the famine plot england's role in ireland's greatest tragedy

Lacking Mitchel’s personal experience of famine, he draws liberally on the numerous accounts of human agony, ruthless exploitation and official indifference that have survived to our times. However, it is still very much alive elsewhere – as witnessed, for example, by a recent mural on Belfast’s Springfield Road depicting the forced export of Irish foodstuffs by Britain’s armed forces in the 1840s, in the text of New Jersey’s state high-school Famine curriculum, and in the agenda of a forthcoming Irish Famine Tribunal at Fordham University in New York. Mitchel’s unequivocal accusation is now, Tim Pat Coogan laments, out of favour both in Irish official discourse and in Famine historiography. First made in Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) in the 1860s, it influenced the collective memory of the catastrophe held by generations of Irish, both at home and in the diaspora. John Mitchel’s charge of British culpability for Ireland’s Great Famine – that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine” – has had a long history. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, by Tim Pat Coogan, Palgrave Macmillan, 276pp, £17.99 HISTORY:Tim Pat Coogan believes that Irish historians have obscured the truth about a British famine plot against the Irish in the 1840s, but his account is far less convincing than that of his main source

The famine plot england's role in ireland's greatest tragedy