Subjects Lacking Words? The Gray Zone of the Great Famine

In the time of Ireland’s Great Famine, poor people were, in places, so “reduced” that they treated each other with brutal callousness. Husbands abandoned wives and children. Mothers snatched food from the hands of infants. Neighbours stole each other’s rations. People even killed for food. And this callousness extended to the dead. Human bodies were dumped in mass graves or left unburied to be ravaged by dogs and pigs, rats, ravens, and gulls. There were reports too of cannibalism.

In later years, some people, who themselves suffered in the 1840s, were ashamed of having failed to offer human solidarity to others in distress. Yet if there were subjects lacking words - things difficult to describe or explain - those who had been to the abyss did talk of it. Survivors of other humanitarian crises have shown human beings to be remarkably resilient. And, in the case of Ireland, there is no basis for the insular notion that the Great Famine was “so deeply tragic as to be too traumatic to recall”.

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 many 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.

Author: Breandán Mac Suibhne

Format: Paperback

Size: 22.8 x 29.7 cm, 44 pages

Publisher: Quinnipiac University Press

ISBN: 9780997837476