Sir, – Peter Gray’s critical review of Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (January 19th) was to be expected. In the book, Coogan criticises Irish historians as a class for evading the issue of British government responsibility for the Famine. Peter Gray, a professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast, retaliates by faulting the book on both academic and polemical grounds.
Unusually for a professional historian, Gray advises readers to consult works on the Famine by two non-academic authors, Cecil Woodham Smith and John Mitchel. He also commends the work of James Donnelly, an historian who has criticised the record of mainstream Irish historians on similar grounds to Coogan and whom Coogan cites to bolster his case.
Gray himself comes close to laying blame at the door of the British government when he implies that the Treasury ministry was “morally culpable, especially from later 1847, in failing to provide and distribute affordable (mostly imported) food aid and employment to the starving masses”, a failure he attributes to “ideological fixations with free trade”.
However, in line with the custom and practice of mainstream Irish historiography, the lessons of history must not be spelled out too clearly.
Gray concludes that “all the constraints under which government operated” require “a more complex and difficult story of agency and responsibility” than Coogan provides.
In other words, consult all the sources you like in studying the Famine so long as your conclusions are weighed down with complexity and the British are absolved of blame.
The expressions of tolerance for Woodham Smith, Mitchel and Donnelly are elaborate rhetoric. Gray may have a superior knowledge of the Famine in academic terms but in the end his review bears out Coogan’s point. – Yours, etc,