Words like 'invaded,' 'conquered,' 'confiscated,' and 'an Irish nation' would have been anathema to historians anxious to play down the colonial dimension of Ireland's past relationship with Britain. The country had been conquered not once but several times, the land had been confiscated and redistributed over and over again, the population had been brought to the verge of extinction-after Cromwell's conquest and settlement only some half million Irish survived-yet an Irish nation still existed, separate, numerous and hostile.1 Ireland had first been invaded in 1169 it was now 1845, yet she had been neither assimilated nor subdued. The opening paragraph made the author's sympathies clear:Īt the beginning of the year 1845 the state of Ireland was, as it had been for nearly seven hundred years, a source of grave anxiety to England. After only a few pages, it was obvious this book went against the prevailing orthodoxies about the Famine, which lay at the heart of the revisionist interpretations.

Reading that book proved both heartrending and enlightening. The second suggestion came not because he liked the book-he did not-but because he believed it was the only comprehensive narrative of the tragedy that had made extensive use of archives in Ireland and England.

He then informed me that I should first read Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger. In the late 1970s, when I was embarking on my doctoral research, my supervisor at Trinity College Dublin told me that I must extend my dissertation on the Poor Law in Ireland, 1838–45, to include the famine period.

Woodham smith the great hunger