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The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People
John Kelly
By
Published: Jul 23, 2013
Category:
Non Fiction
They weren’t prosperous to start with, but it suddenly seems that there’s no money to be found and no food they can afford. The government passes legislation to help them. Loan applications pour in; many, it turns out, are not projects to help the poor but to enrich the applicants. The people cry out. Give away food? Not possible. That would encourage “dependency on government.” That would be a “moral plague.” This is a matter for the free market to sort out.
The U.S. House of Representatives, 2013?
Absolutely.
But our Representatives’ plan to hold the poor accountable for their poverty — to teach the poor a lesson — is not a new strategy. It is very much the philosophy the English applied in Ireland, when the great potato famine struck in 1845 and turned that country into a graveyard.
The story that John Kelly tells in “The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People” has been told before, but not recently and not with as much energy in the telling. It’s quite a story, with few heroes but many villains, all of them English. It’s not exactly that that the Brits meant to commit genocide in Ireland. It’s more like: There’s a way to do things, a procedure, and if a few people have to die while we get our systems operating, so be it.
Good people with terrible ideas hurt people who can’t fight back — that’s the kind of story that you read shaking your head because you can’t quite believe any philosophy can justify the suffering and death of others. “The Graves Are Walking” is a jaw-dropping reading experience. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
How many died in Ireland from 1845-1848? Starvation and disease killed 1.1 million of Ireland’s eight million people. "By the summer of 1847,” Kelly writes, “newspaper readers in North America and Europe could be forgiven for thinking the only thing the Irish knew how to do any more was die." To stay alive, people sold everything. Men sucked the blood of living cows.
In Limerick, John Geary, a physician, told a visiting English commission about his recent encounter with a former textile worker; the man was lying in bed next to his wife, who had typhus. “I begged him to get up,” said Geary, “and I shall never forget so long as I live his answer to me, ‘Ah sir, if I get up and breathe the air and walk about I will get an appetite … and I have nothing to eat and not a penny to buy anything.’”
Another two million emigrated — those graves really were walking. All told, Ireland lost a third of its population.
Potatoes. It all came down to potatoes. The bottom two-thirds of the Irish population depended on them. They grew them: a single acre produced six tons of potatoes. And ate them: each acre could feed a family of six for a year. But then came a plague: Phytophthora infestans. And there was no food.
“The Graves Are Walking” is not an indictment; the history is sufficient. Grim, but laced with black humor. Who benefited from the plague? Tax collectors; their numbers increased by 222%. And coffin makers — up by 187%. And, of course, English politicians, like Charles Edward Trevelyan, a civil servant at the Treasury who had charge of the British response. God had “sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” he declared, and it “must not be too much mitigated.”
A cautionary tale.
To read an excerpt, click here.
