Sir, – Jack Lane (September 7th) is, as always, cogent and to the point in his discussion of culpability in the Great Famine. He is right to say that state policy contributed to the million deaths. Whether this amounts to genocide, including the “intent” specified by the UN definition he quotes, I am less sure than he is.
There is one aspect of his letter which is worth clarifying, however. His evidence of intent is a letter by the lord lieutenant of the time saying that the government was “coldly persisting in a policy of extermination”.
The word “extermination”, as it was used during the 1840s in Ireland, meant removal from the land, usually multiple evictions, rather than murder.
In 1849, Edmund Roche, MP for Cork, told the House of Commons that a proposed change in the law meant that “the extermination in Ireland would be trebled, until the whole of the pauper population would be got rid of and transported beyond the seas”.
Deborah Lipstadt’s letter (August 23rd), to which Jack Lane was responding, urged caution in the use of the term “genocide” relative to the Famine, and she was of course right to do so.
Your original report (August 18th), however, quoted her as saying that the famine was not “a holocaust”, which is different. The word “genocide” was coined in the 20th century and has a precise legal and literal meaning; the word “holocaust”, meaning “wholly burnt offering”, has existed for centuries, is used mostly figuratively, and took on its current dominant meaning – “the Holocaust” rather than “a holocaust” – only since about 1970. Before the second World War, it carried much less of a charge. It could be used to mean a sacrifice, as when Parnell in 1879 said that Irishmen who joined the British army became “the holocaust of Imperialism”; or it could simply mean destruction by fire, which is its literal meaning. The historian DB Quinn in 1933 could even refer to the burning of the Dublin state archive a decade earlier as “the holocaust of the Public Record Office”, a usage which would be unthinkable now.
At least one contemporary referred to the famine of the 1840s as a “holocaust”. This was a city councillor in Cork who told a meeting in January 1848 that “a million and a half of Irish people perished, were smitten and offered up as a holocaust”.
This was a more serious usage than those of Parnell or Quinn, but does not imply an equivalence to the Nazi Holocaust.
Precision in language is as necessary with the word “holocaust” as it is with “genocide”, and indeed with “extermination”. – Yours etc,