Monday, May 19, 2008




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.

...

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 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.

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.


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# posted by intcoex : 3:14 PM




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