In June of 1997, one hundred and fifty years after “Black ’47,” the worst year of the Irish Famine, Tony Blair, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, issued the following statement. “That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people.” A bit late, perhaps, but few historians would disagree with Mr. Blair’s assessment. With over a million dead and another million or so having fled the country in the course of six years, Great Britain had indeed failed its Irish citizens. Yet, questions remain. In what ways did Great Britain fail Ireland and why? What were the cultural, ethnic, religious and ideological factors that contributed to the failure? Was it, as many Irish nationalists maintain, a matter of genocide? Or was Britain’s deeply flawed response something more complicated and, in its own way, more disturbing. Was it a combination of factors: an emerging, imperfect democracy, ethnic prejudice, self-serving bureaucratic ignorance, a newly triumphant free-market ideology, and the politics of an emergent middle class?
If such factors were to blame, then perhaps we may be able to crack the shell of time and place and see the Irish Famine in a broader perspective. The attitudes and decisions that define Britain’s mishandling of the Irish crisis might then cease to be the peculiar properties of bigoted English politicians and anti-Irish publicists and instead take on an all too familiar appearance. Many of the same kinds of forces that shaped, limited and distorted famine policy in Victorian Britain are still at work in today’s advanced democratic societies as they struggle to deal with slower-moving but equally devastating crises involving issues of poverty, class, ethnicity, ideology and politics.