THE GRAVES ARE WALKING: THE GREAT FAMINE AND THE SAGA OF THE
IRISH PEOPLE By John Kelly Henry Holt & Co., $32, 397 pages The
English have always had trouble deciding just how far the human
race extends beyond their own borders. Thus, after a terrorist
bomb took the lives of a pair of foreign visitors, Margaret
Thatcher angrily declared, “The IRA are indiscriminately killing
men, women and children and now they have killed two
Australians.” A similar attitude was embraced by early Victorian
Englishmen when the great potato famine struck John Bull’s other
island, Ireland, beginning in 1845: Something bad was happening
on a piece of imperial real estate to distinctly un-English
“others.” By the time the miserable cycle of blight, starvation,
disease and mass emigration was over, Ireland’s population had
shrunk by a third. In the words of Sir William Wilde, a
prominent Irish physician and humanitarian whose own son, Oscar,
left Ireland to pursue literary opportunities in England, what
remained was a population di