The Irish Famine: A Documentary. By Colm Toibin and Diarmaid Ferriter. Profile Books. 214 pp, £15 in UK
The Great Irish Potato Famine. By James S. Donnelly, Jr. Sutton Publishing. xii+292 pp, £20 in UK
In the mid-1990s when the 150th anniversary commemorations were at their height, a friend likened the rush of events and pronouncements to "Famine fever". Half a decade later, the embarrassment of the Jeannie Johnson apart, public memory of the Famine seems to have gone into cold storage again. The pattern is reminiscent of historian Peter Novick's claim that collective memory is subject to "memory spasms" that coincide with anniversaries. Indeed in Ireland "Famine fever" gave way to "Famine fatigue" before the true anniversary was over, glossing over the awkward historical reality that people were still dying of Famine-related causes in some parts of Ireland in 1850 and even 1851. Then it was on to the next collective memory. A crisis that allegedly had been repressed in the subconscious according to some, too well remembered according to others, has retreated backstage again.
Looking back, the commemorations probably spoke more about Ireland in the 1990s than in the 1840s, but they did little harm, and much good. They heightened historical interest and raised important issues about public action and global responsibility. Their permanent legacy is a flood of publications, many of them excellent, on the Famine. There can hardly be a local historical journal that did not feature the Famine, and several counties organised their own commemorative volumes. The peak in such publishing came in 1995 and 1996. The two books under review are stragglers in this respect.
In 1999 Profile Books repackaged as a mini-book what began as a longish book review by Colm Toibin in the London Review of Books a year earlier. The gamble evidently worked. Not content with that second bite at the cherry, the same publishers have now refashioned Toibin's essay, slightly revised, as a full-length hardback. This they have done by tacking on 170 pages of Famine-related documents.
What began as an appraisal of some books on the Famine now, claim Profile Books, "answers the questions we want answered: What caused the Famine? How could it have been prevented?" The ruse takes some gumption, though given Toib in's celebrity status as novelist and anthologist, it may pay off. In the US where the new book is most likely to do well, and where gross misunderstandings about the Famine are still rife, it may enlighten. Here at home it is a case of one Famine book too many.
Toibin being a literary man, it is fitting that his 30-page meditation, with Lady Gregory as his guru, has more to say about literature and historians than it does about the nitty-gritty of the Famine proper. The text is peppered with references to figures ranging from Maria Edgeworth and Herman Melville to Theodore Adorno and Terry Eagleton. He is hard on some historians, whom he berates for "cold" matter-of-factness in the face of what was after all a catastrophe. Irish readers of Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts - a devastating analysis of famines in south Asia just a few decades after the Irish Famine - may feel that this criticism applies to the species Historicus revisionistus hibernicus, though not to historians at large. It seems that for Toibin the horror of an drochshaol is better caught by folklore, literature, and literary criticism than in Gradgrindian facts and figures.
The essay begins and ends with Lady Augusta Gregory, but in between it lacks the kind of narrative structure at which Toibin the novelist is so skilled. Instead it drifts rather aimlessly from topic to topic, without seeking to provide the "door to understanding" promised in the publisher's blurb. It also appears without any references or footnotes.
Toibin gives pride of place to aspects of the Famine that are the staple fare of literary critics and Irish Studies curricula. The key themes are guilt, memory, resonance, holocaust (or not), cultural consequences, and the like. Metaphors such as the Catholic church in Enniscorthy or the big house at Coole crowd out debates about the concrete issues that concern economic and demographic historians of the Famine.
I am biased, of course, but I would hold that most of the recent breakthroughs in our understanding of the Famine have come from such historians. Toibin is a poor guide to their labours. Merely mentioning Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved, an influential and highly original work now out of print, is no substitute for appraising it and the critiques it spawned.
The challenging works of other economic historians such as Kevin O'Rourke ("Did the Great Irish Famine matter?") or Peter Solar ("The Great Famine was no ordinary subsistence crisis") are equally overlooked. So too is the comparative focus of recent economic research on the Famine, and its attempts to open up new areas of inquiry such as the Famine's unequal impact on the sexes, the relevance of agency and corruption, and the role of moneylenders, traders, and markets.
All of which means that, alas, Toibin's review is about Famine history with the hard bits left out. Moreover, as a survey it also ignores the significant contributions made by local historians in the 1990s and also publications in the Irish language (including two on folklore and memory in addition to that cited in Toibin's as the "only" one available).
DIARMAID FERRITER - a talented historian in his own right - has done a valiant job in generating the necessary page-length. For manuscript source material he has relied almost exclusively on the National Archives on Dublin's Bishop Street. The other documents consist of recycled excerpts from newspapers, official documents, and other contemporary and later printed sources.
Taken together they help capture both the devastation and suffering from below and the varieties of arrogance and compassion from above. Some of the recycling is of material which the reading public has scarcely had time to digest, such as Noel Kissane's The Irish Famine: A Documentary History (1995), Liam Swords's In Their Own Words: The Famine in North Connacht (1999), and Tim O'Neill's Famine Evictions (2000).
After the torrent of publications on the Famine in the 1990s - including Kissane's, which does an excellent job of supplying documents - is another volume of documents really needed? Is it not enough that many historians have already analysed, coded, put in context, and processed these documents, or ones very like them, over and over again? Or is there a market out there still for do-it-yourself Famine history?
Though James Donnelly's book is also to a large extent a rehash, it is much more powerful and interesting as a survey, and better value to boot (not only more but much bigger pages!). Its core chapters bring to a wider readership what had been closeted in the expensive New History of Ireland (Volume 5) since 1989. Donnelly justifies their re-publication now by arguing that their interpretations are "firmly consistent with what turned out to be the general scholarly consensus that emerged during the 1990s". The claim is fair, at least insofar as the less inhibited and less apologetic tone of the recent literature is concerned, and Donnelly's strong narrative skills and sound judgments make for a readable and reliable account.
Donnelly also adds an excellent and generous overview of subsequent research (with 145 endnotes), and a final chapter on the construction of Famine memory (previously published in the American journal Eire-Ireland in 1996). There is a long, useful bibliography. The book comes garnished with scores of contemporary and near-contemporary illustrations, many of them already familiar to readers of other books on the Famine, but more skilfully reproduced here than ever before.
Cormac O Grada is an economic historian. His most recent book, Black '47 and Beyond (paperback edition 2000), has just won the American Committee for Irish Studies Prize for best book on Irish history or social studies