A colleague in The Irish Times, a woman of recognised intellect, recently surprised me by saying that the sadness in the Irish character had to do with the loss of the good times we had before the Famine.
She suggested that what happened to us as a race who lived a carefree existence eating potatoes, breeding big families, singing songs and playing music was akin to having been thrown out of the Garden of Eden.
It is not a theory I embraced and found little evidence to support her "good times" pre-Famine premise in anything I have ever read or come across in folklore.
It was interesting then that within days of this conversation I was sent a copy of Carn, Killare - A Forgotten Westmeath Famine Village by Seamus O'Brien.
Seamus, a teacher in St Mary's CBS, Mullingar, who is on secondment to the Marino Institute of Education in Dublin, examined in great detail an abandoned Famine village on the summit of a Westmeath hill and conditions there before the awful event.
A decade before, the Parish Priest of Ballymore, Father Own Coffey, in a Poor Law Commission study, reported that only 60 per cent of the labourers and cottiers had constant work and, when not working, lived on "potatoes and salt".
Charles Kelly, a pre-Famine Justice of the Peace in Conroy parish, where Carn is situated, described the clothing of the 100 labourers in the parish as "very middling, generally frieze".
Seamus O'Brien notes that travel-writers moving through the area during the early 19th century also commented on the poor living conditions of the labourers and cottiers.
The exteriors of their cabins were described as "wretched", the walls being of mud or stone, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof and the cold earth constituting the floor.
Seamus was particularly lucky because much of the remains of the homes of the labourers at Carn, which lie close to the historic Hill of Usnagh, are intact.
He wrote that the vernacular architecture found in rural settlements such as Carn need to be studied and appreciated. The homes, he wrote, were less intrusive than either the ribbon developments or isolated habitations which now typify Ireland's rural settlement morphology.
Whether the people who lived in them were happy or unhappy will continue to be argued but it would seem that conditions were pretty terrible.
The book can be obtained from Rathlainne Publications, Lynn, Mullingar, and in bookshops in the area.