This book is widely accepted as one of the most comprehensive and authoritative accounts of the Famine due to Woodham-Smith’s expert use of official archives. The land owners were estimated to have caused the eviction of a half million Gaels from their homes during the famine years. The combination of famine and homelessness led to the unspeakable deaths of one million Celtic souls, many dying in road side ditches. As 1847 arrived, three million souls were in immediate danger of death by starvation. The blow dealt by blight was followed by the monstrous actions of the land owning aristocrats, the majority of whom lived their lives of luxury in England funded by rents extracted annually from the Irish Celt. The Potato Blight made its appearance in 1845 and by 1846 had destroyed the Potato Crop. Two hundred years later the population of Ireland was poor, landless and 3 million Irish are said to have subsisted on a diet of potatoes alone. The blessing, and the curse, of the potato is that it is nearly the perfect food and with a wee bit of milk, it is possible to live a healthy life on the potato alone. It was during Cromwell’s war on Ireland that an estimated 40% of the land was confiscated and transferred to the ownership of the English Nobility. The population had increased during the period following the rape of Ireland by Cromwell in 1649, to 8 million in 1845.

The country had been invaded not once but several times, the land had been conquered and redistributed over and over again, the population had been brought to the verge of extinction – after Cromwell's conquest and settlement only some half million Irish survived - yet an Irish nation still existed, separate, numerous and hostile. The first paragraph sets the tone:Īt the beginning of 1845, the state of Ireland was as it had been for nearly seven hundred years, a source of grave anxiety to England. Ireland had first been invaded in 1169 it was now 1845 yet she had been neither assimilated nor subdued.

The horror of what is casually referred to as the 'Potato Famine' is meticulously chronicled in the superb and immensely readable 'The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849', by Cecil Woodham-Smith.

The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith