A creature manifestly between the gorilla and the negro is to be met in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool – by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate. It belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.
All of which contributed to a climate of dehumanisation which subsequently allowed a million people to die on a neighbouring island – because they were no longer seen as human beings. Such characterisations were by no means restricted to the popular culture of the time; the Oxford historian J. A. Froude in 1842 described the Irish as ‘more like tribes of squalid apes than human beings’. And, similarly, in a telling link between the Tasmanian genocide and the Irish Famine, Trevelyan uses the word ‘aboriginal’ to describe the people of Ireland – a shorthand, in Victorian terms, for an animal halfway between an ape and a human being. In 1860, only a few years after the Famine, Charles Kingsley, the cleric, writer and historian, who had just been made chaplain to Queen Victoria at the time, on a visit to Ireland, wrote to his wife: ‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country … to see white chimpanzees is dreadful, if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.’fn6
Given Mitchel’s explosive interventions, in the remainder of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, it is remarkable how few concerted efforts there were to write serious critical histories regarding the Famine. It was as if generations of Irish historians had been scared off the subject. For much of the last century the debate polarised around only two works – both of them significantly flawed. The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, a collection of essays edited by Robert Dudley Edwards and Thomas Desmond Williams, two Irish historians, was published in 1956, but was seen by many commentators as letting the British off the hook – O’Grada feels that it lacked ‘coherence and fairness’ and that in essence it made ‘excuses for the attitudes of British bureaucrats and politicians’. It also was widely criticised for its dryness – ‘dehydrated history’ – for its overemphasis on the administrative aspects of the Famine, and lack of attention to the testimonies of human suffering.
Six years later, Cecil Woodham-Smith published her bestseller – the product of over a decade of detailed research, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–49, but though popular with nationalists for placing the blame for the Famine firmly at Britain’s door once again, some criticised it for being too emotional and passionate. (Though Colm Tóibín sees enduring strengths in her approach: ‘Her work is readable – something which later historians of the Famine have tried hard not to be.6 If she relies too much on the study of personalities, her command of detail, her insistence on the cruelty of those in charge and the misery of those who suffered, and her ability to structure the narrative, account for the book’s extraordinary impact.’)
But, putting these two works aside, the paucity of historical attention paid to the Famine for most of the twentieth century is striking. It is remarkable that, as the historian James Donnelly observed in 2001, in the fifty years between 1938 and 1988, the journal Irish Historical Studies published only five articles about the Famine. Only since the 1990s, prompted by the 150th anniversary commemorations, has there been a growing debate, and far more publications, on the Famine, its causes and legacies. Indeed, historian Christine Kinealy has stated that ‘more has been written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine than was written in the whole period since 1850’.fn7
Cormac O’Grada, perhaps fairly, accounts for the nervousness of Irish historians to really confront the Famine until relatively recently as being due to the fact that they are generally ‘a conservative bunch’, and notes, with a trace of sadness, ‘there are no Irish E. P. Thompsons’.fn8 He has also written of the fear of being associated with terrorism, if you too strongly emphasise the crimes of the British state, saying that Robert Kee’s groundbreaking series Ireland: A Television History broadcast in 1980, though warmly received internationally, was criticised by some in Ireland ‘for lending succour to terrorism’. Kinealy made the same point herself but more explicitly, writing in 1997 that Irish historians have enforced a ‘self-imposed censorship’ for fear of providing ‘ideological bullets to the IRA’.†fn9
But something began to shift in the 1990s that at last enabled a more honest and vigorous national debate to take place. Some of this movement is attributable to the aforementioned 150th anniversary of the Famine, some of the unblocking is no doubt connected to the years culminating in the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998. These moments in a country’s development are seismic; at certain times there are windows, often relatively brief, when exceptional change becomes possible. And such change is no respecter of frontiers or borders. It may begin in one country, but the effects of the breaking of silence soon fall like waves lapping over neighbouring countries.
At a concert in Cork (promoted with the jarring phrase ‘The Great Famine Event’) on 1 June 1997, part of the 150th anniversary commemoration, the British government began to publicly acknowledge its role in the Famine for the first time. To the amazement of the 15,000 people at the concert, the actor Gabriel Byrne read out a statement by the newly elected British prime minister, Tony Blair:
I am glad to have this opportunity to join with you in commemorating all those who suffered and died during the Great Irish Famine … The Famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and of Britain. It has left deep scars. That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. We must not forget such a dreadful event.
This has sometimes, wrongly, been referred to as an ‘apology’ – but saying the British government of the time ‘failed’ and recognising the ‘massive human tragedy’ that followed is not the same as apologising, or indeed accepting full responsibility on behalf of the country. Blair, with his barrister’s background, would have understood the legal ramifications of a full apology, and also the financial and reparations claims that could, potentially, have followed, even 150 years after the event. But putting such considerations to one side, these words were still hugely significant. It is worth remembering that at this time the Good Friday Agreement was still ten months away, peace in Northern Ireland was far from assured, the IRA had not yet renewed the 1994 ceasefire. This statement played a key role in reassuring the Irish people that the British state wasn’t locked in the past, that there was a real possibility of movement. Words about the past helped to create trust in the present, and this trust led to hope for a shared future – all gradually leading to a full ceasefire and the agreement which was signed between Britain and Ireland on Friday, 10 April 1998. The breaking of a historical silence contributed to a remarkable political change.