The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy

During seven years in the mid-nineteenth century, Ireland suffered a catastrophic disaster. Approximately one quarter of its population either died from starvation or emigrated, with mortality during passage so high that contemporaries claimed "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." Tim Pat Coogan presents a comprehensive account of this period, arguing that Britain bore significant responsibility for the tragedy's severity. He contends that Britain engineered the food shortage in what he characterizes as one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. Anti-Irish sentiment in England was so pronounced that Parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, Coogan examines the famine's causes, documents its events, and explores the lasting "famine mentality" that affected Irish immigrants to the United States and those who remained in Ireland. The book traces the famine's impact on the worldwide Irish diaspora, which today numbers nearly 80 million people.