They sustain their arguments with sound materials. What happened in 1840s Ireland, and why, and who was responsible, is also the subject of John Kelly’s cogent and forceful popular history, “The Graves Are Walking.” Kelly and Coogan have both written polemics against the British government of the day and its inadequate response to Ireland’s nightmare. And these days, as Tim Pat Coogan writes in “The Famine Plot,” “poverty and emigration remained continuing themes in Ireland,” and the country has been learning all over again that “its defenses were too fragile to cope with the longstanding Irish vices such as clientalism and corruption.” What Coogan suggests - and this is just one of many intriguing points made in his book - is a linkage between the recent Irish collapse, Irish feelings of helplessness and that demographic and moral disaster of the Irish 1840s: the potato famine, otherwise known as the Great Hunger. Who had time to brood over the potato famine when the aged parents’ wee house happened to be worth four times what it was five years ago? Ireland’s economic takeoff, which began accelerating in the 1980s, spun out of control early in the new millennium and was crashing even before the near-meltdown of the global financial system in 2008.īack in the late purple stage of the property boom, a nation besotted with an insanely over-confident real estate market seemed willing, even eager, to finally forget its history of subjugation, oppression, theft, poverty, famine and emigration.
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