The great Irish potato famine of the 1840s claimed a million lives - and yet the reasons for the tragedy have still not been fully explored. Colm Tóibín on the need for Ireland to reassess its past in an extract from The Irish Famine (Profile).

Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by 40 years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. “John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought / All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil.” Lady Gregory also wrote plays, which had to do in various ways with “the soil”.

The house at Coole Park she came to after her marriage must have been haunted by the great famine, which began with the failure of the potato crop in parts of Ireland in 1845. It is recorded, for example, that on April 5, 1847, 4,000 destitute labourers gathered at Gort, the nearest town to Coole Park, looking for work. In 1848 a Poor Law inspector visiting the workhouse in Gort wrote that he could scarcely “conceive a house in a worse state, or in greater disorder”. A quarter of the population of the area sought relief in those years and many died in the most appalling circumstances.

Sir William Gregory witnessed much of this and was, according to his biographer, deeply affected. Yet in 1847, as the famine in Ireland became increasingly serious, Sir William drafted what is often described as “the infamous Gregory clause” in the Poor Law legislation for Ireland going through the House of Commons: any family holding more than a quarter of an acre could not be granted relief, either in or out of the workhouse, until they gave up their land.

Thus, landlords who wanted to move from tillage to livestock or dairy farming would now have a valuable opportunity to do so. They would also rid themselves of bad tenants. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a rule, not even children were allowed to enter the workhouse until a family’s land was surrendered. People had to decide: if they wanted to eat, they had to give up their land.

In Heathcliff and The Great Hunger, Terry Eagleton has wry words to say about the relationship between Anglo-Irish landlords and Anglo-Irish writers. “Yet it could not pass entirely unnoticed that if the forefathers of the colonial class in Ireland had been a little less intent on undermining the native culture, their emancipated sons and daughters would have needed to busy themselves rather less with restoring it. Before Lady Gregory came to collect Gaelic folk tales, her future husband William had framed the infamous Gregory clause in the depths of famine.”

In a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked that when in 1874 Canon John O’Rourke, the parish priest of Maynooth, came to publish his History of The Great Famine of 1847, he declared of the Gregory clause: “A more complete engine for the slaughter and expatriation of a people was never designed.” Irish historians, on the whole, do not become emotional about the famine. Like historians elsewhere, they are happier to describe and analyse than blame or use emotional language or emotional quotations. They are not in the business of writing about forgiving or forgetting: they are aware, perhaps, that we have had to listen to this sort of language for a long time in Ireland, and none of it has done us much good.

Catholic society in Ireland in the 1840s was graded and complex: to suggest that it was merely England, or Irish landlords, who stood by while Ireland starved is to miss the point. An entire class of Irish Catholics survived the famine; many, indeed, improved their prospects as a result of it, and this legacy may be more difficult for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.

In my father’s account of the famine in Enniscorthy, County Wexford - he was a local historian - he wrote about the rise in the price of food: the workhouse could buy oatmeal for £2 a ton in October 1845; within a few months that had gone up to £5 and by the end of 1846 it was £20. He does not comment on this. There were things you could not say in 1946 about the famine, such as that ordinary Catholic traders in the town and the stronger farmers speculated in food and made profits. It is plain from much writing about the famine that two things happened in its aftermath. One, people blamed the English and the ascendancy. Two, there began a great silence about class division in Catholic Ireland. It became increasingly important, as nationalist fervour grew in the years after, that Catholic Ireland, or simply “Ireland” (the Catholic part went without saying), was presented as a nation, one and indivisible. The famine, then, had to be blamed on the Great Other, the enemy across the water, and the victims had to be this entire Irish nation, rather than a vulnerable section of the population.

And it became a truth universally acknowledged that this was an event we still had to come to terms with; that scholars needed to do a great deal of work before we could finally understand what happened in Ireland in the latter part of the 1840s, why it happened, and who was to blame. The first 100 issues of Irish Historical Studies contained only five articles on the famine. Between 1974 and 1987, Irish Economic and Social History did not publish a single article on it.

In the early 1940s Eamon de Valera, who had been brought up in County Clare, a part of Ireland deeply affected by the famine, realised that there was a need for a definitive single volume on the famine by serious historians, and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, 1,000 pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946.

The government released a grant of £1,500. It finally appeared in 1956, with 436 pages of text. It was the first serious work about the famine by modern historians, and it tells us a great deal both about the famine and about the historians.

In his essay on the saga of this book, which is included in Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, Cormac O’Gráda writes: “It reads more like an administrative history of the period, with the core chapters dwelling on the tragedy mainly from the standpoint of the politician, the Poor Law administrator, those who controlled passenger movements, and the medical practitioner ... Few of the contributors relied on the wealth of manuscript sources available even then on the famine years.”

De Valera was out of office by the time the book was published. “Later,” O’Gráda writes, “he expressed unhappiness with the book, presumably because it seemed to downplay those aspects of the tragedy that had been etched in his own memory. Almost three decades later, that ‘definitive history’ remains to be written, though a great deal of work has been done in the interim.”

The problem may be endemic. It may lie in the relationship between catastrophe and analytic narrative. How do you write about the famine? What tone do you use? It is now agreed (at least more or less) that around a million people died of disease, hunger and fever in the years between 1846 and 1849. The west of Ireland suffered most and there are people there today who claim still to be haunted by the silences and absences and emptiness that the famine left.

The political legacy was also important. It emerges most clearly in the Irish nationalist John Mitchell’s Jail Journal, first published in New York in 1854. The famine, he claimed, was genocide: it could have been prevented by the British. “In every one of those years, ’46, ’47, ’48, Ireland was exporting to England food to the value of £15m, and had on her own soil at each harvest good and ample provision for double her own population, notwithstanding the potato blight.” This claim persisted, as did the call that we should neither forgive nor forget. In fact, food imports for the years 1846 to 1850 exceeded exports by a ratio of two to one.

Such claims make historians cringe. The question of tone in Irish historical writing has been raised by Brendan Bradshaw in an essay published in Interpreting Irish History. Bradshaw is concerned to show that “value-free” history cannot work in a society such as Ireland, “seared... by successive waves of conquest and colonisation, by bloody wars and uprisings, by traumatic social dislocation, by lethal racial antagonisms, and, indeed, by its own 19th-century version of a holocaust”.

He writes about the “sheer neglect” of the famine by historians, with the exception of the government-sponsored book, and goes on to list the problems in Mary Daly’s The Famine In Ireland, published in 1986: “cerebralising” and “desentisitising” the trauma, and employing “a conception of professionalism which denies the historian recourse to value judgments and, therefore, access to the moral and emotional register necessary to respond to human tragedy”.

Surely if we want moral and emotional registers as badly as Bradshaw suggests, we will not look to historians: we will read novels and poems, listen to ballads, stick close to our grand- mothers and say our prayers. The questions we want answered remain the same: What caused the famine? How could it have been prevented? How many died and who were they? What was the result? The sifting of facts, the careful analysis of statistics, the weighing up of material are what is required. We have enough moral and emotional registers (at least in Ireland; Bradshaw teaches at Cambridge). We need information.

What is notable about the period of the potato blight, beginning in 1845, is the virulence of the comments about Ireland and Irish people, both landlords and peasants, made by politicians and journalists in Britain, including figures like Engels, who wrote: “Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them... The Irish man loves his pig as the Arab loves his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it.” In March 1847, the Times declared: “The astounding apathy of the Irish themselves to the most horrible scenes under their eyes and capable of relief by the smallest exertion is something absolutely without parallel in the history of civilised nations.” In August 1847 Lord Clarendon wrote to Lord John Russell: “We shall be equally blamed for keeping [the Irish] alive or letting them die and we have only to select between the censure of the Economists or the Philanthropists - which do you prefer?”

These are examples of the dismissive tones used about Ireland at the time. If you also take into account the fact that the British government and Irish landlords wanted land clearance on a vast scale, then the obvious question arises: could it be that, on the one hand, there were these attitudes and ambitions and, on the other, there was a famine, but that the two are not necessarily connected, or not connected enough to constitute cause and effect? The famine was caused, after all, by a potato blight and the system of land-holding meant that many people had no money to buy food. It is like an Agatha Christie novel in which everything points to an obvious suspect, but the culprit turns out to have been the vicar’s wife, whom no one suspected.

In fact, nobody is suggesting that the administration caused the famine. The suggestion is rather that, impelled by its contempt for Ireland and their interest in land reform, the administration caused many people to die. This is the possibility some historians are afraid to approach and that others, who come to wildly different conclusions, are too ready to entertain.

Eamon de Valera, who came to power in the Irish Free State in 1932, was deeply concerned that because of emigration and social change a whole sense of the past was being lost in Ireland, customs and stories were dying out, and the memory of events like the famine was fading. In 1935 he set up the Irish Folklore Commission, which organised the work of professional and voluntary folklore collectors. The folklore collection that resulted is now housed at University College, Dublin. It comprises 3,500 bound volumes and more than 1,000 boxes of unbound material, plus sound recordings and 40,000 photographs. The collectors were encouraged to keep diaries of their time in the field and these are also kept in the archive.

Memories of the famine come to us in three ways in the collection. First, through the ordinary work of the collectors, more valuable the closer it dates to 1935. Second, through a questionnaire sent to individuals throughout the country (including the North) in 1945. These individuals then collected information in their locality. Third, through material collected by schoolchildren, aged between 11 and 14, in a special one-off folklore project in the Free State in 1937 and 1938, which included material on the memory of the famine. This consists of 1,100 volumes with 400 pages per volume.

In the history of the famine commissioned by de Valera, the final essay by Roger McHugh makes use of this material. It is significant that McHugh was a literary critic and not a historian. The truth of his chapter, he writes, is “the truth, heard from afar, of the men and women who were caught up, uncomprehending and frantic, in that disaster”.

Almost all Irish historians of the famine have been uneasy about this “truth, heard from afar”. One of the reasons for this, Cormac O’Gráda points out, is the plethora of documentary source material on the famine. The case for using folk material is therefore “less pressing”. In his essay Irish History And Irish Mythology, TW Moody wrote: “But if ’history’ is used in its proper sense of a continuing, probing, critical search for truth about the past, my argument would be that it is not Irish history but Irish mythology that has been ruinous to us and may prove even more lethal. History is a matter of facing the facts of the Irish past, however painful some of them may be; mythology is a way of refusing to face the historical facts.”

Most Irish historians from the 1970s onwards were liberals who wanted a non-sectarian, post-nationalist, pro-European Ireland; most of them grew to believe, innocently, that this was not a political position but a matter of common sense, and they genuinely believed that this enabled them to write history impartially. They were, in any case, united in their common sense against material collected in 1945 about events 100 years earlier being taken as seriously as institutional records.

The folklore material presents us with a problem, no matter what our views on nationalism or sectarianism. O’Gráda writes: “Though memories recounted much later may fail to reveal the true feelings of those at risk, they may capture them better than the standard documentary sources. Moreover, folklore is also about normative beliefs and semi-public attitudes, as exchanged between people - an important topic for famine historiographers. At its best the record [in the archive of the Folklore Commission] is vivid, eloquent and compelling.” He adds: “Yet, ironically, Irish historians remain unconvinced of the value of this source.” O’Gráda offers a good reason for this in showing that the folklore is “often - consciously or subconsciously - selective, evasive and apologetic”. It is of no use, he points out, for statistics or even basic facts and figures.

The folklore archive on the famine can, then, be anything you want it to be: it can be studded with legends; it can be full of information that should be treated as almost primary source; it is a history of memory in Ireland after 1935; it should be consulted by all historians; it should be consulted by literary critics.

It remains, however, an unconsulted treasure trove. The famine only comes close when you bring it close: when you read about it, when you see a list of names, or when you start thinking about evictions or when you hear a song about it, or see a mass grave, or a road built during those years, or read some soundbite by an English administrator or politician. In Heathcliff And The Great Hunger, Eagleton asks: “Where is the famine in the literature of the Revival? Where is it in Joyce?” [...] “If the famine stirred some to angry rhetoric, it would seem to have traumatised others into muteness. The event strains at the limit of the articulable, and is truly in this sense an Irish Auschwitz.”

He goes on to make what seems to me a crucial point: “Part of the horror of the famine is its atavistic nature - the mind-shaking fact that an event with all the pre- modern character of a medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness.” I think that this “pre-modern” quality puts the famine beyond the reach of writers who came after it; and the speed with which society transformed itself - and perhaps the arrival of the camera - made the history of 1846-48 in Ireland a set of erasures rather than a set of reminders.

For Joyce, and for many other writers, the famine was too distant, and the world that grew out of it too interesting and close and dramatic. As Seamus Deane writes in Strange Country: Modernity And Nationhood In Irish Writing Since 1790, the literature and the politics of the Irish Revival achieved “the remarkable feat of ignoring the famine and rerouting the claim for cultural exceptionalism through legend rather than through history”. For Yeats, Lady Gregory and others, the invocation of an ancient, heroic Ireland was more powerful and less limiting than trying, as Seamus Deane puts it, “to maintain the position that a traditional culture had been destroyed while making the integrity of that culture a claim for political independence”.

As the 150th anniversary of the famine approached last year, a quantity of books on the subject began to appear. A number were written in the shadow of Irish nationalism which, as we all know, had a fresh outing in Ireland after the IRA embarked on its campaign in the North in the early 1970s. Irish history, the old story of Ireland, was once more being used as a weapon to stir political emotions. The fastidiousness of Daly’s approach should probably be seen in this context, while the approach of others - notably Christine Kinealy in This Great Calamity - is an effort to set the record straight and unrevise the revisionists.

Nothing is settled in Ireland. The years of famine commemoration made this clear. For some, the silence surrounding the famine and the attempt of Irish historians to remain cool about it are examples of denial, and serve only to show its importance in the Irish psyche.

Fifty years after the famine, in February 1895, Lady Gregory wrote to a friend: “The garden is like Italy, warm sunshine and many flowers out, wallflowers, grape hyacinths, violets and in the woods, primroses. I did a little ornamental planting yesterday, putting out copper beeches and laburnums raised from seed in my own nursery. I hope, if there are ever grandchildren, they will be grateful some day. Our people are paying rents and paying very well, and a policeman who came from Gort in the holidays to cut the boys’ hair said that he was glad of the distraction, as they have absolutely nothing to do here now.”

The scene is straight out of Chekhov in its innocence and melancholy and self-absorption, but there is no Lenin lurking in the undergrowth: the changes came subtly and slowly. In a series of Land Acts, the old estates, which had been cleared of cottier tenants, were divided up, and the deeply conservative Catholic farmer class came into being. Lady Gregory’s nephew, John Shaw-Taylor, was one of the architects of this legislation. By 1923, 2m acres had been redistributed.

Around the mid-1890s, according to her diaries, Lady Gregory realised that “the breaking of Parnell’s power and his death” in 1891 had “pushed politics into the background, and... there came a birth of new hope and interests, as it were, a setting free of the imagination.” Ireland, then, could concentrate on myth and folk life and cultural de-Anglicisation rather than partisan politics, bitterness and economic argument. Poets, dramatists and dreamers could set the tone of the debate. And in the prosperous demesnes of the west, where a new, dreamy nationalism began to thrive, the events of the famine had no place.