Sir, We have had Tony Blair's apology to us for Britain's failure to avert or even materially mitigate the grim effects of the Famine. There is one more apology due. Is it not time for is to apologise to the dead, and to the descendants of the nearly-dead, the children of the Irish Diaspora, for our ancestors having failed them?.
In those last years of the 1840s not all Irish people were starving; not all Irish people were even hungry. Many, perhaps even most of our ancestors were reasonably comfortable, particularly on the east coast. Many even put themselves, during the Famine, into positions to profit subsequently from the changed circumstances brought about by the Famine deaths and massive emigration. Unless one is quite certain that none of one's ancestors emerged from the Famine years with more than the clothes on his back then, if those living now must accept responsibility for the acts of their ancestors (and we seem to insist on this), one is part of the problem, not a victim.
We don't even have what few excuses the British have. We were here; there can be no question of our not knowing what was happening, of just how dreadful the situation was: we saw the bodies at the side of the road, and there was no BBC to bring this level of immediacy to the English. The children starving to death were Irish children; we are denied even the dubious exculpation of British racism (which there surely was no one could doubt that the government's reaction would have been at least slightly less bumbling if English children, women and men had been dying). Make no mistake: our ancestors knew that if they didn't act, no one else would.
The Famine preceded the welfare state by a century: it is difficult now for us to understand that government at the time had not accepted the degree of responsibility in the face of such disasters that to us seems automatic. Our ancestors, however, knew that if the starving were to be fed, they would have to feed them themselves; and for the most part they didn't.
So I wonder when Mary Robinson, with the example of Tony Blair before her, will apologise on our behalf to the Irish-Americans, Hiberno-Argentines, Irish-Australians - and on through the alphabet - for our ancestors having so dramatically failed their ancestors; and to the Famine dead for having even more comprehensively failed them.
I also wonder whether the constant smouldering resentment and the occasional fiery eruptions of anger over the Famine will ever fully consume the fuel that feeds them. Probably not, for the fuel is guilt, the same as for the fires of hell. Yours, etc.,
Harold's Cross,
Dublin 6W.