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The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849

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This is by far the most complete and best written account of the Great Hunger in Ireland. Woodham-Smith sets forth in heart-wrenching detail the causes, experiences and effects of the great potato blight in the mid 1800s in Ireland. Unflinching in its indictment of the laissez-faire response of British authorities such as Trevelyan and Russell, this thorough history sheds a blinding light on a dark period in this history of this great and troubled nation. If you read only one account of the Hunger, make this the one.

A good book to read on the subject if you you're looking for a single text on the subject of the Irish Potato Famine. I do appreciate the technical and fact filled nature of Smith's writing. What it lacks in specific details on human suffering it makes up for with detailed accounts on the conditions and players that led to this tragedy. This book covers the political and cultural environments of the time as well as the greater effect the famine had on Ireland and the rest of the world. I came away from the book with a clearer picture of the relationship between Ireland and England, and a better understanding of the role each country (and their populations, press, government officials, landowners, farmers and royalty) played.

One would be pressed to call "The Great Hunger" an easy read. Written in 1964, its style and dense recitation of facts can leave the reader mired in detail.

Yet through the often thick prose comes a shocking tale of human disaster on an enormous scale. The near-total reliance of the Irish on the potato leads to calamity when that crop is destroyed by blight in the mid-1840's. Beholding to their landlords (many of them absentee), virtually penniless, they are swept into a vortex of helplessness and starvation.

While local officials in Ireland realise with horror the consequences of the crop failure, government bureaucrats in London stubbornly insist it would be wrong to send massive food relief because it would undermine free enterprise.

The author quotes extensively from numerous first hand accounts which graphically describe the suffering and despair of the Irish peasantry.

The book however is not limited to the tragedy that took place in Ireland. Woodham-Smith relates how thousands of Irish, many of them ill with typhus, flee their homeland for North America. Many of the vessels are poorly equipped and provisioned, and their cargo is human misery.

One of the most appalling chapters deals with the scene at Grosse Isle, Quebec, where a small fever hospital is overrun by sick and dying immigrants. At one point in the summer of 1847, dozens of ships are moored in the St. Lawrence River, waiting to discharge their gravely-ill passengers. The line of vessels stretches several miles. The deaths number in the thousands.

This is just one of many compelling images which emerge from Woodham-Smith's history, and they more than compensate for the often complex and detailed way he presents his information.

A worthwhile companion book to "The Great Hunger" is the novel "Away" by Jane Urquhart, which traces the journey of an Irish family from the Isle of Rathlin off the north coast of Ireland, to the Canadian province of Ontario, during the potato famine.

In fall 1972 I was a student traveling around the British Isles with a backpack and a rail pass. Finding myself stuck in Dublin for several days, I bought a copy of this book to while away the time. Previously I'd known of the Potato Famine only as a blessing-in-disguise that drove some of my ancestors to America. This book is rather dry and statistical, but the story it tells is damning. The Potato Famine was traditionally blamed on the laziness of the Irish, who had grown dependent on a single, easy-to-grow crop. Woodham-Smith shows convincingly that the real villains were the British landlords, who were trying to squeeze the maximum profit out of their tenants, and the British government, who denied the magnitude of the problem until it could no longer be concealed and then blamed it on the victims. I found the book engrossing, read it through in a few days, and have reread it several times since. Although it seems short on "human interest," some of the stories the author tells (e.g., the account of famine victims in Skibbereen, Co. Cork) are almost too painful to bear. Perhaps it's just as well that she let the facts and figures speak for themselves; they're horrifying enough!

The BritIrish history establishment has never forgiven Woodham-Smith this watershed book that exposes their cover-up. It took only her few mentions of the British regiments' at-gunpoint removal of Ireland's livestock and grains to end the "perfect" status of history's only "perfect" genocide. By even touching upon the Food Removal this book shatters the "Potato Famine" Big Lie that had ruled for the previous 110 years. Note where the author inserts two math fudges to produce her falsely-low death toll. (After reporting the 1841 official partial recount and how it proved that the 1841 census had undercounted by one-third, the author, nevertheless, used the figure that she knew to be false to lower the death toll [to get published, I am told]). Her fudges yield a death toll of "some 2.5 millions." Once her fudges are removed, her methodology and official figures produce a death toll of 5.16 millions. She also omitted the readily-available identities of each of the 75 Food Removal regiments and the warships convoying the lines of grain ships departing for England. She subtly blows the Irish history establishment's cover-up by complimenting their generosity in blaming the genocide on the potato crop failures and the victims' "fecklessness." This book remains, by far, the most truthful Irish "famine" book ever published. A courageous author! An effective opponent of genocide! A Must Read!

"By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
'Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn'
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay..."

THE GREAT HUNGER is the definitive history of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1849. When the Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith published this book in 1962 she was vilified and branded a Communist by the British establishment which had spent the previous 120 years explaining away what is undoubtedly the greatest European famine since antiquity. Estimates of the dead are difficult to quantify. Conservative historians put the number at 1-2 million; others place it closer to 6,000,000. At least another 1.5 million Irish fled their homeland.

Like most disasters, "An Gortha Mor" seems both inevitable and avoidable in retrospect. The Irish population exploded in the first half of the 19th century reaching an official 8.2 million (and an unofficial ten million) just before the Famine. But unlike Britain, which had become heavily industrialized and was moving confidently into the modern and scientific Victorian Era, Ireland was sunk in a morass of poverty and dejection. The average Irish countryman led a life no better than the poorest serfs of Imperial Russia of the day, and the Irish were subject to all manner of legal restrictions, mass unemployment, subsistence agriculture, exploitation by landlords, and eviction at whim from the land and their homes, often just a rude mud cabin. With no education, and few skills other than potato farming, eviction meant almost certain death for husbands, wives and children. Often, they were driven even from the bogs where they'd found shelter after being put out.

The Blight, too, meant certain death for far too many. Eating nothing but potatoes and buttermilk, these most wretched people literally had nothing at all to sustain them after the crop turned into a glutinous, stinking mass of black rot. They died in droves, particularly in the poor west of Ireland, bleak and rocky Connaught. The typhus which followed killed more.

As hideous as all this seems, Cecil Woodham-Smith tells us that the Blight was only one factor in the disaster that overtook the Irish. More insidious was the attitude of the British administration which largely stayed hardset in its laissez-faire attitude, refusing to step in and feed the Irish, refusing to interfere with the free market economy of the day, and worst of all, refusing to grasp that the market economy only works when people have money or skills to trade for products and services. In 1845, Ireland was still a pre-capitalist economy, and the mercantile approach of the British simply could not be applied there; still, the British tried, and blamed their own failure to address the Famine on their convenient perceptions of Irish intransigence and laziness.

Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan may be one of the most hated figures in Ireland even to this day. Effectively the head of British efforts at Famine Relief, Trevelyan was unenamored of the Irish, he was a rock-ribbed capitalist, and, though moral and moralistic to a fault, was also just as singleminded, blind to the suffering of the populace, but fixed on promoting Irish efforts at self-help. He bought a parsimonious 100,000 Pounds Sterling worth of unmilled American corn, and doled it out to provide for the eight million Irish. Amazingly, Trevelyan kept food EXPORTS flowing out of the country at pre-Famine levels throughout (!) Nothing could interfere with trade.

A disciple of the philosopher Thomas Malthus, Trevelyan cast a cold and dispassionate eye over Ireland's circumstances, seeing them as a form of natural population control. At the same time, the British placed the country under virtual martial law, decreeing "seven long years Transportation way on down to Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania) for minor infractions and acts of desperation (such as stealing corn).

Was this, as many have posited, an organized genocide? Certainly, there were those among the British who despised the Irish to that extent. On the other hand, if this had been an organized killing field, then why did the British do anything at all to help the Irish, little as it was?

Woodham-Smith's tales of people living in bogs, of coffinless mass funerals, of fever patients being abandoned by their terrified relations, of Ireland starving to death, cannot help but touch the reader. The British are presented as less calculating than more stupid, unable to adjust their thought processes to meet the crisis. Conditions were so awful and the Irish were so reduced and brutalized, forced to filthiness, criminal desperation and hair-trigger violence that when the Irish left Ireland (on rotten-bottomed Coffin Ships, like as not), their arrival in American and Canadian ports can be summed up shortly: NO IRISH NEED APPLY. "Paddy Wagons" were so named because they carried Irish miscreants almost exclusively for a time. Miraculously, the Irish rose, and rose all the way to the U.S. Presidency in just three generations.

More than just a history of the Potato Famine, THE GREAT HUNGER is an indictment of the too-common human propensities of blaming the victim, making gestures instead of taking action, and that of ultimately doing nothing. The truth behind every human tragedy can be found in the pages of THE GREAT HUNGER.

This is an essential read.

The failure of the potato crops covered all of the British Isles and much of Western Europe;but it was only in Ireland,and principally in the rural west,that "The Great Hunger" occured.This book gives the facts so that one must conclude that it was nothing short of Genocide orchestrated by the British Crown. To believe otherwise, one would have to believe that the Crown was not in control..an enormous stretch of the imagination. This book is very well written and tells the truth of what happened.

I have read and reread this history several times and bought copies for
my sons.

I don't believe anyone can understand the Ireland of today without
this touching and tragic reference.

Cecil Woodham-Smith's judicious account of the potato famine in Ireland contrasts sharply with the angry tone of Thomas Gallagher's Paddy's Lament. Nevertheless, the two books complement each other very well. Although Woodham-Smith does not neglect the suffering of the Irish people, the main focus of her book is on the British government's response to the famine. She shows how the British administration was constrained by a narrow laissez-faire ideology and an inadequate administrative structure in Ireland, especially in the remote western counties. Although she never oversimplifies, Woodham-Smith patiently compiles a devastating indictment of British policy in Ireland. The main strength of Gallagher's book is his vivid description of life during the famine. He occasionally drifts into fictional methods in order to make his story more personal and immediate. Woodham-Smith is the better historian, but Gallagher packs a larger emotional punch.

This is a very detailed account of how the famine happened, extensively researched and well supported with historical facts. For all of its detail of budgets, expeditures, and grants, the book fails to fully capture the human side of the tragedy. I found the most moving part of the book the description of the emigrant experience to Canada, where the agony of the fever-sticken, starving Irish was strong and convincing.