The Tragedy Ireland Repressed

I reland produces nearly endless literature and poetry about its history, even its darkest moments. The Troubles, one of the worst recent campaigns of paramilitary terror in the Western world, has been turned into a kind of tourist attraction in Northern Ireland. Ireland produces endless films about repressive Catholicism and tear-jerkers about emigration. Novels about isolation abound, along with short stories by authors like William Trevor about rural alienation. Yet, the greatest tragedy of Irish history is almost never addressed in the Irish arts.

Over 30 years ago, Irish commentator John Waters wrote that the Irish Potato Famine — known there as “the great hunger” — was “like so many other matters of importance in Irish life, subjected to a peculiar collective repression.”

The novelist Colm Tóibín, building on Waters’s observation, wrote that ultimately it was not horror for the dead, but the shame of survivors that powered this repression. “An entire class of Irish Catholics survived the Famine; many, indeed, improved their prospects as a result of it,” he wrote, “and this legacy may be more difficult for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated.”

Waters’s theory for this repression was that this discomfit was due to fissures in Irish society. On the one hand, there was Ireland’s cultural and political leadership class — which he dubbed “Dublin 4,” naming one of the wealthier suburbs in Dublin. They could not deal honestly with the whole story of the famine because the divisions of class and land, and the role of Irish Catholics, would upset a nationalist narrative of simple English villainy. Then there was rural Ireland, which carried the memory of the famine but in the silence of national shame and trauma. Somehow this enormity was too large to contemplate.

And yet, the legacy of the famine still looms over Irish life. Ireland is the only country on Planet Earth that is less populated in 2026 than it was in 1826. Of a population of 8 or so million, 1 million died in the famine. Another million emigrated. And in the decades afterward, that pattern of migration was followed by millions more.

I give this all as background because I recently sat through two films made in the last decade that are set in the famine. The first, Black ’47, was directed by Lance Daly in 2018. It starred James Frecheville as Martin Feeney, a deserter returning to Connemara from his service “for the king’s shilling” in Afghanistan.

The film sits firmly in the genre of Western revenge films. Feeney means to bring a higher law of decency to the landlords, the collaborators, and other constabulary men who are driving peasants out of their homes for rents unpaid, or otherwise exploiting the tragedy. In one deeply satisfying scene, he turns the tables on a judge who has condemned an Irish-speaking man to Van Dieman’s Land, and explains, “Ní Béarla teanga na cúirte seo,” or “English is not the language of this court.” The film presents cartoonishly evil foes who deserve this comeuppance. I found myself taken out of it by the absurdly framed “Souper” scene in which Protestant missionaries coaxed Catholics to renounce their faith in exchange for soup. This does capture, but dimly, the zealotry of historical villains like Hyacinth D’Arcy. But the larger story is that the British government did try to bring relief soup to Ireland. It simply brought too little, and it was too nutritionally deficient to stem the full tide of death. Quakers as well provided philanthropic meals with no conditions attached. The moral valence of the film is entirely with those who suffer; Feeney is their vengeance upon the whole establishment.

Although it is set in the same bewildering Connacht landscapes, the film Arracht (2019) doesn’t offer easy satisfactions. The film is directed with austere realism by Tomás Ó Súilleabháin. Almost entirely in the Irish language, it features Dónall Ó Héalaí as Colmán Sharkey, a contented husband, father, and peasant farmer who appeals with reason to his landlord on behalf of his neighbors. But his own trusting kindness is turned against him just as the famine is starting to settle in his region. And soon, like the biblical figure Job, he is stripped of everything that gave his life meaning, his reputation unjustly transformed into that of a murderer. He finds meaning in providing what little shelter and fish he can to an orphan, while hiding along the cliffs and caves of the shore.

Arracht (listed as Monster on Apple’s iTunes store in America) portrays unflinchingly the awful choice faced by Irish people in such extreme privation. The moral will to survive requires a life of meaning that only caring relationships can supply. And yet scarce resources can only feed so many dependents. Arracht’s film resolves the moral dilemma of the famine. What Irish people did, or didn’t do, for one another in this half-decade wave of death was not entirely their own fault. Their ancestors were dispossessed. Their landlords pressured them into overreliance on one crop. “Why did this happen to us?” a young hungry girl asks. Colmán replies: “It didn’t happen to us — this was done to us.”