potato blight--combined with the single-crop reliance of the vast majority of Ireland's inhabitants to produce a catastrophe that in turn gave rise ...more

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Jun 17, 2018 Les rated it really liked it

I wasn't taught about the Irish Potato famines at school. Although I thought I'd self-taught myself about them subsequently, I still wasn't prepared for the tragedies described in this book; tragedies that have left a legacy to this day. There were famines before and after the period covered by this work, but the author argues convincingly that it is the period 1845-49 that is largely responsible for the sometimes difficult Anglo-Irish relations that persist to this day (and even before Brexit.) ...more

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Oct 30, 2017 RA rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, informative-somehow, irish, socio-political

". . . as a nation, the English have proved themselves to be capable of generosity, tolerance and magnanimity, but not where Ireland is concerned. . . The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots."

The story of the Great Famine period (1846--49), and the absolute colonialism practiced by the British over the Irish, directly and/or indirectly cau ...more

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Oct 11, 2018 Sean Chick rated it it was amazing

A detailed, at times dry, but good account of an event that led to Ireland's losing an estimated 30% of its population through death and immigration. Woodham-Smith can be a bit too ready with generalizations about peasant culture, and in discussing immigration, New Orleans is never mentioned (although it was second only to New York as a destination) and Philadelphia only briefly. Yet the thesis of government incompetence, at least after 1845, and the ravages of laissez faire capitalism and free ...more

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Dec 02, 2019 Eric rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I recall seeing over the years references to bits and pieces of this remarkable story of human suffering, but having the bulk of the catastrophe laid out in a complete work strikes at my soul - and I'm not Irish. The vision of human beings(a significant percentage of the populace in 1840) living in windowless sod igloos along with their animals and everyone's excrement nearby starts one down ugly paths. As the story progresses through the throes of typhus, typhoid fever, and ship fever added to ...more

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Jan 14, 2019 Susan Oleksiw rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history

Over the years I've heard numerous stories about the Irish famine in the 1840s, but this book walks through the four years of misery with minute detail and careful analysis. It is hard to imagine the ease with which Lord Trevelyan took over the management of the famine and turned a deaf and cruel ear to every entreaty, every desperate plea for help. At the end of it all, a million were dead, often dying in front of the English who cared so little they were willing to cart them to the docks and p ...more

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Feb 20, 2019 Dorothy Caimano rated it really liked it

A very thorough and heart-breaking account of the potato famine in Ireland in the middle of the 19th century: The prejudice against the Irish, both in England and in the United States, is addressed. The weak and ill-informed efforts of the British government to respond to the needs of the starving thousands did little to alleviate the situation and actually caused additional problems. I better understand why our U.S. presidents visit areas of crisis in person today. There is no substitute for se ...more

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Jan 12, 2018 Ann McReynolds rated it it was amazing

Cecil Woodham-Smith’s magnificent record of the Irish diaspora led by the infamous policies of the absentee Anglo-Irish landowners of the early 1800s stands alone in defining the causes, the conditions under which “tumbling” of the people’s’ homes left them to walk the roads, the “murrain” which caused potatoes to rot in the fields, and the infamous steerage passage to America with its own deadly costs.

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Feb 23, 2018 Petra rated it it was amazing

A lot of information about Great Famine is in this book. I liked insight into the immigration process, detailed process about potato blight and also I learned something about people who "were in charge" during famine. A lot of citations, in a well arranged way divided chapters...great introduction to one of the biggest disaster of 19th century and its consequences. ...more

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About Cecil Woodham-Smith

Cecil Woodham-Smith

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Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (née Fitzgerald) was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era.