Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British -- Tim Pat Coogan moves Famine history on to a new plane

The Famine memorial on the quays in Dublin City

The most significant section of Tim Pat Coogan’s new book on the Irish Famine is not his own writing, but his printing of the United Nations definition of genocide.

“The Famine Plot”, published by Palgrave MacMillan, was released in America last week and Coogan should have been here to launch it but in a separate but equally confounding plot he was denied a visa to come here by the American Embassy in Dublin.

The conclusion from his book is unmistakable. Ireland’s most prominent historian, who has previously created definitive portraits of both Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera, has now pointed the finger squarely at the British during the Famine and stated it was genocide.

It is a big charge, but Coogan is a big man, physically, intellectually, and in every sense and makes a very effective accusation. Coogan has painted a portrait of devastating neglect, abuse, and mismanagement that certainly fits the genocide concept.

I mean if we go back to that time, Ireland was the equivalent of Puerto Rico or Samoa, massive dependencies on the United States today.

If there were a massive food shortage in either of those two countries, we know the US would step up to the plate, literally.

Back in Famine time, the same potato crop disease occurred most heavily in Scotland, outside Ireland, yet there were relatively few casualties as the landowners and government ensured, for their own sakes as much as anything, that there was no mass death.

That was not the case in Ireland, where a very different mentality prevailed. The damned Irish were going to get what they deserved because of their attachment to Catholicism and Irish ways when they were refusing to toe the British line.

Read more: Tim Pat Coogan slams American Embassy as ‘Kafkaesque’ after visa refusal

As Coogan painstakingly recounts, every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving were thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market forces on them.

Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in the British government, had foreshadowed the deadly policy in a letter to the “Morning Post”, after a trip to Ireland, where he heartily agreed with the sentiment that there were at least a million or two people too many in the benighted land and that the eight million could not possibly survive there.

“Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.”

Shortly after, he was in charge of a policy that brought that situation about.

One Trevelyan story and one quote suffice.

“British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, when he saw starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his attempts to feed the starving, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan…”

The Trevelyan quote is “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Tim Pat Coogan has done an enormous service with this book.

Read it and weep.

Remembering the Famine and its impact on the US -- Voices of those who survived still live on

I gave a speech in Drogheda, Ireland, yesterday on the impact of the famine in America. I was one of several speakers, including Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who is speaking today on the occasion of the national commemoration of the greatest European catastrophe of the 19th Century.

Here is an excerpt of some of my remarks:

“Missing Friends was the series every week in John Boyle O’Reilly’s Boston Pilot newspaper which allowed Famine era immigrants to America to seek out families and freidns who had gone before them.

It was the Facebook of its time. Famine emigrants rarely wanted to discuss the horrific nature of the voyage or the awful conditions they had to endure.

On Missing Friends, however, we hear their voices resonate.

It is not surprising  they never wanted to talk about it and who could blame them they were ripped from their families, catapulted across the bitter bowl of tears arrived penniless, many speaking no English.

Here are some of their voices from the past.

“Of JOHN QUILMAN, late of the parish of Inch, co’y Tipperary, who sailed from Waterford with his family last April.  His daughter, Mary Harrington, wishes him to know that her husband, James Harrington, died on their passage to this country; also her two children since. She is now in Troy and wishes to know where her father is.  Any information respecting him will be thankfully received by Mary Harrington, care of S. Duffy, or Mrs. Daly, Fifth street, Troy, N. Y.
27 November 1847

Of ANTHONY and PATRICK WATERS, natives of co. Mayo. They are informed that their sister, Mary, who was married to Patrick Boyle, is anxious to hear from them. Her husband died on the passage.  Should this meet their eye they will write to her immediately, care of the editor of the Pilot,Boston, Ms.
4 December 1847

Of BERNARD MURPHY, who emigrated from Co. Armagh, parish of Grangemore, townland of Aughmagorgan, in April last, with his father and 2 sisters. He was parted from his father at Quarantine Island, below Montreal. It is supposed he went to Kingston. Any information respecting him will be thankfully received by his father who is now living in Dover. If by letter, address Patrick Grimes, Dover, N. H., or John Doran, No. 6 Canal street, Boston, Ms.
11 December 1847

Of CATHERINE GILLEN, who landed in Boston last spring, with her father and family. She was sick and went to hospital and has not been heard from since. Any one knowing anything of her would confer a favor on her father, Hugh Gillen, by writing a letter to him in care of John Devlin, Pawtucket, R.I.
18 December 1847

Of BRIDGET CARROLL, a native of Killacooly, parish of Drumcliff, co. Sligo, who was taken into Grosse Isle hospital, below Quebec, in June last, and has not been heard from since. Any information respecting her will be thankfully received by her brother, Patrick Carroll, care of Mr. Samuel Downer, Second street, South Boston, Ms.
1 January 1848

Of PETER and ELLEN CARR, natives of county Down, parish of Gervathey, who left home in April and landed in St. John, 4th July.  They came in the ship Ambassadress. Ellen had the fever and was taken to Patridge Island, and Peter remained with her.  Any information of them will be thankfully received by their brother, JohnCarr, Lawrence City, Ms.

Of DENNIS MCCARTHY, late of Killmichael, co’y Cork, who sailed from Liverpool on the 1st of last May, and left his wife, Ellen Ahearn, in Quarantine near Quebec, in June.  She is now in Troy, N. Y., and wishes to know his whereabouts.  Any information respecting him will be thankfully received by addressing a line to Ellen McCarthy, care of Stephen Duffy, Troy, N. Y.

'Son  missing' John Fallon ‘had light hair, blue eyes; was about four feet, four inches in height; wore a blue spencer, a new scoop shovel cap, a fancy pants and had a freckled face.'

The voices of these emigrants resonate still.

As we can see many of the emigrants themselves were in despair, their dreams of a new life shattered by the reality of what awaited them. Only the Blacks in chains fare worse than the Irish.

As one famine emigrant put it plainly 'We thought we could not be worse off than we were; but now to our sorrow we know the difference. At home we had the chance of a doctors care and the certainty of the spiritual administration of a priest. Should death overtake us there we would be buried beside our beloved dead, in consecrated Irish ground, with the prayers and last blessing of our church. Here we have nothing.'

In April, 1847, Stephen E. De Vere, a compassionate landlord, travelled as an emigrant to Canada in a converted lumber and cargo boat.  His description of conditions is appalling.

'Before the emigrant has been a week at sea he is an altered man.  How could it be otherwise?  Hundreds of poor people men, women, and children of all ages from the drivelling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart, the fever patients lying between the sound, in sleeping places so narrow as almost to deny them the power of indulging, by a change of position, the natural restlessness of the disease. The food supply was of the poorest quality.  Drinking water was mixed with vinegar to kill the stench.'

Yet they changed America, among the famine emigrants Patrick Kennedy, great grandfather of an American presdient, later Micheal Regan ditto, and indeed, Fulmouth Kearney ... William Ford, 1846 father of Henry Ford, the man who changed America, to name but a few.

In the American Civil War, 250,000 fought for the Union. They helped create the American political system, built the Catholic Church, changed the face of Ireland and America. Their legacy is with us all today.

The poet Evan Boland said it best:

“Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —
of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:
they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.
And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.”

New Irish famine data shows the horrific scale of the devastation of the Great Hunger

Recent statistics from the Irish Census about post-Famine Ireland are an extraordinary treasure trove.

Most important, however, the statistics also quote extensively from previous Census material, dating back to 1831.

Since practically every Census from the 19th century was destroyed by the authorities or in the great blaze that happened at the Four Courts in Dubin on the outbreak of the civil war in 1921, these are the only documents that can show an Ireland that was profoundly different to what we have today.

They reveal in cold numbers the impact of the Irish Famine, the greatest human disaster to afflict any country in Europe in the 19th Century.

Town by town, village by village, we can track the declining population, the death of communities and the rapid extinguishing of the Irish language as the first tongue of the nation's people.

Imagine America going from 300 million people to 100 million, and English dying out overnight as the first language -- and you get a sense of the scale of the catastrophe.

From 1821 to 1831, the new figures show the population leaped by over 14 percent in what is now the Irish Republic. Ireland was approaching its all-time high total of 8 million people on the cusp of the Famine.

Ironically, it was the growth of the potato as the staple crop that created this incredible growth. The potato provides enough nutrients on its own to sustain large populations, and Ireland thrived on the alien import from the Andes first brought in as a luxury food for the rich, but soon adopted by the masses.

From 1831 to 1841 the population continued to grow, increasing by over 5 percent as the island reached the historic eight million mark. Then came 1845.

The Famine blight almost certainly came from an American ship. There had been similar crop failures in parts of America in the two years before, but nothing like what was going to befall Ireland. That winter was wet and extraordinarily long. In the spring the potato crop failed. The potatoes in the fields were black and rotten.

"A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop... the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in. As for cure for this distemper, there is none.." reported one newspaper. That year, one-third of the crop failed. In 1846 one half, and then in Black '47, the entire crop failed.

The Census from 1851 reveals the sad facts. The population had dropped by over 21 percent. Entire villages were depopulated, the countryside laid waste. The great trek to America is well underway.

It is the hinge of history.

Without the Famine, we would never have come to this land, no antecedents of John F. Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or Eugene O'Neill. We would have become a European people, with no far-flung outposts from Australia to Canada to the U.S . Our history as a people revolved around those four years from 1845 to 1848, the worst years of the Famine.

The decline begins in the Census figures. From 1861 to 1871 the population slumps a further 8 percent, followed by 5 percent in the following ten years to 1881 and then over ten percent to 1891 and over 7 per cent by 1901. All in all from 1851 to 1901 the population drops an astounding 63 percent.

In that same time the language dies, side by side with the harvest. The number of Gaelic speakers dropped by over 80 percent. A traveler who visited in 1844 and came back in 1900 would have seen an utterly different land.

What the British could not accomplish -- the death of the old Gaelic order -- the Famine did. The new Census figures are an extraordinary account of that historic and awful event.

Denny's apology falls far short on Irish Famine smear

What a mealy-mouthed apology Denny's just issued for their incredible behavior in mocking the victims of the Irish Famine. Here it is:

"Denny's has a history of using humor in its television advertising. It is certainly not the intention of the company to offend anyone or any group and we apologize if this spot has in any way. As a result of the feedback we have received from our customers the spot will no longer be on the air after Tuesday. We thank those who took the time to contact us."

Gee, thanks. Denny's will apologize "if" the ad offended? It offended all right, and it seems utterly incredible that this company does not see fit to issue a decent apology.

This is typical of a company with an appalling record on human rights. They lost a huge lawsuit because of discrimination against African American employees and customers. What they need to say is, "We apologize to the Irish American community for depicting the Irish Famine as some kind of humorous event, when in fact 1 million people died of starvation. We realize that such a tragedy was not proper material in any way for a 'humorous' advertisement."

Let's keep up the pressure on Denny's so they cannot dismiss us so lightly. Earlier an Irish American community leader who has been in touch with Denny's said they are "backpedalling faster than a circus clown" and the company has begun to realize just how wrong-headed the advertisement appeared.

"They are being flooded with calls" he reported. "They have no idea what they have set off here."

The ad ran last week and immediately led to major anger in the Irish American community.

Until they fully explain themselves and make a decent apology, I still believe any Irish American with a trace of pride in their heritage will support a boycott of the Denny's restaurant chain after their disgraceful Irish Famine ad currently running on television.

They had announced that in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the end of the Irish Famine, they would be offering unlimited pancakes for customers. Yes, you read that right.

It is disgraceful.

One million people starved to death in the Great Famine, one million more fled Ireland, most to America. To make fun of the greatest human tragedy of the 19th century in Europe is unpardonable. Whoever created the ad, whoever approved it, whoever decided on it it should go on television should be fired forthwith.

Will Denny's also feature an ad joking that they are also offering pancakes in celebration of the end of the Holocaust and the deaths of six million Jews? Perhaps they can celebrate Armenian Genocide Day with some free pancakes as well.

Remember, this is the company that lost a massive suit because of the way they treated African American customers and staff.

What would you expect from a pig but a grunt?

I am delighted to see that the Ancient Order of Hibernians has rushed out a statement condemning this incredibly insensitive and hostile ad which has been shown all over America in the past few days.

Equally as important, there are already Facebook sites cropping up calling for a Denny's boycott. I wholeheartedly endorse that. On the eve of St. Patrick's Day to offer such a degrading and insensitive portrayal of Ireland and Irish America's version of the Holocaust is frankly disgusting.

What were they thinking? More importantly will they get away with it ?

Call Nelson Marchioli, Denny's President, and explain to him what this insult means.: 1-864-597-7781 Ext 8122 to organize a national boycott against the food chain.