A million dead. Over a million emigrants. A population that has never recovered to its level before the disaster.

The Irish starved while the British government stood back and decided to let the market solve the problem for it. Or even to allow what it saw as God’s will to work itself out. The legacy is a deep well of bitterness against Britain.

With the descendants of the emigrants in the United States outnumbering the Irish population by nearly six times, it’s not surprising that the bitterness is particularly strong there. Which, while it doesn’t make my experience of living through a terrorist campaign any pleasanter, does perhaps at least explain why it was funded from across the Atlantic.

Illustration: The Irish Famine: scene at the gate of the work-house. Public Domain

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License