Exclusive Interview with Tim Pat Coogan - A policy of ethnic cleansing? Who’s to blame for the Irish Famine?

"The Famine Plot" tells the unvarnished truth about that epic disaster

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CAHIR O'DOHERTY,

Irish Voice Arts Edtior

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Tim Pat Coogan

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How, in a nation brimming with crops and surrounded on all sides by teeming seas, could the Irish people have starved in their millions in the middle of the 19th century?

The answer, according to noted Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan, is as unsettling as it is direct.

The biggest contributing factor to the Great Irish Hunger was that because of conquest, Ireland was a dependency with no government of its own between 1845 and 1852. It’s a dangerous and isolating scenario that Coogan suggests may be playing out still.

“As I wrote The Famine Plot I got an increasingly bad feeling. The reason that most of what occurred during the famine happened to the Irish was because we didn’t have a government,” he told the Irish Voice during a phone interview last week, not long after his highly publicized visa battle with the U.S. Embassy in Dublin was settled.

“We’re back to that now. We have lost our sovereignty and are depending on doles from Brussels, the IMF and so on. And we’re back to unemployment, emigration and suicide – and of course, to learned helplessness.”

That last condition, which arises from the long-term legacy of colonization and from the despair of never being able to master your own fate, has characterized so much of the Irish response to political and social challenges since the great hunger, Coogan contends.

For decades now Coogan, 77, one of Ireland’s most prominent historians and the former editor of The Irish Press, has studied the impact and consequences of the Great Hunger on the nation, and his research has now led to his new work The Famine Plot, his hard-hitting exploration of the most traumatic event in Irish history.

Perhaps the first and most remarkable thing about the legacy of the Great Hunger is the silence that immediately followed it. For almost a 100 years Irish historians and Irish officialdom were reluctant to address it because they were leery of its enormous emotive and political power.

Interestingly, Coogan was himself prevented from undertaking his own U.S. book tour to promote The Famine Plot due to being twice refused a visa by the American Embassy in Dublin last month. On his personal website he spoke of his unease over the unprecedented decision.

“Somebody, somewhere it appears did not want me to visit the United States to publicize my book on the Famine.  It was suggested to me that some securicrats in the U.S. Embassy had decided to do a good turn for their buddies in the British ‘spookdom’ by blocking my attempts to enter the United States on a book tour,” he said.

If this is true then the Great Hunger (and British officialdom’s response to it) has lost none of its power to unnerve. But how can you really postpone an honest telling of how upward of two million Irish people died without that being an insult to their dignity as people?

“I had been applying fruitlessly for a visa since September but inexplicably had two separate visa waivers turned down and finally after much unhelpful gobbledygook from the U.S. Embassy, had to apply for a non-immigrant visa,” Coogan explains.

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