Charles Trevelyan and the great Irish Famine Robin Haines (Four Courts Press, 285) ISBN 1851827552 In tackling Charles Trevelyan’s role in the Great Famine, Robin Haines has entered something of a historiographical minefield. The Famine, as a subject of academic research, has consistently exposed the polemics of Irish history-writing, from John Mitchel’s overtly nationalist verdict … Read more
Is it possible to write famine out of Irish history? Note, the question refers to ‘famine’, not the ‘Great Famine’. The catastrophe of 1845-49 was unlike any previous famine. In the words of Peter Solar it ‘was no ordinary subsistence crisis’. Its singularity notwithstanding, Ireland’s story is often told with famine as a fugue running … Read more
Christine Kinealy (Palgrave, £15.50 pb, £47.50 hb) ISBN 0333677722 The Great Irish Potato Famine James S. Donnelly, Jr (Sutton Publishing, £20) ISBN 0750926325 These are two books which, at first sight, bear certain similarities. Both are surveys of the Great Famine by established scholars in the field, which combine elements of the author’s previous work … Read more
Readers of Joseph Robins’ Lost Children will be familiar with the story of Irish female orphan adolescents who were sent from the workhouses of Ireland to the Australian colonies at the time of the Great Famine. Between 1848 and 1850 over 4,000 young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty arrived in Sydney, Melbourne … Read more
Irish missionary effort in America began before the Famine, when most Irish immigrants were non-Catholic, but it matured quickly thereafter between 1845 and 1900 when approximately four million Irish, predominantly Catholic, left their homeland for the United States. Prior to the Famine, priests from the Irish colleges of Spain, especially Salamanca, came to serve in … Read more