Black '47 and Beyond

Rating:
Summary: Essential but not easy or pleasant reading.
Review: Both the tragic subject and the density of documentation, with graphs and statistics, make this a hard book to read. The Famine killed over a million people, even on the most conservative estimates. It virtually wiped out the Gaeltacht. The question that resonates today is whether fewer people would have died if Ireland in 1840 had been an independent country, with its boundaries at the salt water. You'd have to read this book at least, and maybe some others as well, to get an answer to that question.

Rating:
Summary: Covering up the Irish Holocaust
Review: O'Grada is the most notorious of the Irish Holocaust cover-up cabal. His earlier published work was abetted by the Irish history establishment including Kinealy who lauded it as "demolishing forever the myth of food leaving Ireland during the famine." This book covers up the "smoking gun" of what Ireland's consciences (Michael Davitt, John Mitchel, etc) referred to as Holocaust - the seventy-five British regiments removing Ireland's abundant livestock, cereals, etc., during those years. By failing to name the perpetrating British regiments, warships, etc., O Grada's evil purpose is made clear. He also grossly understates the population loss of 6.3 millions of whom 5.2 million were murdered in what he refers to as "famine." Far better to read Cecil Woodham-Smith's "The Great Hunger" which, by naming a few of the regiments, broke academia's total cover-up. Better yet to read "Irish Holocaust Graves: 1845-1850;" a pamphlet recently adopted as history course material by some eighty colleges and universities across the U.S. and Ireland. It identifies all seventy-five British regiments and the Irish districts each was assigned to starve; also the dozens of warships assigned to escort the merchantmen removing the tens of millions of tons of grain and head of livestock; the London-enacted laws that bribed the Irish Catholic hierarchy into silence in advance of the food removal; etc.

Rating:
Summary: An leabhar is fearr ar an drochshaol - riamh!
Review: This is a fraught subject, but O Grada handles it with both rigour and compassion.