Legacy of The Great Irish Famine - Suggestions of Genocide

Suggestions of Genocide

A claim was made by a U.S. professor of law, Francis A. Boyle that the Famine was genocide by the British against the Irish, meaning that the famine was part of a deliberate policy of planned extermination. One U.S. historian, James Mullin, insists that what happened can be described as genocide, sometimes accusing other historians, statisticians and researchers who state otherwise of pushing a British point of view, or of revisionism, rewriting history to make excuses for British imperialism. However more U.S., British and Irish historians, such as Professors F.S.L. Lyons, John A. Murphy, Roy Foster, and James S. Donnelly, Jr, as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth Dudley Edwards and Cormac Ó Gráda have denied claims of a deliberate policy of genocide. All historians generally agree that British policies during the Famine (particularly those applied by the ministry of Lord John Russell) were misguided, ill-informed and counter-productive, and that had a similar crisis occurred in England instead of Ireland then the government's response would have been very different.

"Democide", a recently coined term, has been suggested to be more appropriate — referring to a deliberate policy of negligence rather of planned extermination. The famine killed one million Irish through hunger and related diseases such as cholera. A million others emigrated during the famine, with millions more following them in the following decades. The vast majority of these people were Roman Catholic, traditionally less inclined towards loyalty to the Crown.

While it could easily be said that the famine and its after-effects ended conclusively any chance of Ireland ever being a military or economic threat to Britain again, it should be also noted that the famine's long term demographic effects were less the result of deaths from starvation (which, as with most famines, affected the old, the very young and the sick disproportionately) and more the result of emigration (which affected the young population of reproductive age). It seems almost certain that economic factors alone would have caused considerable emigration from Ireland even without mass starvation, therefore it is a matter of conjecture as to what the population of Ireland would be today had there not been a famine in the 19th century.