He thoroughly deals with the different personalities who were in power at the time – he is kind to some such as Robert Peel and outright damning of others, such as the infamous Trevelyan. Above all it is the suffering that the Irish were subjected to that will occupy your thoughts long after finishing this book.

Their mud hut dwellings, the workhouses, the “work schemes”, the coffin ships and the horrendous slums the Irish fled to in America and beyond are all brought to life by Coogan’s pen. Coogan offers extensive and convincing evidence to support his claim.īehind the headline grabbing assertion that the famine was genocide Coogan hauntingly describes the horrendous conditions that some three million people lived in during that time. “Natural causes” would deal with the displaced millions.

A concerted policy to clear the land of peasants to allow “high farming” was behind the tragedy. The catastrophe of the Famine was not mismanagement, Coogan claims. It is certainly the conclusion Coogan himself reached. Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written, Coogan compiles a book of evidence which leads one to the conclusion that John Mitchel was right all those years ago. Revisionist historians went in with an agenda, he says, to disprove John Mitchel’s claim that “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine” rather than providing an accurate and honest history of the period and in particular Britain’s actions during this time.

The book is a welcome rebuttal of and polemic against revisionist histories of An Górta Mór. Tim Pat Coogan’s “The Famine Plot” offers us a valuable perspective on the Great Irish Famine. Why, in Ireland, a part of the richest empire in the world, did over three million people die or emigrate during the years 1845 – 1852 ?

The famine plot by tim pat coogan