Sir, - Brendan O'Cathaoir's excellent chronicle of the Famine will have done much to awaken our consciences to the shocking nature of the catastrophe. His articles will be missed.
However, it is a pity that the final column (December 27th) should have featured a photograph of a ruined settlement near Lough Dan, Co Wicklow, described as "pre-Famine" as though to emphasise the abandonment at that time of land and house by the destitute.
That particular settlement was a working farm when I was a boy in the 1940s and early 1950s, one hundred years after the Famine. -Yours, etc.,
Strand Road, Killiney, Co Dublin.