237\. The Great Famine: The Irish Exodus to America (Ep 2)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durham-Poole. And we are joined once again, I'm delighted to say, by Colm Tobin, Irish novelist, playwright, journalist, writer, most recently at the acclaimed Brooklyn. I'm so happy that you came back to talk to us. The last episode, I mean, I did warn people at the front, was going to be very difficult listening. And I'm so happy that you came back to talk to us.

This is going to be much of the same. Of course, we're going to look at some of the suffering that went on. We took you up to 1847, but we're going to pick up from there. Where this famine, which started in the mid-1840s, drags on to the 50s, the 1850s. So it is not just a one-year thing. And the repercussions felt for decades afterwards. We talked, Colm, a little bit about, well, a lot a bit about the suffering, which is quite right. But what we're going to sort of focus on is what the British government did afterwards.

and did not do to alleviate that suffering. Now, you talked about gruel and the thin watery soup that was provided at first to those who could no longer hold on to their land and had to go to the workhouse. They'd been sort of thrown off their land because they owned five acres and therefore they didn't qualify for relief.

And then suddenly the decision is made by again, Charles Trevelyan, Boo Hiss, the man we talked about in the last episode, who is thought of by many as the villain of the piece, not the only one, but the chief villain of the piece as he was head of famine relief. He decides to stop the soup kitchens. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, I mean, by August 1847, say, 3 million people are being fed every day by the state. Now, this has replaced public works, which didn't work and it was a very bad winter. And in a way, there's a hiatus between the public works period and the soup kitchen period where really nothing happens.

Now, if you have three million people who are starving, arriving every day to get this soup, of course you're going to get the spread of disease. So that the overwhelming majority of famine deaths, I mean, the ones that people just didn't die of hunger, but died of typhus and relapsing fever and dysentery. People gather together in great groups. But then if you get the next stage where you remove even this disease,

Now, on one hand, you have a set of statements made by British politicians generally or British public figures about Ireland and the Irish, the indolence, the drunkenness, etc.,

But on the other side now, what you start to get are extraordinary descriptions of the starving, of the roads, of the cabins, of people being found dead, of the walking dead, ghosts. They're extraordinary, vivid descriptions now appearing, as you said in the last episode, in the actual contemporary newspapers, but also by writers, by anyone who goes there. So you could fill a book with these extraordinary descriptions, which really do curdle the blood of actually what it looked like in County Mayo

by the end of 1847. I've got some here taken from Cecil Woodham Smith's book that you talked about in the last episode. And it's a particularly vivid set of descriptions by somebody called William Forster, who is a Quaker minister from Norwich. As we have Trevelyan as our villain, who seems to run through every bit of villainy in the

So the Quakers, wherever we go in Empire, the Quakers always seem to come to the rescue. They're here, very much center stage, running their own soup kitchens and running their own relief works throughout Ireland. And he writes to Trevelyan, saying and begging him to realize the seriousness of the situation. And his letters survive, and they're extraordinary. Let's read some passages. The people were like walking skeletons.

The men stamped with the livid mark of hunger, the children crying with pain, and women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. All the sheep gone, all the cows, all the poultry killed. Only one pig left and the very dogs had disappeared. At a place called Clifton, Foster was quickly surrounded by a mob of men and women, more like famished dogs than fellow creatures, whose fingers, looks and cries all showed they were suffering from the ravening agony of

Another letter that...

Trevelyan gets is from a cork magistrate who's been told to first organise public works and then run the soup kitchens and then the soup kitchens are closed down. And he says, the scenes that I saw on my journey were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner in some filthy straw.

their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth their wretched legs hanging about naked above the knees i approached with horror and found by a low moaning that they were alive they were in fever four children and a woman what had once been a man

it was impossible to go into the detail suffice to say that in a few minutes i was surrounded by at least two hundred such phantoms then my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn around

And I find myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins, the sole covering of herself and the baby. And so it goes on. These terrible descriptions begin pouring in to London, but they don't alter the policy. They don't shift things. I mean, there's one. I mean, it's just one line. I can't find where it's from. But like you, William, I've been incredibly depressed all week reading accounts of this.

But there's one of a journalist, I think, seeing, he describes them, sort of men, women and children whose mouths are green, stained from the grass that they've been eating, because that's all that they can eat. And Colm, I mean, you must know so many of these stories. So I don't know whether you become immune to it. We've just kind of been subject to it over the week that we've been thinking about this. Part of the problem, and I noticed this about Ireland only when I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina,

that the contested spaces in Europe like that are places where there are river valleys and above the river valleys are boggy badland.

with very good land below that can produce corn, that can have dairy herds, and just above land that is hardly, barely arable, and that can be used for very little. So you get good land very close to really, really bad land, which means that in the middle of all of this, corn is being exported. In the middle of all of this, people in the towns, some of them are living quite comfortably, people who own shops, people who, for example, who are moving like Daniel O'Connell into the professions.

So that you have a way of almost pretending as soon as this was over that it almost hadn't happened. Trevelyan was the spin doctor here where he really said there was a famine of 1847. And he kept saying it was over. And when it went into 48 and 49, it was as though it really the worst part had happened, which wasn't actually true.

And so you get on one hand these extraordinary descriptions out of a book of apocalypse. But what you don't get are then what are these people's names? Where was the house they lived in? Because the houses they lived in were mud cabins that were very quickly destroyed. So you're talking about the landscaping erased of these people, the marks where they're buried, even the famine, the famine graveyards with unmarked graves.

massive emigration, the huge clearances. So that these descriptions, which there's so many of them, they're so vivid, become strangely ghostly themselves in that there's a sort of way of writing about this from anyone who's seen it from outside. There's a way of describing it from London as public policy. What's missing in the middle, of course, is the photograph that we're just before a moment.

when there could have been photographs of this. We don't have them. We have a few paintings, but nothing... This is pre-modern in a very funny way. The language describing...

that the starving and the dying is almost pre-modern, but the actual way in which it's not, just before photography, makes also a difference to how we view it now. But we do get figures like the character who comes in our podcast a lot, William Howard Russell, this early war correspondent who later goes on to cover the Crimea and the Indian mutiny. He's there and he says it's the worst thing he's seen of any of these. He says, I've supped

breakfast, lunch and dinner of horrors for all my career, but nothing equals this. And so you are getting these sort of moments of modernity when war correspondents are turning up and covering this for newspapers. And later on, economists, I mean, Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, will say that there's no other famine in the world where the number of dead

as a proportion of the population, that this in the late 1840s in Ireland was like nowhere else. I mean, obviously it's the place if you're a journalist to go in 1847, 1848. But what I'm talking about is ways in which it seems to have moved out of reality into some apocalyptic space. It's in ballads, it's in descriptions, it's in songs, but somehow or other it got erased from the landscape. But whatever it was as a catastrophe,

it seemed to mark a year and after that things were different. Can we sort of try and put

some names. I think you're right. You know, sort of numbers are not names. Photographs are absent. So, I mean, if we just remember just a name. I know you had a book earlier, you showed us a names of the dead. You know, there has been scholarship more recently and there was at the time people were named. So, Jeremiah Hegarty, let's just remember him, of Galway, who died in a ditch of starvation because he was so worried that his family would be evicted. He stopped eating the barley earmarked to pay the rent. Now,

Many others stole sheep they left behind, the head and the bell and the skinning, the carcass on a flat tombstone before taking the flesh part to be cooked in a hiding place. And the farmers retaliated by building pits full of spikes, we're told. The thief fell in, was held there by his pierced feet and then clubbed to death.

So people were reduced to eating rats, dogs, the carcasses of diseased cattle and the joints of starved horses. Okay, I mean, we started with a name and then we lost him again. Jeremiah would like to know more about what happened to Jeremiah Hegarty's family. The family tried to feed by starving himself to death and not eating the barley. I mean...

It's work being done even now to try and put families and names and histories to these people who died. I think historians are still divided. The economic historians tended to have been trained to be very, very careful with emotion, that it's not your job to do the feelings.

For example, jobs on what exactly the workhouses were, what the nourishment was in a workhouse, how the famine ends up. You must study it regionally because it didn't happen with the same intensity, say, in the east of Ireland as it did in County Mayo and County Golan, County Kerry.

So that County Donegal, historians tend to be very, very careful because, of course, during the years of the Troubles, if you got going on this, if you got going on the emotions surrounding it, you could unleash emotions that led into people supporting the IRA. And there was a desperate fear among academics, especially, that if the work you were doing could lead people to have this vision

view of Irish history, that it was dark and it was light, and we were light and they were dark. This had enormous political implications. So historians tended, especially Irish historians, tended to be very, very careful in what they wrote, in not just putting in a name and writing about the emotions surrounding even the looking of a name. You put in Mary Kelly. What does that name mean to you? Do you know a Mary Kelly? Yes, I do.

But imagine if that Mary Kelly were to be found moving along the streets, suffering from typhus. Historians didn't tend to do that. And there was a general support for that. It was really only when Mary Robinson became president where she began to talk about it as something, a trauma that the society had suffered.

that it sort of moved into a realm where it could be openly discussed and where people would read about it and think about it. You know, you've used the term workhouse and it just suddenly occurred to me that we have listeners all over the world. And although we here in Britain are familiar with what the workhouse is, if you've ever read any of your Dickens, you will know. But just for those who don't know,

Just describe what a workhouse was and who ended up there and how you ended up there and how you got out of there. A workhouse was the last resort. I mean, it was simply that you could arrive there with your family. You could be taken in. You could be fed to some extent. You could be housed to some extent. But they were hotbeds, obviously, of disease and of despair. So it was not as though you went there and you were rehabilitated and given enough food and sent back home.

And of course, they were still there for the rest of the 19th century into the 20th century as a sort of public relief.

but a public relief that really had its origins in, I think, a Victorian punishment for the poor, that if you're coming in here, you're coming into a dark, punishing place. You weren't just given food, you would have to do work for the food. So it's that kind of, again, linking together the feckless poor who end up in this way, have to be taught how to work. And often people didn't leave the workhouse. There are some horrifying figures, the mortality rate within the workhouses. I was just looking...

in Skibbereen, the workhouse there. And these, by the way, these were like huge, they did look like prisons. They were like huge buildings. Barracks. Where you couldn't just come and go as you please. High walls, you know, and gates and guards and things. But in Skibbereen, more than half of the children admitted after October 1846, which is the start

died, more than half, because of diarrhoea acting on their exhausted constitution, it is noted. So as you say, you know, just a hideous thing. There's another statistic I've got here which, again, even worse. In 1850...

The workhouses were caring for 119,000 children who knew neither their surname nor whether their parents were alive. What I'm suggesting is that what happened in this period was the erasure, the wiping out of a complete class of person in Ireland. And these were the people who had a lease on five acres or less.

So that you're looking at this, let's say between 1845 and 1855, this cottier class had more or less disappeared. The number of holdings under one acre dropped from 134,000

There were 134,000 holdings under one acre to 36,000. The number of persons per square mile had fallen from 255 to 231. And the average productivity had risen greatly. So in other words, what you're getting is that as soon as you went into the workhouse or as soon as you left your holding, your house was destroyed on that day. It was often a mud cabin. The five acres was joined to another five acres.

And so what happened then was within a year, within two years, by the early 1850s, that class of five acre to one acre holding people had simply disappeared from the earth.

So that what grew instead, of course, were people who had larger farms or worked on larger farms, were people who, because the prices went up during these years so much, people who had profited from that, who were not the English government, but the middleman.

And the middleman, of course, is Irish and the middleman is Catholic. And the middleman is the one who collects the rents. The middleman is the one who does the evictions. So all that's being done in Ireland by Irish people. So you have this strange new class emerging. For example, some people were able to join the empire. They learned how to read and write. They did the exams. They did the civil service exams. Even in something like Joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man, you see them getting the results and someone got in.

India, you know, someone got the other colonies. And this is the ambition for certain young men. For other young men, it was to become a middleman. And for other young men, it was to own a shop. For other young men, it was to own a bigger farm. And so what you saw then in the aftermath was not merely the idea that the ghostly dead had wandered with their diseases through these roads and in these workhouses, but their children had died. So they didn't have grandchildren.

that the whole idea that all of them had gone, their houses had gone, their holdings had gone, and what they had left was this idea of the ghostly, of something that economic historians could work with, that ballad writers could work with. But somehow in the middle, the catastrophe was almost unimaginable. But there's also a terrible sense, I think, that the English are after this end, that Trevelyan sees...

sees the erasure of this Cotillard class as, in a sense, the bright providential end. In a sense, God is wanting these people to be wiped out for a better future. His view of this is that God has sent the calamity to punish the Irish and that the calamity must not be too much mitigated, that the selfish nindelit must learn the error of their ways

and a better world emerge at the end of this. And this is the divine plan. This, oddly enough, had solved the problem. And the problem was identified in the early 1840s that this system of landholding

in very poor areas, was not sustainable. And suddenly, you know, this catastrophe came. And yes, I mean, there are appallingly cold remarks by Trevelyan about God and providence, but also about, you know, just the need for serious root and branch land reform in Ireland. Here are two Trevelyan quotes where he says this. The great Irish famine of 1847 he's talking about, and he's using those words already by 1848.

Unless we are much deceived, posterity will trace up to that famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate. And we'll acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, supreme wisdom has reduced permanent good out of transient evil. It's a terrible, terrible way of looking at it. The death of all these people is somehow part of a divine plan that's going to create something better in its wake.

It's completely appalling. What happens also, though, Colm touched on this earlier, is that you do have a sort of pushback from people like Young Ireland, led by John Mitchell and William Smith O'Brien, who, you know, will be building up in anger until they've attempted an armed uprising in 1848. But it's

But in the meantime, they are writing. They are writing too. They can write too. You see, the newspapers have written all these unspeakable things. Hansard has groaned under the weight of those Trevelyan speeches and others like them. But then you have in 1847, you have these things written, the Almighty indeed sent the potato blight. This is almost an answer to the Trevelyan thing. The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but it is the English who created this famine.

A million and a half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by this English government. So, you know, there is the start of a politicisation and a radicalisation. I mean, I don't know whether you would go as far as to say if the famine wouldn't have happened.

you wouldn't have had such a surge of nationalism in the country column. Could the one have happened without the other? Well, you see, 1848, oddly enough, happened in the same way that happened in other European countries, the consolidation of ideas of identity and national identity and an ancient nation.

So, you know, in other words, the opening of A Nation Once Again is when boyhood's fire was in my blood. I read of ancient heroes. So you're talking about, you know, the beginning of that idea that Ireland was an ancient country with an ancient language and an ancient culture. But what also Ireland now had was a grievance. In a single moment, the British government had conspired to wipe out more or less half the population.

So that if you're a nationalist and you're writing books and you're writing ballads and you're making speeches from 1848 onwards, this idea of grievance is rooted in the famine. I mean, the famine becomes the grievance, not the wiping out of the Irish language or even the trade issues, you know, of closing various Irish industries. But the famine becomes the word you can use to say this is what they did to us. This is how they feel about us.

And not merely that, but this catastrophe was almost caused by them. This began with the potato blight. You have to be very careful because you have to read this in a sort of reasonably nuanced way. This policy of laissez-faire was not invented to punish Ireland.

that this Trevelyan did not specialise in hating Ireland. You know, he went to India and did the same thing, as you've pointed out. You're still dealing, no matter what you do, with the small question of language, with the extraordinary statements made in the British House of Commons, with the extraordinary statements made by Trevelyan, with the vivid descriptions, and with something like, I mean, Herman Melville was in Liverpool and he saw the Irish coming off the ship

And he said, it seems hard to believe such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world. Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow starving and age, young girls incurably sick who ought to have been in the hospital, sturdy men with the gallows in their eyes.

and a whining lie in their mouth. Young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit. So you have constant descriptions of this. And the problem then is how this then gets moved into the rhetoric of nationalism, going in certainly to the 20th century. This is the, I suppose, the sort of culmination

in the relations between Ireland and England, which would really mean that Ireland would have to become an independent state. And not only that, but a sort of nation. We're going to take a break. After the break, these descriptions that Colm just described and people seeing, you know, for themselves coming off on the boats in Liverpool, they know what's happening now. Come back and we'll talk about Queen Victoria and her rather controversial part in famine relief. ♪

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Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about these ghost ships, if you like, ending up in Liverpool with these hollow-eyed men, women and children fleeing the hunger, the great hunger of the famine. Queen Victoria is moved by, when we talked about this, we did an episode on Queen Victoria, the descriptions of the suffering, particularly of the children. And, you know, she keeps a diary where she writes about it. She says that she's deeply moved by it.

And she starts contributing to a fund that sort of rises up out of the ground where the government and the laissez-faire attitude of the government is we've done what we can, we can do no more. It is charity that steps in. So William talked about the Quakers, love the Quakers. But then you've also got these sort of businesses, associations that step forward. The British Association for the Relief of the Extreme Distress in the Remote Parishes of Ireland and Scotland.

It was snappy titles like that that got people to give and put their hands in their pockets. But you had people like the Rothschilds, Bearings. These are all the names that we are familiar with, the Kinnairds, who start raising money or giving money or sort of creating trusts to feed, clothe,

and provide fuel for the starving of Ireland. And then you've got Queen Victoria herself, who gives £2,000 to famine relief. What did you make of that? Is this a woman who is deeply... Okay, I can see you're laughing. All right, okay. No, I'm laughing because I was brought up, I honestly was brought up believing that she gave a fiver. That was the story, wasn't it? I don't know who started this, but it was very, very effective that in the middle of the whole thing, Queen Victoria, she gave a fiver. And there was a Native American tribe who managed to give more fiver.

And they heard about the famine and thought it was awful. And they sent more money than the Queen. This 2000 thing, I'm sure it's true, but it has never made any difference. It's always presumed that this parsimonious Ireland-hating Queen decided to give as little as possible as a...

by the way of insulting us honestly honestly this was this was and is generally believed that she gave a fiver not just believed now I mean in 1900 Maud Gonne who was like a muse to WB Yeats Beauty Like a Titan Bow that was her wasn't it Maud Gonne Beauty Like a Titan Bow being high and solitary and most stern oh I get I get chills

with Yeats, and with you reading Yeats, it's even worse, so stop it. But look, Maud Gonne used to describe Queen Victoria as the famine queen. Yeah, Maud Gonne was pretty good at that. She called her the famine queen, and that stuck. I mean, there was no point in talking about £2,000 being a lot of money at that time.

No matter what she did, she was the famine queen and she gave a fiver. Okay. America, though, also donated. I mean, just talk to us about the relationship that is now building between, because there's a very strong relationship between the Irish and America. They will head to America in great numbers.

Just let's say that 80% of those who emigrated to America and survived were of rural origin. They were from those five acre holdings. And one thing they never wanted to see again was a piece of clay or a piece of land. They wanted to be cops and firemen and they wanted to work indoors. So that of those, only 6% of them ended up in the countryside. So they went to Boston, Philadelphia and New York.

And therefore, in those places, they could gather and they could create, in a way, not just a myth around grievance, but the actual Irish America as a political force emerges from this idea of grievance. And it emerges in those East Coast cities and it becomes Tammany Hall. It makes its way into figures such as Ted Kennedy or Joe Biden, who had very immediate Irish ancestors, but with all the idea that they came on ships.

that they were part of the famine Irish and that they made their way very slowly in the American cities. So this is a really very important point. They really did represent a sort of, I suppose, an ethnic group that became much more powerful, say, than Norwegians in American politics, even though there were vast numbers of Norwegians or indeed Italians, that they became an important caucus within the Democratic Party. It didn't happen in England in the same way because the Irish spread out

And it isn't as though a caucus began in England that was Irish, but that in America it certainly did and came to matter enormously and still does. And interestingly, if you look at some of the people around Donald Trump,

And some of the closest to him, such as General Flynn or Steve Bannon or Conway, you know, the Irish are strange. I mean, you watch the Irish becoming Republicans. You realize something very funny has been happening to the world because the Irish were so traditionally Democrats. It's important to, I think, give some figures. There's a million people that die during the famine.

But there's 1.5 to 2 million Irish who go to America at this time. This is an incredibly important moment in the birth of the Irish community, particularly on the East Coast, particularly in, Colm, I think you were saying Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Yeah.

Yes, and what you notice considering the reputation, I mean, I want to sort of bang a nationalist drum for a moment that, you know, if you consider the reputation for being indolent and drunken, how,

How come these people did so well so quickly in America? How come they sent money home all the time? How come a sort of a new class of, you know, solid Irish people working indoors emerged in these cities? You know, it isn't as though they walked the streets of these cities looking for charity from the Americans. They got jobs. They kept their jobs. They produced the next generation. They sent money home. And not just a little money, a million dollars.

in the course of the famine comes from America. In famine relief donations, is that right? Yes, but what happens after that is that they continue to send money home every year into the 20th century so that a letter from America that didn't have a dollar inside was called an empty letter. Oh, really? Because it was unusual. They would usually put something in. But there's a real difference between those who go and make a life in America and

And again, I'm not going to sing the song again. I swear, I'm so sorry. I apologize for the completely awful singing that happened in the first one. But you've got the navvies, the navigationals who come to England and who are doing manual labor, who are digging up the waterways, the canals, doing the roads. And they are always still looked down upon wherever their enclaves are.

They don't quite make it to become the beat cops or send envelopes full of money home, do they, Colm? I don't want to stretch a point, but what you get actually in the English side, you get the Beatles. In other words, you get Liverpool and you get Irish Liverpool. And you get this extraordinary lack of respect for your betters.

you get an extraordinary sort of confidence about being Liverpool Irish. It means there's no one in your family ever been a lord. There's no one wants to go to London. There's enough going on in Liverpool. Whatever happened in Liverpool in those, say, 30 years before 1960, with the Education Act giving people extraordinary benefits of education so they could get this sort of swaggering confidence. But it wasn't a swaggering confidence coming from class in England. It

It was a swaggering conference coming from being Liverpool Irish. And you can see it sometimes. There's a funny moment in the new Beatles documentary where they're in New York. They're at the height of their famous 1964. And it's a moment where one John Lennon shouts to McCarty and George Harrison joins in.

...drogondorus, one of them says... ...which means in Irish, in Gaelic... ...it's in Scots Gaelic as well... ...means the drink of the door... ...meaning the final drink, the stirrup cup... ...drogondorus, one shouts... ...and they start to sing... ...in this sort of Irish way... ...and they say... ...ah, let's have another drink... ...and you realise... ...this is their... ...this is the family party... ...this is the uncle coming over... ...and you realise...

Ah, so that while they became firemen in America and became cops and became barmen, the men in England, it took until the early 60s where the Beatles who are, you know, just think of their names. I mean, you know, Paul McCartney, John Lennon.

that they're not longing for Ireland or missing Ireland or thinking about the famine, but it is as though that enclave brought with it a respect for language, say, a respect for family, but no respect for anything else. So there's a general sort of cheekiness of the whole go of the Beatles.

that comes, I'm sorry to tell you, from Ireland. We're sort of coming to the end of our time together, but I think what we ought to do is, we talked about how the nascent Republican movement is born because they have this lightning rod, which is the famine. And you could arguably say in India, the same thing happens when you've got nationalists who aren't exactly asking for a breakaway in India, but you've got the massacre in Amritsar, which becomes the lightning rod, which is get out, that's it.

We know what you are, get out. And the famine is that where they are. Can you sort of tell us how it leads to people like, who we'll talk about later in the series, de Valera and so on, and how important it was to their rhetoric? Or not. Or not. We have to remember that by the 1870s, for example, just if you look at 1845, a decade has been added to the average lifespan between 1845, this is before the famine, and 1870.

So that in this new prosperity from the 1870s, what we're going to get now towards the end, say in the 1890s, are a series of land acts which the British will finally do to change this system of landholding in Ireland, to get rid of the British landlords out of the system. So that 97%, say, before this starts, are tenants on Irish farms. 40 years later, 97% are farmers. So that this huge reform... I mean, you can talk about Irish independence as a big moment. No, the big moment started...

with the Wyndham Land Acts, with those acts passed by the British Parliament in the aftermath of Charles Stuart Parnell at the end of the 19th century, so that land in Ireland would be completely transformed. So what's a strange idea that one of the effects of the famine was to create a sort of guilt in the English imagination, in those in power in England,

in progressive people in England to think this must never happen again. The only way it cannot happen again is people must not be tenants anymore. They must be given farms and we have to reform the entire system, root and branch. And that is what the English did 50 years after the famine. So the actual part of the results of the famine may have been that they entered the Irish imagination and became part of the general pantheon of grievance that gave way, you know, that gave a lot of power to nationalism.

But on the other side, in this strange English addiction to reform, that there was a view taken at the very top level in English society that something had to be done about Ireland and that would be done by slow reform of the landholding system. So this is the strangest image where actually the effect of the famine entered deeply into the English feeling of guilt about Ireland.

Ireland, which made its way into, for example, even Tony Blair's apology. But even the Queen, when she came to Ireland saying that, I mean, she didn't say sorry. She merely said it would be better if some things had happened differently or not at all. And that's a very beautiful phrase. But I think there is that that is a result of almost 100 years of entering into the spirit of people in England that something appalling had happened in Ireland on England's watch.

Cecil Woodham Smith's book helped, but I'm talking about the 1890s at the top levels of Whitehall, this huge land reform, which would involve massive public expenditure. And

and that this happened before Irish independence. It's one of the reasons why Ireland, since independence, has been such a strange, conservative, quiet place, because all these farmers love their farms. One thing we don't see so much of, I think, is a massive fictional presence of the famine in Irish literature. Is that right or not? Yeah, it's more or less right. I mean, it's more or less right that it doesn't appear in Yeats's poems.

So if it isn't in Yeats, I mean, it's in one of his early plays, Countess Kathleen, but in general, it isn't something Yeats is interested in. Is it Yeats isn't interested because it's going to hurt his patron, Lady Gregory? I mean, genuinely, is it that? That I don't want to be rude to my patron? The fact that Yeats didn't write about it, it's not as simple that he was trying not to hurt Lady Gregory. Just simply that idea, that catastrophe was very far from the sort of way in which he wanted, not to deal with Irish reality, but Irish legend. They moved legend centre stage.

because real conditions were just too hard to deal with. And they exalted the peasant as somebody who had this strange lore of folk tale and story and language and song, and that they weren't interested in land conditions.

and in holding land. Lady Gregory, of course, was a landlord and her tenants paid rent. We get a novel by Limo Flaherty called Famine. We get it in some plays, in some poems, but in general, it isn't at the very centre of the literature of the 20th century. Does Joyce mention the famine? The famine is hardly mentioned in Joyce at all. But you have to remember that Joyce was a Dublin writer

You know, in other words, he was dealing with the city. And you see, he's dealing with Dublin in 1904, which is one of the crucial years of the Land Acts. It's the beginning of local government acts. So there are a lot of new local government figures in Ulysses who have just been elected to Dublin City Council. And so there's a whole new way that the empire is weakening. The empire is handing power back.

And Joyce is fascinated by, for example, the Lord Lieutenant appears in Ulysses, but he doesn't get to speak. He merely moves through the city almost silently. So it is as though there's a new confidence. Ulysses is looking to a time when this British thing will be shrugged off. The problem, if you're a novelist, is this is very easy drama.

You know, if you have your poor famine people, you can't give them the choices and chances that are normally given to people in fiction. If you think of Balzac, if you think of Dickens, if you think of George Eliot, there's a constant sense that you have a choice.

To deal with catastrophe at this level, it's very hard to see what you can do other than very easy emotions surrounding pure catastrophe. You quote Terry Eagleton in your great LRB essay, and you say, where is the famine in the literature of the revival? If famine stirred some angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatized others into muteness.

The event strains at the limit of the articulable and is truly, in this sense, an Irish Auschwitz. What do you think of that? Well, I would be very careful about connecting. You know, I think that you've been always very careful with the Holocaust not to start comparing it to things and not start using the language we have, a word like Holocaust or Auschwitz, in any other context. But I think Terry Eagleton is right about the idea that it's somehow...

that the catastrophe was so large that just trying to deal with it

it was much easier to become silent about it, as the society more or less did. For example, in the early years of journals like Irish Historical Studies, which would be a journal of the 1940s and 50s, which every Irish historian was writing for, there were very few articles on the famine. And in general, it wasn't really until the 1970s, 80s, 90s, that Irish historians began to seriously look not just at the macro issues, you know, how the economy worked, how lazy fare worked, how the British...

civil service worked, but actually literally to look into the workhouses, to go onto the coffin ships and start looking at the archive from there. That has been a reasonably recent thing. But that's one of the reasons is, of course, that it's only reasonably recent that Irish people have been getting PhDs. Would your next great work be about the famine ever? Or is that just not something you would do? You see, in a novel I wrote like Brooklyn, it's there. And the main thing to do is not mention it.

Don't invoke it because it's just too cheap. But it's certainly there, the idea of her going on a boat first to Liverpool and then being Irish on the boat and going in and going to Ellis Island. No matter what you do with that, you have echoes and resonances. There's an interesting thing that emerged recently. I mean, we know that on the 31st of May 1997, Tony Blair, as prime minister, apologised for the famine.

And I remember in the aftermath when the Queen was coming to Ireland and I had a meeting with the British ambassador and various other people about her visit and saying, she mustn't apologise. Don't you? Sorry. These words are debased now. She's got to think of some other way. But don't let her say sorry, because Tony Blair said, I'm glad he began, which is a very Tony Blair way of beginning anything. I'm glad to have this opportunity to join with you in commemoration all those who suffered and died during the Great Irish Famine.

And he spoke very, very discreetly. But he didn't deliver it himself. He wasn't free that day. And it was delivered, in fact, by Gabriel Byrne on behalf of the British Prime Minister. But in recent... In the last year or two, we've learned...

that Tony Blair was too busy that day to even read the statement. So he didn't even see the statement before it went out. I mean, he was all for it as an idea, but it wasn't as though he sat and wrote it and worried about it and then sent it out. He didn't actually see it. You know, this idea of easy apology, it's something we have to be very careful with. I think what the Queen said later when she came to Ireland about it would be better if some things had happened differently or not at all. It might be a better way of looking at it.

But Tony Blair's apology seemed to me a particularly sort of empty moment in the whole idea of who's responsible, who's guilty, how should people feel, what are we going to do? But I think the real British work was done

with the Land Acts at the end of the 1890s, when the public policy really did change as a result of guilt. It's been so good talking to you about such a difficult subject. Colin Tobin, thank you very much for being with us. That is it from us on The Famine, but stay with us because we continue with our Irish series. Till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durrumpo.

Hi there, I'm Al Murray, co-host of We Have Ways of Making You Talk, the world's premier Second World War history podcast from Goldhanger. And I'm James Holland, best-selling World War II historian, and together we tell the best stories from the war.

This time, we're doing a deep dive into the last major attack by the Nazis on the West, the Battle of the Bulge. And what's so fascinating about this story is we've been able to show how quite a lot of the popular history about this battle is kind of the wrong way around, isn't it, Jim? The whole thing is a disaster from the start. Even Hitler's plans for the attack are insane and divorced from reality. Well, you're so right. But what we can do is celebrate this as an American success story for the

ages. From their generals at the top to the GIs on the front line full of gumption and grit, the bold should be remembered as a great victory for the USA. And if this sounds good to you, we've got a short taste for you here. Search We Have Ways wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks.

Yeah. Anyway, so who is Obersturmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper? But I see his jaunty hat and I just think... And his SS skull and crossbones. Well, I see his reputation and I think, you know, you might be a handsome devil, but the emphasis is on the devil bit rather than the handsome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway...

Be that as may, he's 29 years old and he's got a very interesting career, really, because he comes from a pretty right-wing family, let's face it. He's joined the SS at a pretty early stage. He's very international socialism. He's also been Himmler's adjutant. He took a little bit of time off in the summer of 1940 to go and fight with the 1st Waffen-SS Panzer Division.

Yeah. Did pretty well. Went back to being Himmler's adjutant. Then went off and commanded troops in the Eastern Front. Rose up to be a pretty young regimental commander. I mean, there's not many people that age. Or an Obersturmbannfuhrer, which is a sort of colonel. Yes, I... You see, what must it have been like if you're in...

If Himmler's adjutant turns up and he's been posted to you as an officer, do you think, well, he only got that job because of his connections? For Piper, it must have been always, he's always having to prove himself, surely, because he has turned up. He's not worked his way through the ranks of the Waffen-SS. He's dolloped in, having come from head office, as it were.

It must be a peculiar position to be in, right? He's got lots to prove, right? That's what I'm saying. Yeah, and he's from a sort of middle-class background as well. Yeah. But he's got an older brother who's had mental illness and attempted suicide and never really recovers and actually has died of TB eventually in 1942. He's got a younger brother called Horne.

He's also joined the SS and Totenkopf Verbander and died in a never really properly explained accident in Poland in 1941. Piper gains a sort of growing reputation on the Eastern Front for being kind of very inspiring, fearless, you know, obviously courageous. You know, all the guys love him, all that kind of stuff. But he's also orders the entire the destruction of entire village of Krasnaya Polyana in a kind of revenge killing by Russian partisans.

Yeah. And his unit becomes known as the Blowtorch Battalion because of his penchant for touching Russian villages. So he's got all the gongs. He's got Iron Cross, Second Class, First Class, Cross of Gold, Knight's Cross. Did very well at Kursk. Briefly in Northern Italy, actually. Then in Ukraine. Then in Normandy, he suffers a nervous breakdown. Yeah.

Yeah. And he's relieved of his command on the 2nd of August. And he's hospitalized from September to October. So he's not in command during Operation Lutich. And then he rejoins 1st SS Panzer Regiment as its commander again in October 1944. It's really, really odd. I mean... But isn't that interesting, though? Because if you're a Lancer, if you're an ordinary soldier, you're not allowed to have a nervous breakdown. You don't get hospitalized. You don't get time off.

How you could interpret this is this is a sort of Nazi princeling, isn't he? He's him as adjutant. He's demonstrated the necessary Nazi zeal on the Eastern Front and all this sort of stuff. It comes to Normandy where they're losing. Why else would he have a nervous breakdown? He's shown all the zeal and application in the Nazi manner up to this point, and they're losing, you know. And because he's a knob, you know, because he's well connected, he gets to be hospitalized if he has a nervous breakdown. He isn't told like an ordinary German soldier, there's no such thing as combat fatigue, mate.

go back to work. Yes, and it's a nervous breakdown, not combat fatigue. Well, yes, of course. But, you know, what's the difference? One SS soldier said of him, Piper was the most dynamic man I ever met. He just got things done. Yeah. You get this image I have of him of having this kind of sort of slightly mischievous

Manic energy. Yeah. Kind of. He's virulently national socialist. He's got this great reputation. He's damned if anyone's going to tarnish it. You know, he's a he's a driver. You know, all those things. He's trying to make the will triumph, isn't he? He's working towards the Fuhrer. He's imbued with he knows what's expected of him. Extreme violence and cruelty and pushing his men on. I mean, he's sort of he's the Fuhrer Princip writ large, isn't he? As a as an SS officer. Yeah. Yeah.

which is why cruelty and extreme violence are bundled in to wherever he goes, basically.