A haunting and terrible look at Ireland's Great Famine

Sculptor Rowan Gillespie's Famine Memorial in Dublin portrays the misery of the afflicted. (Image: Depositphotos)

Sun, 16 Mar 2025

By Crawford GribbenThere are few events in Irish history as evocative or politically potent as the Great Famine. The blight that destroyed potato crops in the late 1840s reduced the island’s population by almost one-quarter.For nearly two centuries, historians with an Irish-nationalist bent have explained this horror – not without reason – in terms of the indifference and brutality of successive British governments. But reality, as Padraic X. Scanlan shows in Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine, is much more...

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