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Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 200e206

Review article

The past and present of the Great Irish Famine

Leslie A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford (Eds), Famine and Disease in Ireland, London,Pickering and Chatto, 2005, 5 volumes, xiiiexxix, 2320 pages, £450 hardback.

Edited by two highly respected economic historians, Leslie Clarkson and Margaret Crawford,Famine and Disease in Ireland is a five-volume compendium of various texts set in facsimileand ranging in date from 1727e1728 to 1856. In a sense, it is a companion set of sources to Clark-son and Crawford’s earlier book, Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland.1

The texts have been selected (although this has to be inferred from the brief editorial commentary)because they place the Great Famine in a broader context of hunger and fever which occurred inIreland over centuries preceding the cataclysmic events of the 1840s. The Great Irish Famine isone of the better documented famines in history, not least because of the rich local oral memorieslater collected by the Irish Folklore Commission.2 As Cormac O Grada has remarked, Irish his-torians have, however, been wary of this oral tradition.3 The present collection is very much inthat vein with its focus on written sources and rational, scientific explanations. But Clarksonand Crawford point also to a contemporary resonance for their texts, arguing that this historicalexperience of famine is relevant to parts of Africa and Asia which display at least some of the fea-tures evident in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century.

It is in this latter way that Famine and Disease intersects with the wider debate, not just on thecauses of the Great Famine but also on its meaning. Until the early 1990s, the Great Famine of1845e1849 stood as a paradox in Irish historiography. It was, as O Grada argues, the main eventin Irish history, ‘still vividly etched in Irish and Irish-American folk memory’ yet ‘Irish historianstended to shy away from the topic’, resulting in the persistence of an overly simplifying ‘populist-nationalist’ discourse in which the Famine and its associated mortality were ‘almost entirely dueto a negligent government and cruel landlords.’4 Since these comments were written, we have seenthe sesquicentary of the Famine which began in 1995 and was marked by the commissioning of

1 L. Clarkson and E.M. Crawford, Feast and Famine: A History of Food and Nutrition in Ireland, Oxford, 2002.2 N.O. Ciosain, Famine memory and the popular representation of scarcity, in: I. McBride (Ed.), History and Mem-

ory in Modern Ireland, Cambridge, 2001, 95e117.3 C. O Grada, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory, Princeton, 1999.4 C. O Grada, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1789e1939, Oxford, 1994, 173e174.

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2006.10.005

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a plethora of commemorative monuments in Ireland, North America and Australia.5 These em-brace both an array of representational practices and also use the Famine to portray differentmessages. While Roy Foster regards this activity in Ireland as no more than a cynical exploitationof the Famine, the wave of commemoration being ‘linked to exploiting tourist sites and attractinginterest from the Irish diaspora’,6 more widely, it can be seen as portraying three rather differentnarratives. As Kelleher argues, the question as to whom or what Famine memorials commemo-rate is not one that is easily answered.7

First, as Edkins remarks, it is understandable that the Famine has been incorporated into the‘romance of resistance to British imperialism.’8 Traditional interpretations saw the Famine as, atworst, a deliberate policy of English genocide against the Irish, and at best, willful neglect by theBritish government,9 a reading boosted, as Foster notes, by the popularity of Cecil WoodhamSmith’s The Great Hunger.10 In Ireland, North America and even, if to a lesser extent, in Aus-tralia, the Holocaust became what O’Farrell calls the ‘competitive ethnic comparison’ for theFamine.11 For Foster: ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder stalked the land, buried memories were in-discriminately exhumed, and ‘‘survivor guilt’’ was ruthlessly appropriated from Holocaust studiesand exhibited in the market place’.12 At one level, the Philadelphia Irish Memorial, which wasdedicated in 2002, is a prime example of this populist-nationalist narrative of 800 ‘years of Englishrule and Irish resistance’. Its inscriptions link the Famine to genocide and the ‘enslavement’ of theIrish people and cover all the familiar and conventional touchstones of the nationalist narrative:penal laws; predatory landlords; eviction; coffin ships and the like. While the Philadelphia memo-rial makes some claim to artistic merit in Glenna Goodacre’s grandiose if mawkish statue in whichthe emaciated figures rising from the Irish bog are miraculously translated into a well-fed andjaunty Irishman disembarking from the coffin ship onto Penn’s Quay, similar sentiments can befound in the rather less salubrious context of Belfast wall art. Here, stripped of the pretensionsof Philadelphia, the sesquicentary of the Famine was marked by murals representing the on-slaught by the British government against ‘our people’, the onset of an ‘economic war’ that stillcontinues in the deprived estates of West Belfast. One mural on Belfast’s Whiterock Road wasunambiguous: ‘An Gorta Mor [the Great Hunger]: Britain’s genocide by starvation. Ireland’sHolocaust’. Another mural depicted Famine victims juxtaposed with one of the dead 1981 Repub-lican hunger strikers, a symbolic linkage intended to underpin the legitimacy of the Republicanstruggle and also its linear historical longevity.13

Secondly, this nationalist/republican narrative has become conflated with the American dream(and in Thomas Keneally’s case, with the Australian dream).14 While the Philadelphia memorial

5 M. Kelleher, Commemorating the Great Irish Famine, Textual Practice 16 (2002) 249e276.6 R.F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland, Harmondsworth, 2001, 29.7 Kelleher, Commemorating the Famine (note 5).8 J. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge, 2003, 118.9 Foster, Irish Story (note 6).

10 C. Woodham Smith, The Great Hunger, London, 1962.11 P. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, 1788 to the Present, Sydney, 2000, Third Edition, 331.12 I am grateful to Sara McDowell for this information on mural inscriptions.13 T. Keneally, The Great Shame, London, 1998.14 Kelleher, Commemorating the Famine (note 5), 266.

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does acknowledge the anti-Irish hostility to emigrants arriving in the city, it celebrates too theeventual flourishing of the Irish through the ‘openness of American democracy’. In their represen-tative art, the American Famine memorials are often the antithesis of the semi-abstraction of theIrish National Famine Memorial at Murrisk, Co. Mayo. John Behan’s coffin ship with its barelydiscernible figures drifting between life and death is poignantly located on the shores of Clew Baybetween the land left behind e the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick e its prow pointing west-ward towards the hulk of Clare Island and to the open Atlantic beyond. As Kelleher observes,however, the Philadelphia and Boston Famine memorials are directly representational, embody-ing the same theme of rebirth in the NewWorld as the Irish overcome ‘adversity’ with the strengththat can come from ‘great suffering’.15 In the Boston memorial, significantly sited at a key down-town location on the city’s ‘Freedom Trail’, one statue depicts a family of stricken Famine victimsleaving ‘Ireland’s shores, impoverished and desperate’. A second portrays a prosperous familygroup ‘striding out into the future’, filled ‘with hope and determination’ as they are embracedby the American dream.16 For Kelleher, the Great Famine continues as ‘the charter myth or birthmyth for Irish America’,17 a diasporic identity that is markedly at odds with the reality of Irish-ness in an increasingly multicultural island of Ireland. While the United States was a major playerin negotiating the peace process in Northern Ireland during the Clinton presidency, it was the tra-ditional ethno-nationalist identity discourse perpetuated by the US Famine memorials whichbankrolled Republican violence throughout the Troubles.

While the Philadelphia monument never rises above these cliches of the Irish-American dias-pora, more progressive readings can be made of other memorials. There are several dimensionsto this final perspective on who and what the Famine memorials commemorate. There may beelements of hope as in Rowan Gillespie’s installation, ‘Famine’, at Dublin’s Custom HouseQuay, which is intended to reflect the courage of those who left Ireland to begin a new life.18

The Famine thus becomes a powerful story of contribution and adaptation and, for the Irish Gov-ernment, its 150th anniversary was part of a wider political discourse aimed at attaining a ‘level ofinclusiveness, embracing Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter’.19 We have here the sense of trying toreclaim the Famine and emigration narratives from a hegemonic nationalist claim to the owner-ship of victimhood and depict them as a shared Irish tragedy. Such a representation shades intoa wider world in which Irish memorialisation is used, ostensibly at least, as a call to action againsthunger in the contemporary world. This reading is evident in the displays and text in the IrishNational Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, and is also inherent in both the in-scriptions (if not the representations) of the Boston Famine memorial and the Irish HungerMemorial sited near Battery Park in New York City. Coincidentally but powerfully located amere block from ‘Ground Zero’ and in line of sight with Ellis Island, this latter memorial liesgeographically at what is now and will remain the heart of American memorialisation. It is anextraordinary affair. On a cantilevered platform that fills an entire New York block, a fragment

15 Kelleher, Commemorating the Famine (note 5), 267.16 Edkins, Trauma (note 8), 119.17 Kelleher, Commemorating the Famine (note 5).18 Kelleher, Commemorating the Famine (note 5), 261.19 R.J. Savage, Introduction, in: R.J. Savage (Ed.), Ireland in the New Century, Dublin, 2000, xiii.

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of a Mayo landscape has been recreated, complete with lazybeds, native Irish flora and an‘authentic’ Famine-era ruined cottage. Despite the stones each marked with the name of an Irishcounty, this is stereotypical Irish-American Ireland in which the ‘West’ stands as the repository ofall that is ‘truly’ Irish. Its inscriptions are ambiguous but ambitious. It is ‘an expression of soli-darity to those that left from those that stayed behind’; but it is, too, a ‘theater of historicaland modern sentiments about famine worldwide’. This memorial combines Philadelphia’sethno-nationalist spirit of the Irish, Boston’s American Dream, an ethos of reconciliation andthen wraps it up in the claim that the Famine gives the Irish moral leadership and legitimacyin the contemporary world. Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, is cited to the effect that in com-memorating the victims of the Irish Famine, ‘we must renew our pledge to feed the hungry and toend the scourge of famine and poverty worldwide’.

While these sentiments are laudable, they are, necessarily, political and a simplification of his-tory, not least through the recourse to what O Grada calls ‘the nationalist ghost’. He argues thatit is the ‘historian’s function to debunk . myths, even when they are being put in the service ofa ‘‘good cause’’’.20 Clarkson and Crawford’s edited collection could be seen in that context. Theunderlying editorial thesis is that explained elsewhere by Crawford, namely that, followingAmartya Sen, famine is less caused by an absolute shortage of food than by the lack of ‘enti-tlements’ e ‘that is, the existence of large numbers of persons who do not possess the meanseither of producing food or of acquiring it through purchase or [other payments] sanctionedby the state.’ People starve but famine is caused by ‘political and social structures, ratherthan . neutral economic forces’.21 Thus the event, the Great Famine and the potato blightof 1845e1849, has to be distinguished from the structure, the political economy that allowedthree million people to live on the potato and little else. The content of the five volumes is struc-tured by four interconnected sets of questions which address successively: the vulnerability ofIreland to famine; the reaction of government to famine, starvation and disease; the causes ofmortality during famine; and the weapons available to public health authorities in dealing withfever and disease.

In 1856, Sir William Wilde published his commentary on the ‘Tables of Death’ in the 1851 Cen-sus which included the ‘Table of Cosmical Phenomena, Epizootics, Famines and Pestilences, inIreland.’ This highly detailed chronology, which constitutes the core of Volume 1, listed the resultsof Wilde’s archival research into the complexity of the relationships between weather, food sup-plies, famines and epidemics and placed the Great Famine into a narrative stretching back intoprehistory. As Clarkson and Crawford observe, Wilde would have subscribed to the viewpointthat Ireland was chronically vulnerable to famine. They note, however, that although the GreatFamine was preceded by repeated episodes of famine and disease (for instance, an estimated300,000e480,000 people died as a result of famine and famine-related diseases in 1740e1741),‘Ireland was [not] uniquely at risk until the mid-eighteenth century’.22 Episodes of famine werecommonplace in Britain and throughout Europe but the crucial event for Ireland was the

20 O Grada, Ireland (note 4), 174.21 E.M. Crawford, Famine, in: S.J. Connolly (Ed.), The Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford, 1998, 185.22 L. Clarkson and E.M. Crawford, General introduction, in: L. Clarkson and E.M. Crawford (Eds), Famine and

Disease in Ireland, Vol. I, London, 2005, xvii.

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narrowing of the diet of the poor during the eighteenth century as population rose from two tofive million and the dependence on the potato increased.

The texts included in Volume II relate to the issue of government reaction to famine, starvationand disease. The core document here is Charles E. Trevelyan’s The Irish Crisis, first published in1848. Trevelyan was Assistant Secretary at the Treasury from 1840e1859 and the most senior civilservant in charge of relief during the Great Famine. In the eighteenth century, it had been left tomunicipalities and private charities to cope as well as they could but government did intervene, forexample, during the famine of 1740e1741 and the subsistence crisis of 1817e1819. Fever hospitalswere among the most conspicuous initiatives and, unsurprisingly, these were also a response to theGreat Famine although, in 1847, their costs were shifted onto local relief committees. As Clarksonand Crawford observe, the severity of the Famine taxed a government ideologically wedded toa minimal level of intervention in economic affairs. Nevertheless, corn was purchased secretlyand a programme of public works was implemented. The most successful public intervention,though, took the form of soup kitchens. Trevelyan played a crucial role in developing and imple-menting these relief policies, foreshadowing ‘modern discussions about the most appropriate formof relief during famines’.23 As is readily apparent, however, such strategies were short-term expe-dients which did nothing to improve the structure of society that was the prime cause of the GreatFamine. Volume II also includes extracts from the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science(1849), which reports on a regional investigation of the fever epidemic carried out by Sir WilliamWilde. The variable geography of the Famine and its associated mortality is yet another issue thatcomplicates the populist-nationalist discourse.

Turning to the third set of interconnected questions, it has been estimated that for every personwho died from hunger during the Great Famine, perhaps 10 or 12 died from disease. Starvationdisproportionately affects children, which is just as true today as in Ireland during the 1840s whenmore than 50% of the starvation deaths were of children aged under 15. The two dominant causesof death during the Great Famine were fever (especially typhus and relapsing fever) and dysen-tery. Medical science had few better answers than had been the case during the fever epidemicof 1817e1819 which is the subject of Francis Barker and John Cheyne’s An Account of theRise, Progress and Decline of the Fever Lately Epidemical in Ireland. First published in 1821,this sprawling and ‘vast cornucopia of medical and social history’ is reproduced here in VolumesIII and IV.24 Again based on questionnaires sent out to doctors, it demonstrates both the limitedmeans available to doctors in treating fever and also its variable geography. In assessing thefourth interconnected set of questions, those concerned with the weapons available to publichealth authorities in combating fever and disease, Clarkson and Crawford observe that becausegerm theory did not gain acceptance until the later nineteenth century, ‘only after Ireland had suf-fered its last Great Famine was medical science properly able to explain how epidemics spread andhow they could be cured’.25 Thus Barker and Cheyne understood that fever was caused by con-tagion and filthy, overcrowded conditions but the medical interventions available were restrictedto well-worn practices such as bleeding, purging and poultices.

23 Clarkson and Crawford, Famine and Disease (note 22), Vol. II, 2.24 L.M. Geary, Francis Barker (1771/2e1859), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004.25 Clarkson and Crawford, Famine and Disease (note 22), Vol. I, xxix.

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The final volume, which turns to the structural causes of famine, comprises three texts. Jona-than Swift’s A Short View of the State of Ireland, published anonymously in 1728, is used to es-tablish the idea of the fundamental weaknesses of Irish society, including crippling restrictions ontrade and industry and rent remittances to absentee landlords. Characteristically polemical intone, the editors use Swift to support the idea of famine as both event and structure arguingthat ‘such events would have been less catastrophic had the structure of society been more ro-bust’.26 John Rutty’s treatise, A Chronological History of the Weather and Seasons and of the Pre-vailing Diseases in Dublin (1770), makes up the bulk of Volume V. Its straightforward thesis is thatthere is a connection between weather and famine. Volume V concludes with a short excerpt fromWilliam Harty’s comparative analysis of the famine of 1740e1741 and the fever epidemic of1817e1819 which again demonstrates the very limited value of prevailing medical practices intreating fever and epidemics.

In sum, therefore, the five volumes of Famine and Disease in Ireland comprise a major set ofprimary sources that demonstrate the complexity of the causes of famine and disease and con-tribute to the undermining of the nationalist myths that are still so dominant, particularly inIrish-American narratives of Irishness and Famine memorialisation. But the aims and objectivesof the collection remain very much understated. The editorial content amounts to less than 30 ofmore than 2300 pages (and some of that is repetition). It is very clear content and the key pointthat famine and disease are the consequences both of events and structure is resoundingly wellmade. Given, however, the importance of the historiography of the Great Famine of the 1840s,and the previous reluctance of many Irish historians to engage with the issues which it creates,this present work would have benefited from a more extensive editorial commentary which mighthave foregrounded the undoubted contribution of the collection to the debunking of stereotypicalnationalist narratives.

As we have seen, those narratives are all too ready to link Ireland with oppressed peoples ev-erywhere and the way in which this present collection makes a connection between famine anddisease in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with famine today is unhelpfulto the necessary complicating of the legacy of the events of the 1840s. It does not seem enough tosay: ‘History does not repeat itself precisely . the texts reprinted in these volumes contain somefamiliar images’.27 The structural, ideological and geopolitical conditions are very different todayas is the capacity of medical science to deal with disease and epidemics. Present-day famines areoften the results of war but also environmental change on a scale not remotely contemplated e oreven conceptualised e in the nineteenth century. Certainly, there is the same reluctance of govern-ments to intervene and the reliance on charities but the financial reach of the latter bears no re-lation to the situation in nineteenth-century Ireland. We have, too, real-time communication anda voracious visual media. Finally, most especially in the United States, the memorialisation of theGreat Irish Famine can be profoundly regressive and ethno-nationalist and there is, too, an in-tense irony, given the country’s culpability in existing patterns and processes of global inequality,in linking an Irish-American narrative of the Great Famine in Ireland to the ‘scourge of famineand poverty worldwide’. It is in these contexts of the meaning of the Famine and the contestation

26 Clarkson and Crawford, Famine and Disease (note 22), Vol. V, 2.27 Clarkson and Crawford, Famine and Disease (note 22), Vol. I, xxix.

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of its memorialisation that Clarkson and Crawford have perhaps neglected the opportunity toadvance a rather more robust argument to complement their undoubted success in situating theIrish experience of famine and disease within a conceptual context of event and structure.

Brian GrahamSchool of Environmental Sciences,

University of Ulster,Cromore Road, Coleraine,

Northern Ireland BT52 1SA, UKE-mail address: bj.graham@ulster.ac.uk