Potato Famine in Ireland?

[ZZZenAgain]

Can anyone recommend a good book on the famine in Ireland? Could be a factual book or a work of fiction set in that time. I see there are several. Does anyone know of a good book on the topic.

It is for an 11 year old. Could be aimed at an older audience since we'll read it together.

The Hunger from the My Story range is supposed to be very good. I haven't read it myself though.

Twist of Gold by Michael Morpurgo is good according to my history-obsessed DD2. I would also recommend Under The Hawthorn Tree which is an Irish children's classic now.

Under the Hawthorne tree

Thanks very much for those suggestions. I'll get dd to have a look at them and see which one appeals to her most. We have been watching a documentary called "When Ireland Starved" which is in 4 parts and we have only seen the first two - "The Causes of Poverty" and "The Irish Holocaust". Dd in tears over the last one. Shocking for me too as an adult tbh

just fyi, we don't tend to call it the potato famine in Ireland, thats the English terminology, and its not exactly accurate. In Irish it is called "An Gorta Mor", the great hunger.

There is a childrens book called Black Potatoes.

ok thanks for that.

that book you mentioned

that looks very good too actually, non fiction. Just reading the reviews now

seperate topic, but you might like Children of the Dust Bowl, about America in the 30's during the Depression.

I'm going to be spectacular unhelpful, here, because I don't know the title or the author, but there was a time slip children's book I read a few years ago concerning the famine. Anne somebody or another, with 'Pit' in the title I think, although I've googled this and nothing came up.

My DD enjoyed (if that's the right word) The Hunger, which she read when we were holidaying in the west of Ireland. In fact, the next term she decided to do a project on the topic.

Is this the book you meant jeee?

I remember reading Black Harvest as a young teen and really loving it.

thanks Joan but dd specifically wanted to know about the famine in Ireland since she read something about it but only a very brief overview and wanted to know more about it. After the documentary, I am not sure if she doesn't know more than she wanted to for now.

what I really cannot understand is why more was not done to help these people.

Well if these people didn't have to hand over their land and produce to the landlords there wouldn't have been any shortages. It was a political famine.

I second the Hawthorne Tree series by Marita Conlon-McKenna

do you mean there was a conscious policy that a lot of people should die? Is that what you mean by a political famine? Something like the famine in Ukraine that led to 8 million deaths by starvation or something horrendous like that under Stalin? I don't know much about the famine in Ireland, just learning about it now. I thought that already before the famine began, almost all of the land in Ireland was owned by a handful of landlords, often absentee landlords and also the Church of Ireland and that it was rented out at exorbitant rates as small holdings.

Are you saying that it was a deliberate policy to extend the famine so that the people on this rented land would have to give that up to the landowners so they in turn could use it for another purpose? I would have thought judging by the whole set-up very much in favour of the landlords, they could have seized the land back from their tenants easily enough since they had the law on their side. Also I understood basically the only produce local families were producing was potatoes so that is why the blight hit them so hard. I didn't realise they were also producing other crops which they had to hand over to the landlords.

No not that people should die but an indeifference if they did.
O Connell had warned the English parliament about the implications of their policies, infact several of the Young Irishmen did, but responses were poor and ineffectual.
Export of food to England actaully increased during the famine years, a famous poem called The Nation was written about it, we leant it in school.
Tenant farmers were evicted from land if they could not pay, thus freeing up land for cattle rearing and any small land holdings had to be divided between sons equally so plots were so small nothing but potatoes could grow to sustaina family.
Evictions also caused huge emigration or being sent to workhouses. The government legislated against begging so homeless starving people died at the side of the roads.

Suggest you read on wiki or theirishhunger.org for more and succinct information?

sorry * indifference

sounds completely desperate.

Well, I will watch the other two episodes of that documentary which is tough watching, but informative. They are entitled "managing the famine" and "exodus" so about emigration. Then I'll see what to read.

I am quite stunned that if the conditions in Ireland during the famine were well-known, people could have just been left in those conditions. We were hearing about a group of people who trekked a long way to ask for aid, received none and were so fragile from hunger and exhaustion that they were literally blown off a cliff into the lake below. I know in Victorian England, the poor had a rough time generally and there was not much interest in the ruling classes towards the poor - but as you say the indifference, if that is all it is, towards the plight in Ireland seems very difficult to understand.

Well I suppose with the huge over population in Europe, it was better for English government to have a few less trouble makers! We weren't the most complicit in colonisation!
There are several memorials around the country to this who died after traveling for food, but then there was the stigma to contend with for having "taking the soup"

Socially it was terrible as well, with the denial of education for catholics and very high penalties for petty crimes (deportation to Australia for stealing bread!)

Not really a matter of just cynically forcing people from the land (though this happened and profitable grazing proved a better bet than rent farming), but rather of being blinded by moral and political orthodoxy that decreed that helping starving people would only encourage them to be feckless in the future. So while people starved food was exported, and people were forced to work on pointless projects such as building stone walls leading up mountain sides, building roads through marginal land, having to clear boulders, fill in boggy patches (many of the roads are recognisable because they are uncharacteristically straight), carrying loads of rocks up hillsides and then down. It was a policy of 'laissez-faire' mixed with a tremendous amount of disdain for the Irish, who were seen as sub human.

You can see the famine walls on mountains and hillsides all over Ireland, even in the south east on the Blaskstairs mountains.

Road in Doolough vallley, Mayo.

Cecil Woodham-Smith's 'The Great Hunger' is an oldie bit a really good history. Her main point is that Phytophthora infestans caused the blight but the Trevelyan administration caused the famine.

Punch cartoon from 1849, right after the famine

'Taking the soup' meant renouncing the RC religion in exchange for soup dished out by the CoI. Obviously, renouncing your religion was frowned upon; making people do this was beyond horrible.

Among churches that weren't RC, the Quakers stood out as truly compassionate and charitable, with no agenda except to alleviate suffering.