Liam Kennedy is an interesting man. He is emeritus professor of history at Queen’s University, he wrote the book Unhappy the Land: The Most Oppressed People Ever, the Irish?, he has in the past called for a commission of inquiry into punishment attacks by republicans, and when he ran in the 2005 election in Belfast West, he came last with a total of 147 votes.
This morning he has an article in the Irish Times, in which he attempts to compare the famine in the Ukraine during the 1930s, in which millions died, with the Irish ‘famine’, in which some one million died and another million emigrated. For the most part, he believes there is little comparison.
“In the Ukrainian famine state terror was deployed in a manner that has no obvious counterpart in Ireland. Stalinist anger at assumed peasant recalcitrance informed and motivated mass terror, wholesale seizures of grain, executions and deportations.”
And An Gorta Mór? “In Ireland the British state sought to alleviate, admittedly inadequately, the effects of a massive failure of the food supply due to the potato blight.”
It’s a long way to Tipperary, the place where Prof Kennedy’s baby eyes first saw the light of day. It is an even longer journey to that part of Prof Kennedy’s brain which deals in a rational fashion with Irish history and the suffering endured by its people.
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