I love when you read two different books on the same events and you immediately pick up on the bias each other has. When I reviewed Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, Scanlan held that the most Ireland could possibly blame England for was “misguided politics”; Kelly holds that the political decisions were the least they could be blamed for.Kelly also went far further into Irish history and culture, as well as the emigrant experience upon leaving Ireland, and how much the Irish struggled to be accepted in other nations. In some ways this was far better researched book, even if in the first couple of chapters I was beginning to feel like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park in regards to the actual famine.
I appreciated the continued name dropping in this book and the frequent references to both Albert Camus’ The Plague and Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron as much as in The Great Mortality, the other John Kelly book I read. He manages to work in Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, Jefferson Davis, Eamon de Valera, Benjamin Disraeli, Herman Melville, James Cagney, Robert Peel, Daniel Webster, John Stuart Mill, Samuel F.B. Morse, John Jay, John Joseph Hughes (who is responsible for the beginning of construction on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City), Lord Lucan (of “Charge of the Light Brigade” fame), William Wilde and his future wife Jane Elgee (future parents of Oscar), Robert Peel; this is like the who’s who of famous Irish, and the famous people who either supported them or loathed them. Kelly also went far more into the diseases that sprung up to plague Ireland during the Famine Years far more than Scanlan did; these spread from famine fever, both relapsing and epidemic, to typhus (frabhas dubh, “black fever” in Irish), dysentary (ruit fola, “bloody flux”), and scurvy. On the whole this book was actually about the famine with occasional mentions of the politics that made the situation far worse than it could have been. Though in total Ireland lost around one-third of its population between the years of 1845 and 1852; one and half to two million to emigration to England, the United States, and Canada; anywhere from 1 million to almost 2 million to famine, disease, and hypothermia. Because of course in a middle of a famine, the wealthier landlords decided to improve their lands and get out of having to pay a larger poor pay rate to support the local workhouses and soup kitchens by mass evictions; sometimes entire villages of up to 70 or 80 families would be thrown out into the snow to sleep in whatever ditch they could find; the eviction rate rose 1,000% between the years of 1847 and 1851. I did find it slightly funny (in a sick way), that upon hearing that there were Irish who were taking to shooting their landlords, the Prime Minister at the time had only this to say; “The landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges, but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty people at once and burn their houses over their heads.”
One of the things I will ding Kelly for is the fact Kelly did not realize that A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift was satirical. Swift wrote it to poke fun at the indifference and condescension the English had towards the Irish; he was not actually suggesting the Irish should resort to eating their babies. Though as bad as the potato blight drove things, it very well almost became a reality. The Public Works program, created to protect the Irish peasant from the moral depredations of free food failed; a victim of snow, gales, exhaustion, malnutrition and the ideological fixations of its creators.
England: God helps those who helps themselves! Each country should take care of supplying it’s own food!
Ireland: So we should stop exporting food to England and keep it all for ourselves?
England: 
Most Irish however did not blame Providence for the mass deaths; they blamed the English. “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight but England sent the famine”. Compared to the belief of some in England who believe Providence sent the blight to punish man for violation His laws on food tariffs, mostly aimed at Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Cambridge. Why the Almighty would deprive the Irish peasant of his potatoes to spite the Duke of Cambridge is, as Kelly puts it, “a mystery as deep as the Virgin birth.”
One of the worst examples in England was Lord Brougham, a former lord chancellor who was vehemently against permitting the Irish to emigrate, as “why send men from starving in Skibbereen to starving in Montreal?”, and “Providence, who sent the potato disease, meant that many should die, not emigrate to England or elsewhere”. Besides, he held the belief that the Irish would make Canada Roman Catholic and set a bad example for the dumb, impressionable Canadians (so it was not just Ireland that the English were snobs to). His comrade overseas back in the day was John Jay, who attempted to add to the New York State Constitution that banned Irish Roman Catholic New Yorkers from having rights or owning property unless they signed a special oath of allegiance including the denunciation of “popery”.
Not that emigration was that wonderful; even before the xenophobia they faced once they arrived at their destinations, the Irish had to contend getting there in ships whose holds were unfavorably compared to The Black Hole of Calcutta. The mortality on German ships was eight and a half per one thousand people, American ships nine and a half per one thousand; British: thirty per one thousand.
All in all, I found it an enjoyable book (or as enjoyable as you can find a book about mass death); it was informative without being the least bit dry, and really helped to fill in what drove part of one half of my heritage to come to the States. I am sorry that my great-grandfather, whose own parents died due to the lasting effects the blight had on Ireland, wasn’t alive to read this book. The fact that in it is the English suggestion that if “American maize isn’t a viable option, the grass crop has come in rather well this year”, would probably make him lose his sh…cool. According to my mother, he could never stand the habit around Saint Patrick’s Day some bars have of dying their beer green. I think it was the stories of people dying with their mouths foaming green from being reduced to eating grass that probably did it to him.