`Fearful Realities' New Perspectives on the Famine edited by Chris Morash and Richard Hayes Irish Academic Press 180pp, £30/£14.95
Before the Famine Struck Life in West Clare, 1834-1845 by Ignatius Murphy Irish Academic Press 105pp, £8.95
A Starving People Life and Death in West Clare, 1845-1851 by Ignatius Murphy Irish Academic Press 113pp, £8.95
The Irish Famine A Documentary History by Noel Kissane National Library of Ireland 184pp, £14.95
TOO much suffering makes the heart grow cold. Fifty years ago, during the centenary of the Famine, we were unable to face the truth about the Holocaust, never mind our own great calamity. The interest in commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Famine suggests a healing of the national psyche.
In any event, it continues to inspire good books. Noel Kissane's National Library publication is both an excellent introduction to the Famine and a source of primary research material Ignatius Murphy's companion volumes transcend local interest and Fearfill Realities is particularly recommended.
This important collection of essays includes Laurence Geary writing about medical relief and the Great Famine James Donnelly on British public opinion and Margaret Kelleher on Asenath Nicholson, an American woman who came to distribute Bibles but stayed to share in a nation's agony.
Initially, efforts were made to treat Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. Sir Robert Peel's relief measures were substantial, if inadequate and geared for one season only. While suffering was deep and widespread in the first year of the Famine, the natural disaster of the potato failure had not yet become a national catastrophe.
Not for the last time, however, Irish ill fate was compounded by a change of British government. The Treasury mandarin, Charles Trevelyan, had much in common with the new Whig ideologues.
Ireland was considered a diseased body in need of the harsh medicine of political economy. Hence the chilling rhetoric of Trevelyan, who viewed the Famine as "the judgment of God on an indolent and unself reliant people and, as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson that calamity must not be too much mitigated the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise".
Providentialism was informed by zeal rather than love. The English evangelical, Alexander Dallas, was convinced the Famine had been sent by God to make the Irish "come out of Rome".
John Mitchel, with some justification, saw the country as a oation perishing of political economy". According to its hard headed principles, providing food for sale in all districts and under all, circumstances should be left to private enterprise. Laissez faire and free trade in land were further watchwords of the political economists, who demanded the replacement of feudal with capitalist economic and social relations.
In a spirit of retribution for the hordes of disease ridden Irish flooding into Britain, in mid-1847 the House of Commons passed the Poor Law Amendment Act which ordained that "Irish property must pay for Irish poverty". Reviewing its results two years later, the London Times found "The rigorous administration of the poor law is destroying small holdings, reducing needy proprietors to utter insolvency, compelling them to surrender their estates into better hands, instigating an emigration far beyond any which a government could undertake, and so leaving the soil of Ireland open to industrial enterprise and the introduction of new capital... We see Ireland depopulated, her villages razed to the ground, her landlords bankrupt in a word, we see the hideous chasm prepared for the foundation of a future prosperity."
The compassion evident in the first season of Famine contrasts with the scene recorded by the historian R.R. Madden in 1851. On a bitter February morning, an estimated 1,000 men, women and children sought admission to Kilrush union workhouse. The courtyard was thronged with a dense mass of misery, clamouring and pressing forward, the less weak thrusting aside the more infirm, the young hustling the old, the women pulling back the children, larger children pushing back the smaller, uttering confused cries of pain, impatience, anger and despair.
The late Monsignor Murphy's books contain much social history, particularly on the growth of Kilkee as Limerick's watering spot. The first tourists travelled to Kilrush in turf boats. In Kilkee they were offered such accommodation as a lodge containing "two sitting rooms, six best bedrooms, three servants' do kitchen, larder, scullery, etc. A lock up yard encloses a coach house, stable and other offices. The tenant will be supplied with as much turf as he requires, the use of a bathing box with slipper bath."