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The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine (RTÉ One, Monday, 9:35 PM) is a completely conventional retelling of one of the darkest chapters in Irish history, and it’s much better for him. With discreetly authoritative narration from Liam Neeson and the usual Talking Head historians, it’s as solid and traditional as heirloom furniture.
Neeson, accompanied by changing panoramic shots of the Irish landscape, takes us from the origins of the Famine to “Black ’47”, the darkest year of this incomprehensible calamity. Conjuring his best “I’ll look for you, I’ll find you” growl from his films Taken, he describes how, impoverished and oppressed, Ireland was already reeling before the potato blight struck.
A doctor writes, about a mother who has left the body of her dead child in the mud with the pigs, that rampant cholera and dysentery mean that no one will bury the child for her.
A contrast is drawn between the governments of the continent, with their relatively swift and humane responses to crop failure, and the slow pace of the London government. Such altruism in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands had the ulterior motive of keeping dissent at bay and hindering possible peasant uprisings, but at least it prevented the massive famine that eventually struck Ireland. Here Britain’s patrician condescension to the population gave way, after an initially relatively effective intervention by Robert Peel, to cruel indifference. Nor did the Continentals share the view of Charles Trevelyan, charged with overseeing the food supply in Ireland, that the plague was God’s way of punishing the indolent.
The sheer horror of the Great Famine is devastatingly conveyed in contemporary accounts. These paint a portrait of a society that has collapsed. A doctor writes, about a mother who has left the body of her dead child in the mud with the pigs, that rampant cholera and dysentery mean that no one will bury the child for her. The doctor agrees to do so, and in the end he knocks down not only the boy, but also his two brothers and his mother. “Ireland has become a great tomb,” writes a monsignor in France. “The bodies were gone for weeks. People eaten by dogs, ”says a Reverend Francis Webb. “Do we really live in a part of the UK?”
“The British left people to starvation,” says Professor Kevin Whelan. ‘At the highest level of government there was a feeling that ultimately this was not their problem’
The Hunger is produced in association with University College Cork, which published the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine in 2012. And the documentary marks the 175th anniversary of the beginning of the crop failure, in 1845. It can be argued that the famine changed Ireland forever and that today we live in its shadow. This complicated question of the aftermath and the legacy will be discussed next week, in part two.
The debate on whether the Great Hunger qualifies as genocide as we define it in the 21st century remains for another moment. But the documentary’s writer and director, Ruán Magan, who also collaborated with Neeson on 1916: the Irish rebellion and with Cillian Murphy in the past year The irish revolutionHe does not hesitate to blame London.
“The British left people to starvation,” says Professor Kevin Whelan of the University of Notre Dame. “At the highest level of government there was a feeling that ultimately this was not their problem.”
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