How, in a nation brimming with crops and surrounded on all sides
by teeming seas, could the Irish people have starved in their
millions in the middle of the 19th century? The answer,
according to noted Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan, is as
unsettling as it is direct. The biggest contributing factor to
the Great Irish Hunger was that because of conquest, Ireland was
a dependency with no government of its own between 1845 and
1852. It’s a dangerous and isolating scenario that Coogan
suggests may be playing out still. “As I wrote The Famine Plot I
got an increasingly bad feeling. The reason that most of what
occurred during the famine happened to the Irish was because we
didn’t have a government,” he told the Irish Voice during a
phone interview last week, not long after his highly publicized
visa battle with the U.S. Embassy in Dublin was settled. “We’re
back to that now. We have lost our sovereignty and are depending
on doles from Brussels, the IMF and so on. And we’re back to
unemployment, emigration and suic