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Home Page > Blogs > News blogs > Periscope > Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British -- Tim Pat Coogan moves Famine history on to a new plane

Periscope by Niall O'Dowd

Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British -- Tim Pat Coogan moves Famine history on to a new plane

Posted on Tuesday, December 04, 2012 at 07:11 AM

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The Famine memorial on the quays in Dublin City

The most significant section of Tim Pat Coogan’s new book on the Irish Famine is not his own writing, but his printing of the United Nations definition of genocide.

“The Famine Plot”, published by Palgrave MacMillan, was released in America last week and Coogan should have been here to launch it but in a separate but equally confounding plot he was denied a visa to come here by the American Embassy in Dublin.

The conclusion from his book is unmistakable. Ireland’s most prominent historian, who has previously created definitive portraits of both Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera, has now pointed the finger squarely at the British during the Famine and stated it was genocide.

It is a big charge, but Coogan is a big man, physically, intellectually, and in every sense and makes a very effective accusation. Coogan has painted a portrait of devastating neglect, abuse, and mismanagement that certainly fits the genocide concept.

I mean if we go back to that time, Ireland was the equivalent of Puerto Rico or Samoa, massive dependencies on the United States today.

If there were a massive food shortage in either of those two countries, we know the US would step up to the plate, literally.

Back in Famine time, the same potato crop disease occurred most heavily in Scotland, outside Ireland, yet there were relatively few casualties as the landowners and government ensured, for their own sakes as much as anything, that there was no mass death.

That was not the case in Ireland, where a very different mentality prevailed. The damned Irish were going to get what they deserved because of their attachment to Catholicism and Irish ways when they were refusing to toe the British line.

Read more: Tim Pat Coogan slams American Embassy as ‘Kafkaesque’ after visa refusal

As Coogan painstakingly recounts, every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving were thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market forces on them.

Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in the British government, had foreshadowed the deadly policy in a letter to the “Morning Post”, after a trip to Ireland, where he heartily agreed with the sentiment that there were at least a million or two people too many in the benighted land and that the eight million could not possibly survive there.

“Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.”

Shortly after, he was in charge of a policy that brought that situation about.

One Trevelyan story and one quote suffice.

“British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, when he saw starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his attempts to feed the starving, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan…”

The Trevelyan quote is “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Tim Pat Coogan has done an enormous service with this book.

Read it and weep.

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152 comments

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seanomelb | Dec 08, 2012, 08:35 PM EST

Perspectivity fromm what point of view???Irish lives are not as precious as European Jewish lives. I wonder who lacks pespectivity.

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anglo-norman | Dec 08, 2012, 07:11 PM EST

You cannot compare what happened to the Jews in WW2 to a Potato Famine for gods sake!! A bit of perspective curtis please.

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curtisjohnson | Dec 08, 2012, 06:44 PM EST

"not the selective history lesson…where taking responsibility might help?" Yes, the Irish need to take responsibility for dispossessing themselves of their property, outlawing their children from receiving an education, preventing the free exercise of religion, forcing themselves to tithe to an alien slave owning "church," then starving themselves en mass. Got it. Next Dano will go on about how the Jews need to take responsibility for the holocaust.

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anglo-norman | Dec 08, 2012, 05:36 PM EST

GavinE- It's called Free Speech.

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GavinE | Dec 08, 2012, 11:56 AM EST

Isn't it a peculiar thing, the way that society "allows" certain countries, religions and/or races to be insulted, but will shout "racist", "hate speech" or whatever when an identical form of abuse is made about some other races, etc. For example, "anglo-norman" on these boards, never fails to insult Ireland. In this particular post, he keeps repeating "move on Ireland" at the end of his post. This is a quite gratuitous attempt at an insult to the Irish people. I need not point out to any reader that his, and others', assault on the Catholic church is unceasing and volatile, and is thrown into any post where he/they can manage to do so regardless of the context being relevant or otherwise. However, if one were to say "Move on Nigeria", one would be abused as a racist. I don't have to even hint at what would occur if one were to say anything negative about the Muslim faith. And even now, when I have not abused any race or religion, I know that there will be a few diehards who will find some way to twist what I have said and attack ME - and assume that I am a particular race or religion to boot. Funny old world, ain't it.

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FallsRNat | Dec 08, 2012, 06:06 AM EST

Seano - if youse think that the English working class were treated any differently from the Irish, dig out your history book & read the 1843 Poor Law, social economic conditions were not the same then & cannot be looked at from the revisionist movement in the 21st century either by Coogan in his anti british rant or Harris in his anti republican one.

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DanOLoingsigh | Dec 08, 2012, 03:16 AM EST

The ironic thing about Curtis’s endless self righteousness, is his endless references to endless self righteousness of others…

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DanOLoingsigh | Dec 08, 2012, 03:08 AM EST

CJ - It’s the ‘poisonous influence of degenerate blah blah blah’ mantra…not the selective history lesson…where taking responsibility might help?

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curtisjohnson | Dec 07, 2012, 11:55 PM EST

" Unless one was living back in that time we can never know the real facts." Weird then how british "historians" seem to talk about the history of other countries such as Ireland with an unwavering certitude. The ironic thing about british atrocities (given their endless self righteousness) is that they in many instances they are copiously documented by the british themselves (that is when the terror state does not destroy the records as in the case with their crimes against the Mau Mau).

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curtisjohnson | Dec 07, 2012, 11:48 PM EST

" Coogan fails to realise that the UK govt consisted of rich upper class men with little or no care of the working class of England, let alone Scotland, Wales or Ireland. It would have appeared as an anathma to them to help the lower classes." Britain has been in substance a commercial oligarchy since the importation of bill the orange (the weak executive model lifted from the Italian city states). It remains a stratified class based society governed in substance by a commercial elite (granted, their advocacy of the cheap labor project has eliminated their official views on racial supremacism/eugenics - although not in the University of Ulster apparently).

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curtisjohnson | Dec 07, 2012, 11:43 PM EST

The point, which is continuously lost on you brit trolls, is to highlight the degeneracy of this "britain" monstrosity.

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curtisjohnson | Dec 07, 2012, 11:41 PM EST

"Curtis J - still peddling the ‘It's always somebody else’s fault’ line?…So when does the ‘taking responsibility for your own decisions’" This is hilarious. I guess the Indians should take responsibility for starving themselves during the Bengali famine and killing themselves during the Armistar massacre (after loyally serving the terror state in WWI), the Kenyans for torturing and sexually mutilating themselves in the british gulags, the Boers for putting themselves in concentration camps, the Kurds for bombing themselves with poisonous gas, etc (the examples are endless - the Tasmanian genocide, collective punishment of the population in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia). The british terror state is one long continuum of moral degeneracy and criminal aggression from the middle ages to the present.

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anglo-norman | Dec 07, 2012, 06:38 PM EST

Unless one was living back in that time we can never know the real facts. Move on please Irealnd.

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seanomelb | Dec 07, 2012, 06:28 PM EST

I wonder who the revisionist are !!certainly no TPC. The Irish peasants did not export food to England during the forced hunger. BTW fallser the British administration in Ireland frowned upon soup kitchens and villified those who manned them.There was sufficient food during the potato blight to feed the population. Your miserable attempt to minimise Btitain's roll in using the famine as a political tool will fall on deaf ears. A plague on the anti Irish British sycophants below. It apperas Dano is back for another verbal hiding,the lad has no sense or feeling.

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anglo-norman | Dec 07, 2012, 06:24 PM EST

Revisiting the pastt over & over is not good. Coogan is going to make a lot of money out of all this. Move on Ireland!!

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