Great Britain responded to the 1798 Rebellion by extracting all organizational power from the nation that it could, causing a future “leadership deficit” whose harmful implications would be realized during the Famine when it was already much too late. His death would prove to be a haunting precursor to Ireland’s future history of crippled, sovereign heroes (notably, Charles Parnell in 1890 and Michael Collins in 1922).
“Cheating the Hangman’s Noose” Wolfe Tone committed suicide before he was sentenced to execution. What resulted was not only calamitous for the Irish population (30,000 is the number that Coogan who were “shot down or blown like chaff”) but also for its leadership. Like the Americans just twenty-five years before, the Irish rebelled against their oppressive authorities in 1798, under the flagship of the incomparable Theobald Wolfe Tone. To these readers Coogan pays special attention in characterizing the struggles of the 18 th century Irish natives, most of which were paupers, as a perennial uphill battle against British imperialism. Like any good historian, he endeavors to let the facts speak for themselves.įor many readers, Ireland’s colorful and in many ways tragic early history will be more or less unknown. Taylor’s declaration that “all Ireland was a Belsen,” or else defer from chronicling the grimmer details of the Famine and, in so doing, embrace what the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith called a “colonial cringe” mentality.Ĭoogan’s book, a pastiche of scintillating research, theory, and vitriol, contains more of the former class than the latter, and yet the author is careful to try and play fair and objective. His 2001 book “Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora” contains early seeds of Coogan’s interest-it is probable that the diaspora itself would not exist if the famine had not displaced so many of Ireland’s natives.īut the tragedy, Coogan writes in “The Famine Plot,” has heretofore been treated with a “strange reluctance” by historians who seem either to subscribe to A.J.P.
It’s no surprise that the famed Irish historian has at last settled himself upon the Blight as his next subject. Nowhere does one feel this pain more acutely then within the pages of Tim Pat Coogan’s most recent history “The Famine Plot,” which sets forth to describe “honestly, without either malice or cap touching, how forbears died.” “That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today,” the prime minister said. In 1996, Tony Blair issued the first apology on behalf of the British authorities for the part they played in Ireland’s 1846 through 1851 famine.
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