Usual suspects, but the mortality was neither calculated nor premeditated. Other deaths were the shocking by-productsof ill-conceived policies that aimed to ‘civilise’ a backward economy.Coogan rounds up the Was (in the words of chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Charles Wood) “a national visitation, sent by providence”. Some of those deaths were inevitable, given the poverty of the country, but some followed from a conviction in high places that the famine
Nor did it betray any remorse at presiding over the deaths of about one million people. And in fairness to Coogan, let us be clear: Whitehall certainly did not set out to minimise mortality. The stance of these fine works is hardly apologetic: they offer ample evidence of policies implemented during the famine that were callous, careless, blinkered and dogmatic. The charge of genocide is rejected in three other books published in a rich period for monographs on the subject: John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking Enda Delaney’s The Curse of Reason and – most ambitious of all – the multi-authored Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. He rests his case on the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, which he reproduces in full.Īs Coogan recognises, specialist historians of the Great Famine are inclined to argue that hard evidence for the “intent to destroy” stipulated in the Convention’s Article 2 is lacking. Coogan makes no bones about accusing the government of the day of “a genocidal intent,” as opposed to pursuing policies with “a genocidal outcome”. Such outraged reactions appalled Woodham-Smith and led some Irish historians to disown her, but they are very much in line with Coogan’s The Famine Plot. Historian AJP Taylor also read the book as clear evidence for “genocide”, claiming that during the famine “all Ireland was a Belsen”. Her enduring classic, fumed Irish novelist Frank O’Connor, was proof that the British authorities were guilty of “murder unlimited” in their treatment of the Irish: why had she not said as much? O’Connor laced his remarks with references to ‘Charles Eichmann-Trevelyan’ (for Charles Trevelyan, Treasury undersecretary) and Dachau. Coogan’s new work recalls a time, half a century ago, when Cecil Woodham-Smith, author of The Great Hunger, was berated for not calling a spade a spade. Unravelling a plot means identifying the guilty party. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot is about a far more sinister conspiracy theory. Until now, ‘famine plot’ was an obscure term linked to the history of food shortages in pre-revolutionary France.
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