This judicious study deepens our knowledge of the Famine. Prof O Grada presents fresh insights through an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach. The scope of his latest book confirms that he is not merely the leading economic historian of the Irish Famine, but a scholar of global history as well. He places the Famine in its historical and international context.
Due to Ireland's subsistence economy, the recurring failure of the potato crop spelt catastrophe. While no county was immune from the disaster, Clare and Mayo were devastated. Although the better-off were vulnerable to disease, the author agrees with Marx that the Famine killed "poor devils only", in the sense that the marginalised were the first to die. Women withstood the calamity better than men.
O Grada considers the Famine would have been worse but for the efforts of the Catholic clergy. Most priests were eager to lobby on behalf of the neediest. While sectarian tension was bound to surface in an age of evangelical revivalism, there is ample evidence of clergymen working in harmony.
On the other hand, medical treatment is unlikely to have saved many lives during the Famine. A scientific understanding of how contagious diseases were transmitted was still decades away in the 1840s, and the relevant curative measures almost a century away.
O Grada argues convincingly that although Dubliners did not starve like Mayo women or Clare men the capital city was touched by the Famine. Life was just as grim in urban slums as on the western seaboard. With migration spreading contagion eastwards, Dublin resembled a huge refugee camp. As late as 1850, the Liberties was crowded with fever-stricken "strangers": "All presented the same listless, stupid, careworn aspect, and the same miserable squalid appearance." Dublin's population grew to 258,361, or by 11 per cent between 1841 and 1851. By the mid-1850s New York contained almost as many Irish-born people as Dublin. This masterly account, supported by tables and graphs, is based on awesome erudition. Notes and bibliography comprise some 20 per cent of the contents. The sources range from parliamentary papers and poorlaw registers, to censal evidence and church records (on both sides of the Atlantic), newspapers and folklore.
Black '47 and Beyond is mainly about economic and demographic aspects of the Famine. (Peter Gray's recently-published Famine, Land and Politics shows how Britain's relief effort was constrained by ideology and public opinion.) During the summer of 1847, O Grada remarks, the soup-kitchen scheme "helped to reduce the number of deaths from starvation" - in fact, it reduced them to zero. After that impressive relief operation the bowels of Victorian compassion closed up. Given the level of insolvency among Irish landlords - an estimated one in 12 was chronically insolvent - they could not shoulder the burden imposed by the Poor Law Amendment Act.
Cormac O Grada concludes "that the Irish Famine was much more murderous, relatively speaking, than most historical and most modern famines". Those who survived tended to end up being materially better off than they would have been had Ireland been spared phytophthora infestans. Whether they were psychologically better off is a moot point outside the economic historian's remit. Certainly, the "cruel doings" of hearts hardened by competition for slender resources cast a dark shadow over the Irish psyche.
Brendan O Cathaoir's Famine Diary was published recently