On 16 November 1846, John Browne was walking from Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland, to his home north of Dingle. In Tralee he had tried to gain admittance into the poor house, but the place was already full, and Browne had no choice but to walk the 30 miles back home. On the way, he collapsed along the roadside.

The south-west of Ireland is the wildest, most mountainous part of the island. Chequered patterns of emerald fields stretch up the hillsides as far as they can reach, where pastureland takes over. Elsewhere, mountain ranges climb to Ireland’s highest peak, Carrauntoohil, at almost 1,040 metres. The coastline drops off in dramatic skerries, so inhospitable that medieval monks found their ideal settlement clinging to the tiny rock of Skellig Michael, where only ghostly ruins remain today. County Kerry attracts a great number of visitors each year, many of them Americans of Irish descent. Tourist busses drive the so-called “Ring of Kerry” around the Iveragh Peninsula, where they all have to drive clockwise since the roads are too narrow for two to pass. If you are traveling the same route by car, you have the choice between the tedious experience of ending up behind a cortege of slow-moving busses, or the frightening prospect of meeting one after the other with hardly any clearance on either side.

But this is all in summer. During the winter, there are few tourists, and the beautiful landscape can appear sinister. In November, when Browne embarked on his walk, storms strike the land directly from the Atlantic, and rainfall can be torrential. He was discovered by passers-by and taken into a farmhouse, where he died only a few hours later. The subsequent inquest established the cause of death as “fatigue and weakness”.[1] Browne was the first or second of the many, many inhabitants of Kerry who would die from the Great Potato Famine.

The potato blight, caused by the fungus-like organism Phytophthora infestans, affected great parts of Europe in the mid-1840s, but Ireland was particularly vulnerable as a result of its population’s great dependence on the potato for nourishment. The vegetable had allowed the Irish population to grow enormously since its introduction. It may come as a surprise to many that the populations of Ireland and England were roughly comparable by 1800, since the ratio today is closer to 1:10.

The blight arrived in Ireland in 1845, and the next year saw a total failure in the potato harvest. Crop failure forces the small farmer into an excruciating choice: eat next year’s seeds and postpone starvation until then, or starve now. The choice is really no choice at all: the seed potatoes were eaten and, even though there was no blight in 1847, there were also few potatoes to plant. The blight then returned in 1848, and did not abate until 1852.

The Tory government under Robert Peel reacted to the famine with reasonable speed, by importing grain from abroad and initiating public works projects. These measures had varying levels of efficiency, but the real disaster for Ireland was the fall of the Peel ministry in June 1846, and the accession of the Whig government of Lord John Russell. Under Russell, relief was delegated to local authorities, a task they were nowhere near capable of handling. Perhaps worst of all, a law was passed by Parliament whereby no one holding more than ¼ acre of land would be eligible for aid, leading to the dispossession of thousands of smallholders. The result was a consolidation of estates and in the long run higher efficiency, but the glee with which certain English commentators greeted these developments was appalling, showing no concern for the underlying human suffering.

Modern estimates have placed the number of excess deaths caused by the famine at around one million, or a million and a half if we also count averted births. Those who could, emigrated, to Australia, Canada or – primarily – the United States, and the stream of migrants did not end once the famine was over. The combined result of these factors was a halving of the Irish population: where there had been 8.5 million people living on the island before the famine, that number was below 4.5 million by the end of the century, a population drop from which the island has never recovered.

A disaster of such a magnitude will naturally stir controversy long after its passing. In 2012, the Irish journalist Tim Pat Coogan published the book The Famine Plot. In it, Coogan asserts categorically that the famine was a case of genocide, committed by the British government against the Irish people.[2] The book met with a tepid reception in Ireland; The Irish Times called it “polemic without plausibility”, with “a disturbing number of factual errors”.[3] Across the Atlantic, reviewers were far more positive. The Boston Globe praised Coogan’s “impressive research” and his contribution to famine scholarship.[4] Americans have in fact long been far more inclined to label the famine as genocide than the Irish themselves have. In 1996, the state of New Jersey included the event in the “Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum” taught in its schools. The descendants of the thousands of Irish refugees who settled in the big cities of the Northeastern Seaboard still maintain a strong sense of pride in their heritage, and no politician hoping to win an election here would dream of offending this important constituency.

Ireland, on the other hand, has already been through all this. For decades, the authoritative book on the subject was John Mitchel’s The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), published in 1860, a genocide indictment of the English avant la lettre. This nationalist interpretation of history was dominant in the country at least until the 1930s. With independence came a new school of revisionist historians, who tried to present a more balanced version of events, though in general this was a field of studies they tended to shy away from. The memory of the Great Famine was still too raw and intimate for a truly objective assessment to be conceivable. It was not until the sesquicentennial in the 1990s that extensive research came along to lay to rest some of the most persistent popular myths. Perhaps the foremost of these, the claim that Ireland produced enough grain that the famine could have been avoided had only the ports been closed to export, was decisively proven wrong.[5]

The word “genocide” is often used loosely to describe a particularly heinous act by a state or similar entity that results in the loss of human lives. But this is not what the word means; it has a very narrow and precise definition. The term was coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he joined the resistance but had to flee the country after being injured in battle, eventually ending up in the United States. Having lost over 40 relatives in the Holocaust, Lemkin worked tirelessly to make sure that these atrocities were recognised as a special category of crime. Towards this goal he came up with the word “genocide”, combining the Greek word genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix ‑cide, for killing. The United Nations today defines it as “…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” It is accordingly not the act itself that calls for the designation, but the intention, or as Lemkin put it: the existence of a “coordinated plan”.[6]

In the years since, the word has gained a special place in the public consciousness. This was Lemkin’s purpose – it was to be the “crime of all crimes”, something that would invite “immediate condemnation” in the listener.[7] But as the word attained this special status, its popularity grew apace, and it fell victim to misuse as well as overuse. In his 2021 book The Problems of Genocide, Australian historian A. Dirk Moses points out how our one-sided focus on genocide blinds us to the challenges of other, equally pernicious forms of crimes against humanity.[8]

There are few better examples of this than the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. That it does not in fact qualify as an act of genocide is demonstrated by the constant – though inefficient and inadequate – efforts by the British government to alleviate the suffering. This would indeed have been bad policy had the objective been “…to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” Few serious historians of the topic maintain this today, and Coogan’s assertion was roundly rejected by the academic journal Genocide Studies International.[9] Instead, the failure of the relief efforts stemmed from a blind belief in laissez-faire principles of free trade and prejudice against the Irish people – and Irish Catholics more specifically. This led many members of the British establishment to regard the Famine as a providential event that would lead the Irish people towards a brighter future. None of this, of course, excuses the disastrous failure of the British government to take necessary action, nor does it help the millions of victims of starvation, disease, forced migration and death.

Americans must be forgiven for their overeager and often misguided attitudes to Irish history and identity; it was after all this nation that saved countless of the island’s numbers by welcoming them into its fold. And the immigrants would eventually repay the favour; among those who fled the famine were Henry Ford’s father William, and Patrick Kennedy, great-grandfather of President John F. Kennedy.[10] For most, though, that kind of success was only a distant dream, as they toiled for endless hours in the factories of Philadelphia, New York and Boston. These burgeoning metropolises must have been an unwelcoming, claustrophobic environment for anyone who had grown up on the green, windswept plains of Kerry.

The poet Sigerson Clifford, in exile no further than a dreary Dublin office, thought back to his childhood in Cahersiveen. He remembered the half-doors so characteristic of rural Ireland, where the lower half remains shut, as the saying goes, “to keep the children in and the animals and taxman out”. He remembered living “skin to skin with the earth/Elbowed by the hills, drenched by the billows”. And he remembered the voices of the wild geese coming on the wind:

Whispering across the half-door of the mind

For always I am Kerry…

[1] Bryan MacMahon, The Great Famine in Tralee and North Kerry (Cork: Mercier Press, 2017), 89.

[2] Tim Pat Coogan, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 229–31.

[3] Grey, Peter, ‘Polemic without Plausibility’, The Irish Times, 19 January 2013, 10.

[4] Leddy, Chuck, ‘“The Famine Plot” by Tim Pat Coogan’, The Boston Globe, 3 December 2012, sec. G, 7.

[5] James S. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine (Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2001), 11–29.

[6] Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed, Foundations of the Laws of War (Clark, N.J: Lawbook Exchange, Ltd, 2008), 79.

[7] Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (London: William Collins, 2021), 42.

[8] A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 19–28.

[9] Mark G. McGowan, ‘The Famine Plot Revisited: A Reassessment of the Great Irish Famine as Genocide’, Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 (December 2017): 87.

[10] Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 141.