Irish Great Famine

The Irish Great Famine is presented as a catastrophe whose consequences extended beyond the nineteenth century into Irish migration, political memory, and the rhetoric of later conflict. The book returns to the famine not only as a history of mass death and displacement, but as a charged precedent in arguments about British responsibility and the power of hunger.

Catastrophe and Migration

The famine is described as a period in which a million people in Ireland died of disease and starvation, while another million or more were forced to migrate. The contrast between starvation at home and food being shipped from Irish harbours for export to England became central to how the disaster was understood. Many in Ireland and elsewhere believed the British bore responsibility for the famine; in this interpretation, responsibility seemed to exceed callous neglect and approach deliberate murder.

The famine also shaped the history recalled in the book’s account of Boston College. Founded by Jesuits in 1863 to educate children of poor immigrants who had fled the potato famine in Ireland, the university maintained close ties to the old country. Its John J. Burns Library, introduced as a repository of Irish political and cultural artefacts, thus stands within an institutional history formed partly by the migration the famine forced.

Political Memory and Hunger

The famine’s memory resurfaces during the hunger strike by Dolours Price and Marian Price at Brixton Prison. The book places their protest in a language already shaped by accounts of the famine: the sisters’ refusal of food recalled a history in which Irish people starved while food left the country for England. A widely circulated early tract described the famine as The Last Conquest of Ireland, framing it as part of a continuing history of domination rather than a disaster detached from politics.

This comparison became a way to reverse the meaning of hunger. In the book’s account, the Provisional Republican Movement’s holiday advertisement set images of abundant food against the claim that Dolours Price was dying. The juxtaposition made the strike legible through the famine’s remembered contrast between plenty and starvation, and turned the sisters’ condition into a public political argument.

The Body as a Political Weapon

Dolours Price understood prison as a test of an IRA volunteer’s allegiance and presented her willingness to die as continuous with the deaths of volunteers on the streets of Belfast. She invoked the prospect of being the first women to die on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, where Terence MacSwiney had also died, more than fifty years earlier. The possible repetition made the prison a site where past and present struggles could be compared, and where a new death might expose, in her view, an empire that had failed to learn from its earlier actions.

The government feared that a hunger striker’s death would bring massive retaliatory violence, but it did not meet the sisters’ demand to be repatriated to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland. Instead, officials force-fed Dolours Price. The book’s movement from famine memory to the confined body in Brixton makes hunger both a historical inheritance and an immediate contest over power: a means by which the British government had been accused of harming the Irish, now deliberately turned by the prisoner against her captors.