“As far as the Famine goes,” declares Terry Eagleton, Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, “we are dealing with the most important episode of modern Irish history and the greatest social disaster of 19th-century Europe – an event with something of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack”. Talking to those whom the late, lamented Flann O’Brien described as the “plain people of Ireland”, one senses both a need to acknowledge the enormity of the 1845-52 calamity and a desire not to stir things up against Britain. Recently, when passing through Mulraney, a tiny, straggling community on the north shore of Clew Bay in County Mayo, I discussed the impact of the famine with a local hotel manager. Outgoing (even exuberant) when addressing other subjects, he was unusually reticent on the issue. I persisted, knowing that he had lost many ancestors in 1847 and 1848 He had little to say.

But later, he sent me a book, dog-eared and yellowing, and printed on cheap paper.
Written in 1957, it was called Annla Beaga Phariste Bhuiris Umhaill, (A Short Account of the History of Burrishoole Parish). The chapter headed “The Famine” said: “We have very little documentary evidence of the sufferings of our people in that hour of darkest tragedy. But the old people of fifty years ago who had seen the horrible thing with their own eyes have told us harrowing tales. They have told us of men and women and children dying by the roadside, their mouths green from the nettles and grass they had eaten in their overpowering hunger; of others dropping dead after partaking of a meal of porridge which proved too much for stomachs long without food; of women carrying their dead husbands on their backs to the graveyards; of others, too weak themselves to carry their dead, burying their beloved ones somewhere near home.

Dead vagrants, and they were many, were buried simply by pulling the sod fence down over them to cover them where they had died. Not one woman, but many, ill with fever, took the body of her husband who had died in the bed beside her of the same fever and buried it in the cabin floor. Then she, too, lay down to die.”All over the parish the graves of the famine victims are scattered, sometimes in single graves, now and then several together. How many lie buried in the strand at Mulraney we could not count Who they were God alone knows. There they rest, the fever of life over, the ebbing and flowing tides ever murmuring their requiem.”The “strand” referred to is a beach; a golden hem to a skirt of green clothing hills that rise above a bay of stunning beauty. Modern bungalows perch above the road which follows the shore. During the day, sheep descend from the hills, cross the road and nibble short, tough grasses between the road and the beach.

In early evening they return to their rocky mountain pasture, often when Clew Bay, and its hundreds of islands and its promontories, are turned red by the setting sun. I have observed this wonderful scene on numerous occasions, but after reading the parish history I cannot walk on Mulraney strand without feeling the kind of great emptiness that one experiences on traversing a wasteland.Before the famine, the population of Burrishoole was more than 12,000 In 1850, it was 4,000 The number of families had dropped from 2,700 to 890 Most had succumbed to starvation, typhus and cholera Many had been evicted. The parish history says: “Lord Sligo flung some 40 families on the roadside in Treenbeg and Treenlar and thereby created his Treenlar Farm .. Sir Richard O’Donnell was also active. He declared he would not leave a Catholic between Knocknabola bridge and the river of NewportTHE GREAT FAMINE of the 1840s is one of the most significant divides in modern Irish history. To commemorate it carries significant risks, particularly at the present, delicate moment.

It is easy to see why Irish folk memory carries the 1845-52 calamity down the turnpike of legend in a bulging sack labelled “British perfidy”; that memory includes the accusation that the British government acted too late to save hundreds of thousands dead and dying on the roadsides. For a couple of generations it has at least stayed in the sack. Why let it out again?That is a question that has been worrying many of those in Ireland charged with furthering a lasting settlement of what British governments have chosen to call the “Irish problem”. One senses a certain disquiet in Dublin, where a special committee was set up last year in the office of the Taoiseach (prime minister) to explore appropriate ways of commemorating the famine. So far, the exploration had resulted in a single decision: to postpone the commemoration to 1997.The reason given to inquirers seems understandable. As someone close to the committee (who declines to be identified) said, “The big event in 1845 was not famine, but the potato blight that caused the famine The actual starvation started in 1846.