Famine Diary by Brendan O Cathaoir, Irish Academic Press, 201pp, £18.95O
Famine research as benefited enormously of the 150th Anniversary commemoration. From being scandalously neglected, the Famine has attracted a wealth of new research - notably by Cormac O Grada, Peter Gray, Chris Morash, Donal Kerr and Margaret Kelleher - which has transformed our understanding of this defining moment in the emergence of modern Ireland and its diaspora. So rapidly has this research evolved that it is now faintly embarrassing to read the Famine chapters in the bestknown general histories of Ireland.
This rethinking of the Famine did not just affect academia. The Robinson Presidency imaginatively deployed the Famine to highlight the suppressed diasporic element in Irish identity, to highlight contemporary obligations with respect to world hunger, and by analogy to reassert the ethical values of compassion and social inclusion in the face of doctrinaire economics. This public engagement with the Famine was enhanced by the decision of The Irish Times to publish a Famine Diary column from 1995 to 1997, expertly compiled by Brendan O Cathaoir, tracking the corresponding Famine period of 1845 to 1847. This present publication book gives a more permanent shape to these columns, as well as adding an introduction, an epilogue which brings the narrative up to 1851, source notes, and a characteristically feisty foreword by Joe Lee. As Professor Lee notes, the strength of the Famine Diary is the immediacy of observation provided by contemporary comment. Much of this is drawn from an impressive range of newspapers, - more than thirty, many of them regional ones. The Belfast Vindicator of October 5th, 1846, reports that
"Give us food or we perish" is now the loudest cry in this unfortunate country. It is heard in every corner of the island - it breaks in like some awful spectre on the festive revelry of the licentious rich - it startles and appalls the merchant at his desk, the landlord in his office, the scholar in his study, the lawyer in his stall, the minister in his council-room and the priest at the altar. It is a strange popular cry to be heard within the limits of the powerful and wealthy British empire.
These accumulating views from all parts of the island - Banagher, Bray, Balbriggan, Clones, St Mullins, Castlewellan, as well as the more familiar Gothic horrors of the west - add to our sense of the Famine as a national, not just a regional, catastrophe. The most affecting voices - because closest to the people - are those of the priests, and O Cathaoir makes excellent use of their letters in the Relief Commissioner's papers in the National Archives. His own editorial interventions are calm and sensible. Here is his pithy summation of the 1848 Rebellion. "As revolution, the Rising was a pathetic failure; as revolutionary theatre, however, it was a gesture against death and despair, eviction and emigration."
The Famine is here in all its horrors; not for nothing does Cathaoir use as an epilogue Rilke's words: "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden" ("how much suffering there is to endure"). The recent winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, Amartya Sen, has consistently argued that the single best preventive to famine is a democratic political system. He has also argued that the Irish Famine killed more people (proportionately) than any other recorded famine. Its abiding lesson, then, is the failure of democracy in Ireland in the 1840s - a failure which allowed famine to stalk the wealthiest, most powerful state in the world. The Famine, properly speaking, did not occur in Ireland: it occurred in the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, and until the British side of the story is told, we remain handicapped in our understanding of it.
Brendan O Cathaoir's Famine Diary can help us in the difficult task of grasping the Famine at a human level. We need to use every available resource while applying our fullest moral, intellectual and imaginative faculties if we are to reappropriate that buried experience. The frail Famine voices now faintly reach us across an aching void. We need to amplify that acoustic; in hearing them attentively, we might reclaim our Famine ghosts from their enforced silence and invisibility. In so doing, we can rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity, paying them the respect which their lonely deaths so signally lacked. That very gesture of reconnection may alleviate a cultural loneliness we do not even know we have and liberate us into a fuller and more honest sense of who we are, showing us how we got to be where we are, even as we leave it behind.