The Great Irish Famine: A Crime of Free Market Economics

Abstract

Writing in the Nation newspaper in the early summer of 1847, John Mitchel described a journey through Connaught. He and his companions arrived at a village where they had been hospitably received two years earlier: But why do we not see the smoke curling from those lowly chimneys? And surely we ought by this time to scent the well-known aroma of the turf-fires. But what…what reeking breath of hell is this oppressing the air, heavier and more loathsome than the smell of death rising from the fresh carnage of a battlefield. Oh misery! had we forgotten that this was the Famine Year? And we are here in the midst of those thousand Golgothas that border our island with a ring of death from Cork Harbour all round to Lough Foyle.

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