After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Great Famine: Ireland’s Darkest Chapter (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

One million people died. Two million emigrated. The Great Irish Famine was the world turned upside down. The darkest chapter in Ireland's past.It is not solely Ireland's history to bear. This is a piece of British history as well, one which needs to be faced. What really happened in the Great Irish Famine?Written by Anthony Delaney with special guest Professor Christine Kinealy, Director of Ireland's Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Charlotte Long and Freddy Chick.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome to True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Something out of the dark that's appeared in love. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? Vengeance felt good. Seeing these people pay for what they've done felt righteous. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to After Dark.

I'm Maddy. And I'm Anthony. This is a special episode of After Dark. Today and next week, Anthony will be telling us the story of one of the darkest pieces of history. This episode was inspired by an email that we got from one of our listeners, 12-year-old Charlotte from Ireland. She wrote in to us and said, I'm age 12 and in school we learned about the Great Irish Famine. Now, I know quite a lot about the cause of the famine and the outcome, but I'm curious as to

what Queen Victoria was doing and thinking during that terrible time that caused so many deaths. You could even just talk about the misdeeds happening at the time. I'm from Ireland like Antony, so that is why I thought this one might be a good one for After Dark. Thank you, Charlotte, so much for your message. It's really got us talking, really got us thinking about this topic and how we wanted to tackle it here on the show. When we started to discuss this particular history, I realised that I, as someone who grew up in England, went to school in England, know very little about it beyond the little that I've read or seen in TV documentaries. And so we decided that for this episode, I'm going to sit back and hear what Anthony has to say about a history that he's far more familiar with

and is going to share with us now. So with that in mind, I am going to be joined by Professor Christine Keneally, and we are going to talk about The Great Famine, Ireland's darkest chapter. The land betrayed us, the British government having violently dishonoured us, and God, despite our anguished pleas and blind devotion, deserted us. If hearing this unsettles you and ignites in you the indignant rage of rebuttal, pause and listen. If this history forces you to look into the haunted faces of a starving past, then I defy you to hold our gaze. See the green smear of eaten grass across our mouths, the black, lifeless eyes sunk into our faces, the rags hanging from our skeletal frames.

Now inhale the stench of death that fills the air. We are Ireland. This is our history. But it is yours too. We hand it back now without ceremony. Face it bravely. In 1847, Nicholas Cummins, a magistrate from County Cork in the west of Ireland, surveyed the starvation around him.

His report was bound for the Irish-born hero of the Napoleonic Wars, Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, better known, perhaps, as the Duke of Wellington. Despite his illustrious career, Wellington had now retired from military and political life, having served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice. Cummins recorded, having served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice. Cummins recorded, I entered some of the hovels and scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of.

In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their soul covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about naked above the knees. I approached with horror and found by a low moaning they were alive. They were in fever, four children, a woman, and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at

least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe, suffering either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain. and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain. Cummins' observations emerge in 1847, what has become known in Irish history as Black 47, the worst year of the Great Hunger in Ireland. It demonstrates that humanity had fled these isles in the face of catastrophe,

and that life and death had become one and the same. But no tragedy occurs in a vacuum. What were the events that unfolded before 1847 that led Nicholas Cummins to record such harrowing, haunting scenes? And how do we reckon with this difficult history today? Over the next two episodes, the After Dark team will grapple with these questions in the hope of shining some light in a particularly dark corner of the past. Be warned, however, the ghosts of this history still walk among us today, keening for a lost generation who can never truly be laid to rest. At the dawn of what was to become the Great Irish Famine in 1845, a famine that would last until 1852, a troubled Anglo-Irish union had been in place for approximately 45 years.

Before that, Ireland had been under some form of English, latterly British, control for centuries. tell this history is Professor Christine Keneally, a writer, historian and founder of Ireland's Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, United States. Welcome, Christine, and thank you for joining us today. Thank you. It's great to be here. Paint us a picture, Christine, of the relationship between Britain and Ireland prior to the 19th century. How do we come to this position and what are the dynamics and the tensions, I suppose, in the lead up to the 19th century. How do we come to this position and what are the dynamics and the tensions, I suppose, in the lead up to the 19th century? It's a very long, complicated history and it really begins in the 12th century when, as a result of conflict between some kings in Ireland, British involvement, English involvement really, was invited over. And the king at the time was

Henry II, who actually already had ambitions towards having a foot in Ireland. He had asked the Pope for permission to invade Ireland and had received it. But he sent one of his warriors, very fierce warrior called Strongbow, over to Ireland to help the King Dermot regain his throne in the area we now call Wexford. And from that point onwards, we call 1169, England had a foothold in Ireland. And of course, they weren't content to stay in the Wexford area. They gradually and very quickly, in fact, spread out. The English came not as people wanting to assimilate, but as conquerors. They saw themselves as separate from and superior to the native Irish.

Gradually, their control spread. There were periods of resistance to their control, of course. There were periods where relationships were amicable between the native Irish and the settling English. Sometimes the settler English retreated. And at one point in the 15th century... They were confined to the area around what we call now Dublin, and in order to control it, they built what was called a pale,

composed of palisades or fences around that area. And Irish, native Irish, were not allowed to live, trade, or come inside that area. And that gave rise to the phrase, beyond the pale. But really, in that phrase, it sums up how the native Irish in their own land were viewed very much as second-class citizens. At the dawn of the 19th century, the 1801 Act of Union united the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. It was speculated that this union would settle some of the rebellious unrest that had occurred across Ireland in 1798, when the United Irishmen and their supporters sought to create a new democracy for the Irish. They were inspired by revolutions

in the British colonies in America and, closer to home, in France. Nonetheless, these uprisings had ultimately failed. Besides settling on rest, the British, under William Pitt the Younger, believed the union would also ensure the joint prosperity of both kingdoms. By the 19th century, the political situation and the relationship between Ireland and Britain had changed again, largely as a result of the failed 1798 rebellion. in Britain had changed again, largely as a result of the failed 1798 rebellion. And one of the consequences of that rebellion was that Ireland was forced to vote its own parliament out of existence, something that was pretty unique in history. And instead, after 1800, Ireland was governed directly by the Westminster Parliament in London. By the beginning of the famine in 1845,

the power imbalance between the two countries had widened. Britain had grown incrementally richer and mightier, while Ireland was drawn into a steady socioeconomic decline. For example, the everyday foodstuffs that had graced the plates of the working poor in Georgian Ireland disappeared from their Victorian descendants' plates. Milk was now sacrificed. It had become too expensive and was substituted for bull's milk, a concoction made from oats and water.

Fish, butter, eggs and milk had also become luxuries, as more and more families were unable to afford them. As a result, two-thirds of the Irish population, which stood at somewhere around 8.2 million at this time, subsisted on the potato as the main part of their diet. It was, after all, readily available, cheap to produce and harvest, and provided a somewhat nutritious basis for a peasant diet. The saying went, potatoes in the morning, potatoes at night, and if I got up at midnight it would still be potatoes. Potatoes were not native to Ireland. We think they were introduced in the late 16th century, possibly by Sir Walter Raleigh, who had estates in Galway. And initially they were just

an extra food, a food for middle classes, but they were very well suited to the Irish climate and to Irish conditions. Potatoes very hardy, they can grow anywhere. The west of Ireland is very rocky with very poor soil, so they were particularly suited to poor areas where land had been subdivided. And also, and this is the key thing, they're extremely nutritious, especially if you eat them with their jackets on, their skins on, which Irish people did. But in order to get the nutrition, you have to eat large numbers. And we know by the 1840s, Irish people, about 40% of the population were eating an equivalent of about 12 pounds of potatoes, maybe 70 potatoes with their skins on every day. It's an incredible

number. And they ate them for every meal. And they ate them in a really creative way because they put seaweed on to flavour them. And seaweed is also a great fertiliser. They put organic, natural garlic on them. So potatoes were the mainstay of 40% of the Irish people by the 1840s. Of course, sometimes it's very easy for that to become cartoonish, almost, this Irish relationship with the potato. But really what we're working with here is a result of poverty, right? It's essentially what most people can afford. Yeah. Irish people didn't eat potatoes because they were lazy or stupid. Going back to centuries of colonisation, dispossession, marginalisation, they were left with very few

choices. And as we know, especially in the west of Ireland, where the population is very dense, the land is of poor quality. And so potatoes were a really good choice. And in many ways, they were a superfood because they were so nutritious. And one fact we know that people don't really think of, that Irish people before the famine were probably the tallest people in the world. One important final point needs to be addressed here. And that is the fact that the land that yielded this vital crop, though Irish, was not, in the main, owned by the Irish at all. Ireland under the Empire meant that predominantly British landowners owned and let their Irish acres to Irish tenant farmers, rather than looking after

the land themselves. In this way, unlike in England, say, these landowners had little or no interest in the plight and pleasures of their tenants, so long as their rents were collected. This, then, was the social, political, agricultural and economic backdrop against which the Dublin Evening Post in 1845 printed an ominous article only months before the outbreak of the potato blight in Ireland. The newspaper interviewed the chief curator of the National Botanic Gardens in Ireland's capital city, one Mr David Moore. Moore warned of the havoc a mysterious tuber disease was wreaking across Europe, most recently in Flanders in Belgium. It was, Mr Moore warned, a most alarming disease and if it made its way to Ireland's shores it would mean the end of Ireland as they knew it. It was, Mr Moore warned, a most alarming disease,

and if it made its way to Ireland's shores, it would mean the end of Ireland as they knew it. This alarming disease was known to Moore and other experts like him as Phytophotora infestans, a late blight fungus that decimated whole potato yields. By the late autumn and early winter of 1845, the smell of decay in the air was unmistakable. The blight had arrived, and devastation the likes of which Ireland had never witnessed before would soon follow. So the potato blight had spread throughout Europe, and it came to Ireland late in the season. About 40% of the crop was destroyed. People didn't know what the disease was. So it was crop was destroyed. People didn't know what the disease was. So it was a new disease. People didn't know what the antidote was. The British government

appointed various scientific commissions who came up with wacky ideas, but none of them were successful. September 1845. Across certain counties in the east and southeast of Ireland, a terrible stench fills the air. Farmers begin to notice fresh white spots appearing on the leaves of their most recent potato crops. Soon, the stalks of their plants wither and die. Then, within 24 hours of these initial signs, the tubers below ground would rot beyond consumption. Farmers grabbed at the remnants of their yield as the potato turned to brown mucus in their very hands

and slipped through their fingers, sliding back to the sodden earth. By the 17th of September, 1845, the Gardiner's Chronicle announced, With very great regret, that the potato moraine has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. By late October, the blight had taken hold across the whole island. A farmer from County Kerry wrote to his children in America about the mood of the country and the fate that now seemed more and more likely. Within the last few days, the greatest alarm prevails throughout the kingdom.

A disease has seized the potato crop. They are now rotten in the ground. The newspapers teem with alarming accounts of the same disease throughout the kingdom. It is dreaded that nothing less than a famine must prevail. This social anxiety turns to political and civil unrest across the country, as desperate Irish men and women willed the government in London to ready sufficient emergency plans and distribute aid. So-called monster meetings were held across the country, meetings organised for large attendance in the open air to place pressure on

the government. In County Tipperary, Daniel O'Connell, a political leader acting on behalf of the Irish Catholic majority, decried the union between the kingdoms, which, he observed, meant nothing to the Irish. England has given us ignorance, bigotry, starvation and rags, has given us ignorance, bigotry, starvation and rags, he declared. In response, the British administration under Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel authorised the import of corn maize from the United States. But when the Liberal PM John Russell assumed power in 1846, he adopted what historians often refer to as a laissez-faire approach to relief in Ireland. It was Russell who advanced the idea that Ireland ought to rely on itself for salvation. He came in on a minority government and he promised cheap government.

He also knew he'd be facing a general election in 1847. And so he was very cautious in the way he approached Ireland. In some ways, Ireland was sacrificed to his own political ambitions. How do we go from crop failure to famine? What is the link there? Or is it as simple as multiple crop failure, basically? multiple crop failure, basically. So when the potato failed in 1845, people would have made their meals stretch for longer, not used as many potatoes. The pig that people either owned or shared in common, they might have sold it, they might have slaughtered it, they might have pulled their fishing tackle, but people would have eked out their resources in order to survive.

Again, believing this would be unpleasant, but short term. What people in Ireland hadn't realised is that this awful disease would return again in 1846. And I think at this point, there would have been panic. It's just devastating. It really is devastating. How do you exist? And it really became a famine of biblical proportions in that the potato blight reappeared 1845, 1846, 1847, 1848, 1849, 1850 and 1851. The resilience of the Irish people was not sufficient to save them.

They needed help and they needed help from their government, which was based in London. Thank you. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. As 1846 progressed, the acute pain of hunger spread in much the same pattern as the preceding blight. That January, Ireland had experienced the coldest winter it had seen in 100 years. Snow and ice covered the ground until the spring.

Without having gone through a famine, I think we can't even imagine what it's like. And some of our eyewitness accounts say we don't have the language to describe how awful it is. It's just beyond everything. Because the process of famine in the body is very painful. It's slow. It's destructive. The people's organs start to break down. And so people go blind. Their stomachs get distended, they grow facial hair, they're listless.

And again, people who witnessed what was going on in Ireland say that they never felt they would be the same again. As we grazed the fields for blades of grass, ships continued to depart from the east coast of Ireland full of grain and other produce bound for London. Britain, it transpired, was continuing to export nearly 770,000 pounds of Irish grain from Ireland each week in order to feed the people in Britain. One parish priest, James McEnvoy, watched the carts roll through his parish in County Meath, bound for the docks at Liverpool, Plymouth and elsewhere. He lamented,

Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to sustain existence is far and away paramount to every right property confers. The landowners, McEnvoy justly complained, may own the land, but the very people of the land from the land were being sidelined so that the landowning classes could continue to line their pockets. Think what 770,000 pounds of grain each week might have meant to the people of McEnvoy's parish and the hundreds of parishes across Ireland. In Galway, posters appeared on the walls of the city demanding a stop to the export of food from Ireland. They stated that merchant stores will be broken up by the people

if any further exploitation of corn were attempted. In response, though, the British sent warships and dragoons to curtail the unrest in poor towns and cities, saying only, we are confident that all true Irishmen will exert themselves and never let it be said that in Ireland the inhabitants lacked courage to meet difficulties against which other nations are successfully struggling. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the merchant class in Ireland at this time, many of whom, if I understand correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong here, many of whom were Irish. Some of those merchants were Irish. And we also know

that some merchants, especially in the local, more remote areas, withheld food from the people so that prices would artificially rise. So again, it's a complex story. It's not simply all the English were bad and all the Irish were good. There were people in Ireland who came to the help of the starving poor, but there were also people in Ireland who benefited both by getting large profits or by, after the famine, buying land very, very cheaply and becoming landlords themselves. Near the outbreak of the famine, Daniel O'Connell, the Irish political leader, informed the British that they had claimed 200,000 head of livestock,

two million quarters of grain and hundreds of millions of pounds of flour from their Irish dominions, as the Irish themselves starved. In simple terms, O'Connell argued, if this Irish produce had been kept in Ireland and offered to the Irish at reasonable rates, it may have curbed the ever-growing hunger. The British government were approached, actually as early as 184545 by a committee based in the Mansion House in Dublin, headed by Daniel O'Connell, who asked that the ports be closed so that food could stay in Ireland. And this request was repeated throughout the famine. This had been done before, so it was not something that was unprecedented in Ireland.

But at this stage, the British government was very much enthralled to the idea of laissez-faire, non-intervention, and they refused to do anything. And there is actually a memo from a leading member of the British government saying, it's very hard to see people starve while merchants are making profits of at least 50%. An abundance of unity and fairness was not something the union between Britain and Ireland could boast. That much is already clear. But there was more to come. The starving Irish were not afforded the same poor relief that their union counterparts in England were entitled to, for instance. In times of crisis, the English poor could avail of what had been termed outdoor relief. This outdoor relief entitled English subjects to various

forms of social welfare and assistance. This might be obtained in the form of money, food, clothing, or other goods to alleviate their suffering without the need for them to enter the confines of a workhouse. The Irish, however, were not granted this assistance. Instead, their poor law system relied on a chain of about 130 workhouses across the country, with approximately 100,000 beds between them, epically short of the need in a country where now approximately 5.5 million people faced acute starvation. To enter a workhouse was, for some in Ireland, an extreme humiliation. And of course, even those who wished to avail of the workhouse might not be granted admittance, given their limited capacity.

So instead, the people of Ireland wandered the land like spectres. We know all this from accounts. The earthing they talk about is the absolute silence of the countryside. Because people, if they could, they would eat birds, they'd eat frogs, they'd eat whatever they could get their hands on. And so there was a silence that descended on the countryside. Dogs, we know that dogs were starving as well. Pigs were starving.

We know that people who themselves were starving were too weak to resist when they were literally eaten alive by dogs and by pigs and by rats. So again, it was the world turned upside down. Further outlets of relief fell to the landed gentry, who were expected to contribute significantly towards the employment of, and food schemes for, the people living on their lands in times of dire need. For example, Catherine Connolly, mistress of Castletown House, had employed the men

of Selbridge to complete the Connolly Folly during the famine of 1740-1741, at a cost of £ pounds. However, by 1846, this philanthropic action was, in practice, rarely used as a form of meaningful relief. As Gustave de Beaumont, a French magistrate and social reformer travelling in Ireland, observed, The Irish landlord, though he touches the soil, rarely takes root in it. Ireland is not the country to which he believes that his cares and sacrifices are due. But if the gentry in Ireland did not respond to the unfolding crisis as they ought to have had, news of conditions in Ireland continued to spread across the globe, particularly in Britain and America. People throughout the world were very quickly aware of what was happening in Ireland,

especially in the wake of the second potato failure in 1846. And newspaper coverage, similar to today, followed sort of ideologically political patterns. The most influential newspaper of the day in Britain was The Times, The most influential newspaper of the day in Britain was The Times, and they tended to be Protestant and conservative and pretty anti-Irish. So many of the reports they published were saying the government shouldn't intervene too much. And as usual, reports from Ireland are exaggerated. It isn't that bad. isn't that bad. In contrast to that, if we go to the Illustrated London News, which, as its name suggests, actually did have illustrations, they were sympathetic to the Irish for the most part. They actually commissioned an Irish artist, James Mahoney. He drew images of what he saw. He actually spoke to people who were suffering. And when people think of the famine, there's a very

famous image of Bridget O'Donnell and her two children. That is actually a painting or a drawing by James Mahoney. He spoke with Bridget and he knew she'd been evicted. She was pregnant. She lost her baby. And after she was forced out of her home, she went to live under a bridge in Doolan. And at that point, the story ends and she probably died. Doolan. And at that point, the story ends and she probably died. Given the state of national emergency across the island of Ireland,

many on both sides of the Irish Sea now pressed for a system of outdoor relief, like the one in England, to be instigated across Ireland. However, the British Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, was utterly baffled by the call for parity within the Union. The Irish must not be treated as the English were, he and his political allies believed, for the Irish tended to be a lazy and wanton nation. If Britain offered in her benevolence outdoor relief in Ireland, then Ireland would never stir herself again, never recover and consistently return cap in hand, to England. Likewise, British authorities believed that the landowning classes couldn't possibly be expected to provide significant poor relief to their tenants. If they did, how could they then fund

the significant agricultural modernisation that was needed in Ireland, which they were also expected to undertake, but had not. No. The situation was unfortunate, but the Irish would just have to figure this out for themselves. After all, in the eyes of the Duke of Cambridge, uncle to Queen Victoria, no less, things in Ireland weren't all that bad. He observed that Ireland was in a speech recorded by The Nation on the 24th of January 1846, advised that the Irish consider eating for this would afford them a After all, he added in sprightly, nonchalant manner, Irishmen can live on anything.

The British government had no control over the appearance of blight or the reappearance of blight. What they could have done is intervened earlier. They could have intervened more generously. They could have intervened by providing food, medicine. The British government, for a period of six years maybe, could and should have intervened to help the Irish people. They chose not to do so for a mixture of ideological, political, economic and cultural reasons. And so instead they allowed over 1 million people to starve in the most painful of ways, and almost 2 million people to emigrate. What was the drive behind this laissez-faire attitude towards helping the Irish? Do you

think? Is it impossible to categorise? So laissez-faire, I think, is a very convenient term that was used at the time for non-intervention. But again, when we look at the British government in a wider context, the British government in Ireland was the most interventionist government in the world. It's intervened in education, in poor law, in all sorts of ways. It's also intervened more broadly in economics. If you've heard the navigation laws, they intervened in that way. If you've heard of the opium wars, when the British government intervened to force people in China to take opium they didn't want. So the British government intervened in a way to suit

itself, but also to suit itself, they would use the phrase laissez-faire when they didn't want to intervene. There's also an idea that if we come to Ireland's rescue this time, famines will just come again and again and again. We're just creating a culture of dependency, so we shouldn't intervene too much. So it was a whole complex raft of reasons that really showed that the Irish people, the Irish poor, were expendable. Alongside this striking coldness, were expendable. Alongside this striking coldness, select Protestant spiritual leaders across Ireland and Britain saw the visitation of the Blight in Ireland as divine intervention from God to punish the Irish for their belligerent commitment to Catholicism. And unfortunately the people who governed relief provision who were based in London, both politicians and civil servants. Many of the

leading members of that group were Protestant evangelicals who firmly believed that the famine was a punishment of God. So religion really fed into attitudes of Catholics being subversive because they were only ever loyal to the Pope, superstitious and disloyal. And then we know that the famine was used as an opportunity to proselytise. Some, again, evangelical Protestant groups came to Ireland during the famine with, as we say, a bowl of rice in one hand or a bowl of soup in one hand and a Bible in the other. And people who accepted that, who changed religion, were known in Ireland as supers. accepted that, who changed religion, were known in Ireland as supers. And in the post-famine years, there was no greater disgrace, unfortunately, than to have been a super.

Given the official dithering, relief came from many individual groups within and outside of Ireland. Irish Quakers, for instance, set up multiple soup kitchens across the country through which they attempted to feed the Irish people. More remarkable, perhaps, was the $8,000, approximately £25,000 today, which was sent to Ireland by the Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation from their native territory in modern-day Oklahoma. These indigenous tribes had felt the effects of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which had deprived them of their lands to make way for white settlers. They knew what it was to be displaced. One of the uplifting positive aspects of the famine is that when people

started to read accounts of what was happening, spontaneous international fundraising initiative got underway. And it's really incredible. And one of the first places actually to send money to Ireland was Calcutta in India. And initially it was English civil servants, but then it spread to the native Indians who sympathised with what was happening in Ireland and they sent money. But by 1847, money donations were coming from all over the world. To me, the most impressive donations come from people who, again, themselves were marginalised, impoverished and stereotyped as being uncivilised. And in that group were a lot of Native Americans. The Choctaws gave, which has been widely acknowledged in Ireland, but the Cherokees also gave donations to Ireland.

These donations came from people who had no direct connection with Ireland. And one of the things that seems to connect them is they talk about humanity and coming to the aid of their fellow human beings. So it's a really moving story. This generosity has never been forgotten by the Irish people or her government. Today, scholarships are provided to Choctaw students that they might come and study in Ireland. And when, in 2020, an online fundraiser was set up to help the struggling Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservation, Irish donations came close to $1 million, many of them citing the kindness shown by the Choctaw and Cherokee people

all those years ago during Ireland's darkest chapter. Unfortunately, most of that aid came to an end at the end of 1847. At that point, the British government had said the famine was over and that the Irish should depend on their own resources. But as we know, the famine was far from over. So we've reached the end of our first episode on the Great Irish Famine and I hope that you, like me, have learned a huge amount from, I think, this really powerful and important conversation. There is more to come. We've just reached the beginning of 1847, and it is going to get worse for Ireland. So join us in the next

episode when Anthony will be delving into that period of time, and we'll all come together to talk to Christine about some of the legacies of the famine and what it means for us in Ireland and in Britain today. If, like our wonderful listener Charlotte, you have a suggestion for an episode topic or want to get in touch to talk more about the famine, then you can email us at afterdarkathistoryhit.com. That's afterdarkathistoryhit.com. We love to hear from you about this episode or any others. of all time. Something out of the dark that's appeared in Lobham. You'll meet the people who live life undercover. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do

in their position? Vengeance felt good. Seeing these people pay for what they'd done felt righteous. True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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