Notice to Quit: The Great Irish Famine Evictions by Perry Curtis, Jr (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 44pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-6-0

Death in Every Paragraph: Journalism & the Great Irish Famine by Michael Foley (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 48pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-5-3

I mBeal an Bhais: The Great Famine and the Language Shift in Nineteenth-Century Ireland by Gearoid O Tuathaigh (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 52pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-7-7

Black Roads: The Famine in Irish Literature by Robert Smart (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 44pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-4-6

Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University publishes Famine Folios, a unique resource for students, scholars and researchers, as well as general readers, covering aspects of the Famine in Ireland from 1845-1852, the worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe.  The essays are interdisciplinary in nature and make available new research in Famine Studies by internationally established scholars in history, art history, cultural theory, philosophy, media history, political economy, literature and music. This publication initiative is devised to augment the Museum experience and is part of the Museum’s commitment to making its collection accessible to audiences of all ages and levels of educational interest. The booklets are produced to the highest level, beautifully illustrated with works from the Museum and related collections. It ensures that audiences have access to the latest scholarship as it pertains to both the historical and contemporary dimensions of the collection.

The catastrophe of Great Irish Famine of 1845-51 is a major watershed in Irish history, with a decisive impact on many aspects of Irish demographic, economic, social and political history. During the peak years of the Famine at least 750,000 men, women, and children died from either starvation or disease. At the same time roughly 350,000 individuals were driven out of their dwellings. Overall the population of Ireland fell from some 8.5 million people in 1845 to around 6.5 million in 1851. This ominous drain of humanity continued at a slower rate well into the twentieth century. It played a crucial role in shaping the memory and identity of the Irish diaspora, notably in north America and Britain. It is also credited with effecting enduring changes in Irish cultural life. 

Whereas nature could be blamed for the lethal effects of acute hunger or malnutrition, human agency caused much of this devastating loss owing to mass evictions of the poorest tenants and squatters after the agent or bailiff had served them with the dreaded notice to quit. Notice to Quit: The Great Irish Famine Evictions provides a context for these evictions by focussing on the ideological and economic factors as well as the role of religious and racial prejudice in prompting owners to rid their estates of what was known as a ‘surplus population.’ Landlords sought to avoid insolvency by expelling these pauperised peasants consolidating their small holdings into larger farms that were rented to solvent tenants. Whether or not the victims of eviction received private or public assistance to emigrate overseas, the results of these clearances were much the same. Thousands of acres were converted to pasture in parts of Munster and Connaught and small villages or clachans were abandoned. Only the skeletal remains of stone cottages remained - some of which can still be seen today.

Whether the Great Famine had occurred or not, newspapers would still have gone through massive changes in the nineteenth century, precipitated by industrialisation and urbanisation. Death in Every Paragraph: Journalism & the Great Irish Famine looks at the ways Irish journalists told the story of unparalleled horror and how this conditioned the evolution of journalism, not alone in Ireland, but abroad. The scale and complexity of the catastrophe forced journalists to find new ways of reporting news including the narration of the stories of ordinary people, rather than just reporting the speeches of important men. Whatever the political perspective of the journalist, the ideologies of his readers had to be taken into account, requiring him to develop new writing skills--forensic, contextual and emotional--that explained the Famine to the rest of the world. The stories that appeared in local Irish newspapers were often reprinted not only in the newspapers of Dublin, but in London and other major cities and in countries, such as America and Australia, where there were significant Irish populations. It was the work of journalists that attracted other journalists from around the world who wanted to see for themselves how such a calamity could take place so close to the centre of the world’s greatest empire. How the Famine was reported by the press established many of the norms in disaster coverage today.

One of the most profound cultural changes in modern Irish history has been the replacement of Irish by English as the main vernacular of the general population in the centuries since the conquest of Ireland in the sixteenth century.    

I mBeal an Bhais: The Great Famine and the Language Shift in Nineteenth-Century Ireland provides a succinct discussion of a complex story and the massive impact of the Famine (mortality and emigration) on the later phase of this language change demands precise analysis. Based on the author’s own work and taking account of recent studies of the language change, this essay examines closely explanations and interpretations of this change of vernacular--over the long term and in its nineteenth-century setting--with a firm focus on the role of the Great Famine in this episode of fundamental cultural transformation.

The Great Hunger was the most gothic event in Ireland’s history and has haunted Irish literature ever since, the subject of Black Roads: The Famine in Irish Literature. In the struggle to resist the diminishment of this tragic episode in Ireland’s colonial history, Irish Gothic writers preserved the memory of the Famine when a general silence prevailed among historians and authors of the Victorian novel. Both Irish Gothic literature and the work of the modernists, especially (Joyce, Yeats and Beckett, resonate with the cultural memory of the suffering of millions, either lying in unmarked graves or forcibly transplanted to a harsh new world. Black Roads traces the impact of the Famine on Irish literature from William Carlton’s The Black Prophet (from which the title is taken) to more contemporary work by authors like Patrick McCabe, Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland, and playwrights like Tom Murphy, Conor MacPherson and Marina Carr. Post Famine, Black Roads argues, all Irish literature is about the Famine, leaving the discussion about what ‘Irishness’ means centred on what Seamus Deane described as ‘what the Famine means.’

These essays, replete with excellent illustrations, are well-written and contain the most recent research on the Famine and point to new ways of looking at the central event in nineteen century Ireland.