Still, Coogan would argue that it is high time Irish intellectuals stopped pulling their punches, particularly now, when the "serious people"-in this this case the managerial voices of the European Union-are once again proclaiming the moral virtue of austerity, demanding salutary sacrifices from the people of Ireland-and, this time around, from the people of Greece, Spain and Portugal as well. It is also true that nobody-least of all the Republic of Ireland-wants to give any ammunition to the rabid fringe of the IRA. It is true that the British (through prime minister Blair) finally apologized for the famine fifteen years ago, and have striven to deal justly with the Northern counties since. Tim Pat Coogan thinks Irish historians should show some spine and stop soft-pedaling British culpability for the famine. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diaspora of nearly 80 million people today.
So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer.
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