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A new documentary on the Great Famine details the lengths the Irish went to to survive, including cannibalism.
Titled The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine, it is RTÉ’s first major documentary exclusively about the calamity and will be released to mark the 175th anniversary of its beginning in 1845.
Things got so bad in “Black 1847” with more famines in 1848 and 1849 that people were reduced to eating rotten pigs, donkeys and dogs.
Cannibalism incidents were also recorded in Cork, Kerry, Galway and Mayo counties.
In 1849, Father Peter Ward, parish priest of Partry in Co Mayo, wrote to his archbishop: “In the village of Drimcaggy, four were dead together in a poor hut: brother, two sisters and a daughter. The meat was ripped from the daughter’s arm and smashed in the mouth of her poor dead mother, her name was Mary Kennedy.
“William Walsh of Mount Partree and his son died together, the rats and the others ripped the flesh from the corpses; meat was found in their mouths. His wife and son died of starvation the week before. ”
Professor Cormac Ó Gráda, a world authority on the Great Famine and its global impact, told the documentary: “The surviving cannibalism is trying to live off the corpses of people who preceded you. They may or may not be related to you.
“If you don’t think this happened or could happen, then you don’t understand what the famine is about.”
The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine is produced in conjunction with University College Cork (UCC), which produced the Atlas of the Irish Famine in 2012.
The documentary notes that the potato harvest failed in northern Europe from Ireland to Prussia, but the total number of starvation deaths between 1845 and 1852 was just 100,000 outside of Ireland, compared to one million in Ireland.
Other countries diverted crops like wheat and corn to feed their starving people. British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel did so in the early stages of the famine and no one went hungry in 1845, but his government was overthrown in 1846 due to the corn laws and he was replaced by Sir John Russell, the liberal prime minister. , who believed in the principle of laissez-faire. The British government spent just £ 8 million out of a total expenditure of £ 300 million on famine relief. Rather, they spent £ 14 million on security in Ireland.
The British government decided not to spend any more British taxpayers money on famine relief and put the burden on homeowners who were often bankrupt.
The documentary raises the question of whether or not the Great Famine amounted to genocide, a view that has a strong validity, especially in the United States.
Its writer and editor Rouen Magan said he wanted the documentary to focus not just on those who died or emigrated, but on those who survived.
Of the eight million people in Ireland at the time, approximately four million escaped the famine relatively unscathed.
Many of them showed great charity to their fellow Irish sufferers, but others did not and a Catholic priest is quoted in the documentary as saying that Catholic landlords who evicted tenants were the worst.
Mr. Magan, who did the Irish War of Independence series earlier this year, said that in the past there had been “a great reluctance on the part of RTÉ to take on any of these great things.”
“They may have been concerned about upsetting certain apple carts, but I think a lot has changed since the 2016 commemorations. Now we can take a cooler look at things,” he said.
“You can blame the British, but maybe we should take a look at ourselves as well to see what happened.”
The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine airs on RTÉ One on November 30 and December 7 at 9:35 p.m.
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