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Home Page > Blogs > News blogs > Periscope > Did Irish leader Daniel O’Connell help make the Famine happen? -- “Graves are Walking” book tells powerful Irish Famine truths

Periscope by Niall O'Dowd

Did Irish leader Daniel O’Connell help make the Famine happen? -- “Graves are Walking” book tells powerful Irish Famine truths

Posted on Friday, September 14, 2012 at 08:19 AM

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Famine memorial in Dublin

“Striding nearer every day
Like a wolf in search of prey
Comes the famine on his way”

That poem in “The Nation,” the journal of the Young Irelanders, who were the Irish republicans of 1846 summarizes what was occurring as Ireland headed full tilt for the Famine and disaster.

In his new book “The Graves are Walking” John Kelly gives an extraordinary insider account of the events that led to the Famine and the machinations on high and the suffering of the peasants below.

It is still an insane thought that the most successful country in the world at the time allowed millions to starve in Ireland, its’ closest colonial neighbor.

Imagine the US, the land of plenty, allowing millions of Hawaiians to starve in a Famine there and you get some sense of the absurdity.

This book reveals insights which have rarely been glimpsed and it does not shun controversy.

The role of Daniel O’Connell as liberator of the Catholic masses is well documented.

But also documented here is O’Connell’s disastrous decision to throw in his lot with Whig leader Lord John Russell who became Prime Minister in July 1846 at the beginning of the worst period of the Famine.

O’Connell did so to help gain the repeal of the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland, which was at the source of so many of Ireland’s problems.

But in the process he backed a man who had become a fully-fledged free trader who insisted that market prices must be received and no government intervention made – even when the result was millions of Irish starving because they could not afford to buy the imported corn.

Russell’s predecessor, the Tory leader Sir Robert Peel, as Kelly points out, had adopted a far more humane policy and had been widely praised for ordering and freeing up imported corn for starving Irish the previous year when the worst of the Famine was blunted.

Kelly has made a profound point about O’Connell that it was the biggest mistake of his life as Russell paid no heed to repeal and the Irish starved by the millions.

The book is scathing about the various British viceroys who came over to Ireland during that period, but kind to the many incredible charities, such as the Quakers and many American organizations as well who did their best to alleviate the suffering.

There is a hilarious chapter on Monsieur Alexis Soyer, a French chef who had proclaimed he had the perfect ingredients for a gourmet soup to save the starving Irish and was much praised in The Times of London and elsewhere.

He even demonstrated this for hundreds of aristocrats in Dublin watched by a “large and brilliant assemblage” and no doubt by the starving peasants as well. Even Monty Python could not have done such a scenario justice.

M.Soyer, gourmet soup and all were soon dispatched back to Britain and obscurity.

The fate of the Famine ships is also discussed in great detail, as is the sense of impending doom in cities such as Montréal as the famine increased and the Irish boats kept coming, discharging their wretched cargo.

The scenes at Grosse Ile, the quarantine Island as depicted by Kelly would bring tears from a stone, while the unlikely rise of the Irish in New York from Famine masses to political power is also documented.

A great read if you’re Irish and even if you’re not. "The Graves Are Walking" is already deservedly a best seller in Ireland.

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jacersagain | Sep 14, 2012, 08:38 PM EDT

This is a baaaad article by Niall, pushing sales of a book by some author blaming Daniel O’Connell for the tragedy of An Gorta Mór. Every Irish-American, every Irish-UK, every Irish-Oz or whatever Irish-other country and every original Irish person with the surname O’Connell had better duck mentioning their surname in future, if this rubbish by Niall is to be believed. Duck this!!!

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seanomelb | Sep 14, 2012, 08:00 PM EDT

"The British press sought to inculcate that the temperament and disposition of the Irish people peculiarly fitted them for some remote country in the east,or in the west,- in fact for any country but their own;- that it was some mistake their being born in Ireland. As a matter of course the "Times" was the first to find out this singular freak! said the paper (February 22nd,1847) "Remove Irishmen to the Ganges or the Indus- and they would be far more in their element there than in the country to which an inexorable fate had confined them" The times also reported on the fate of the Irish due to the famine "we can now do to the Irish as we please" DUFFY'S HISTORY OF IRELAND SECOND EDITION 1901 on the life of John Mitchell. BTW Niall please refrain from calling it a "FAMINE"

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annemcq | Sep 14, 2012, 05:28 PM EDT

The history of the famine and the Young Irelanders both in Ireland, Australia and the U.S. is "intensely researched and passionately narrated" by Thomas Keneally in The Great Shame and the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World: Anchor Books, September 2000. A great read!

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oTuachair | Sep 14, 2012, 04:55 PM EDT

Giving the legacies of historical figures a shot in the arm is not uncommon, but I think if O'Connell were truly responsible for the famine, there probably wouldn't be a large statue of him in the middle of Dublin, nor an O'Connell street in every city...

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oTuachair | Sep 14, 2012, 04:22 PM EDT

The Whigs believed in a libertarian "freedom," the same as Paul Ryan. This would include local rule and no interference by government to aid the poor or suffering. The Whigs represented the newly powerful business ownership classes. Peal and his party represented the old gentry (many of whom were also business owners), who had some sense of obligation to the less fortunate. Of course not all members of either class supported the party that represented their overall culture or ideology. In contrast a while later you had Proudhon in France begin to articlulate a philosophy that "Worker ownership of the means of production is Freedom" and that capitalist or government ownership of the means of production is theft. This philosophy is roughly put into practice by the worker owned coop movement in the US and elsewhere and most interestingly in the large Mondragon businesses in the Basque region of Spain (they are doing well in this Spanish recession).

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slainte9 | Sep 14, 2012, 04:15 PM EDT

Are we saying here that it was O'Connell, and not Benjamin Disraeli who brought down the Peel government.

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lcullen | Sep 14, 2012, 03:45 PM EDT

To pick up from before, Mitchel, before his transportation, was vehemently anti-O'Connell and in favor of a more violent solution to Eire's problems; he gave at least one son to the Confederate cause. O'Connell in 1846, was suffering from "softening of the brain" after being released from prison. His last appearance before Parliament was in 1847 when in the poorest of health, he pled the cause of famine relief for his people. He then went off to die in Rome but only made it as far as Genoa where he died in May'47. It is impossible to imagine how the author's intimation of complicity between O'C and Russell could have any real basis. O'C had no real power in 1846 and was under attack not only by the Brits but by the factions at home, e.g., Young Irelanders, Ribbon Boys, etc. Old Dan hit his zenith in 1828-1830 and was 71 years old in '46. He had given up the Monster Meetings as well. As to his position on the Irish language, it was the spoken tongue of his home and of his core constituency; he did not "despise" it. Rather, O'C saw the English language as the tongue of Irish business with Britain, its largest market. Conjecture is easiest made over the long view of years and I guess the 165 years since O'C's death is enough for this author. Remember also, that to a person, almost all who suffered hunger or immigration were O'c's constituency. -Larry

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odubslaine | Sep 14, 2012, 03:34 PM EDT

Many of our Irish-American ancestors were driven from Ireland by some of the ancestors of the so-called Irish living there today - before, during and after the "Great Hunger", so there is plenty of blame to be spread around ...

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Portia777 | Sep 14, 2012, 03:04 PM EDT

it was a Genocide - not a famine.There was plenty of food in Eire, but it was taken at gun point by British to feed the industrial cities. Genocide at the hands of the British colonialists had also happened in USA, Canada, Australia- so why would we be treated any differently.? And sure why not, when Pope Adrian 1V gave the lands of Eire and all her people as slaves to the British to keep us under control for the Romans? The Queen of England still answers to the Pope.

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lcullen | Sep 14, 2012, 01:39 PM EDT

Revisionist speculation never ceases to amaze! To say that O'Connell had anything to do with the Famine is absurd. 1846 was within one year of O'C's death in 1847 and what became known as the famine was, at that time, more of a crop failure, than a "famine". O'C was 71 in 1846, a mighty age for the time; his leadership was under attack by the Young Ireland movement, one of whose leaders was John Mitchel, a man who later was to publish several journals in the Southern U.S., which were rabidly pro-slavery

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WoundedKnee | Sep 14, 2012, 01:12 PM EDT

ancavker: I think you are wrong to say that O'C "despised" Irish. He simply thought it useless and irrelevant in a modernizing Ireland. His Utilitarian attitude is repeated today by countless Irish people I have heard say things like --"What good is Irish if you have to emigrate?".

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WoundedKnee | Sep 14, 2012, 01:06 PM EDT

Ireland's colonial relationship with Britain in the 1840s provides many parallels to its relationship with the EU today.

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ancavker | Sep 14, 2012, 10:11 AM EDT

O Connell also despised the Irish language. Thought it was backwards and ignorant. Only English can sell the cow he used to say.

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like2tweet | Sep 14, 2012, 09:07 AM EDT

must buy this book

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