The Graves Are Walking

by John Kelly

A magisterial account of one of the worst disasters to strike humankind—the Great Irish Potato Famine—conveyed as lyrical narrative history from the acclaimed author of The Great Mortality

In this comprehensive account of the Irish Potato Famine, delivered with novelistic flair, John Kelly gives us not only the startling facts of this disaster—one of the worst to strike humankind, killing twice as many lives as the American Civil War—but examines the intersection of political greed, bacterial infection, religious intolerance, and racism that made it possible. Kelly brings new material to his analysis of relevant political factors during the years leading up to the famine, and the extent to which Britain's nation-building policies exacerbated the mounting crisis. Despite the shocking, infuriating implications of his findings, The Graves Are Walking is ultimately a story of triumph—of one people's ability to remake themselves in a new land in the face of the unthinkable.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Politics, Historical, 19th Century

397 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2012

About the author

John Kelly specializes in narrative history. He is the author of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death; The Most Devastating Plague of all Time; Three on the Edge; and more. Kelly lives in New York City and Sandisfield, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Colleen Browne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I had planned to read it for quite a while but there were many books ahead of it. I recall listening to a program on RTE radio which featured Tim Pat Coogan, John Kelly, a descendant of Trevelyan, and another woman author whose name escapes me. At the time, Kelly came off as rather conservative on the issue of genocide but I wanted to read what he had to say before passing any judgment. I have studied the Famine, written papers on it, and read other books, including The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith. I have not read Coogan's book because I know his ideas on it.
I had also read Kelly's other book on the Plague.

Unfortunately, I found this book to be a great disappointment on several levels. First, although many reviewers commented on how well documented the book was, and to all outward appearances it would seem to be, when one takes a closer look, it is not. Second, the book relies on anecdotal evidence to make historical points, all too often. Third, in addition to jumping around in time, Kelly also goes off on subjects only tangentially related to the Famine. Fourth, the story he is trying to tell is incomplete (maybe because of all his tangents). Finally, Kelly's conclusions are not supported by the facts.

While the book is interesting and Kelly is obviously quite clever, much of his documentation is of anecdotal information and not statistics. For example, on page 318, Kelly provides a collection of statistics about public aid during 1846 and 1847. This is immediately after he made mention of the ship that carried the remains of Daniel O'Connell back to Ireland. If one goes to his notes, the only documentation is for the boat- but there is nothing documenting the statistics. In the course of my reading, I noticed this on several occasions. Even his claim toward the end of the book (I cannot recall the page) that Ireland imported more food than she exported during the Famine is unsupported.

My second problem with the book is Kelly's reliance on anecdote to tell the story. Anecdote is a great thing- it's purpose is to provide examples of documented evidence. In this case, the author relied on newspapers of the time to do this. Unfortunately, he frequently used the anecdotes without any documentation that they are accurate. I was struck by his inclusion in a Cork paper, when describing men working building roads which gave an example of a couple Kerrymen, supposed to be building roads who were lazy and doing nothing. This may not be a big deal except that it feeds the stereotype that Brits had of the lazy Irish. Moreover, there is no way of knowing if it was true. For all the reader know, the men could have been starving and unable to work or maybe they were just lazy. We do not know. The author may also be unaware that there has always been a rivalry between the counties of Kerry and Cork that might have led to it. In any case, it had no place in the book without some support.

Kelly also seemed unable to stick to the timeline and placeline in writing the book. He went off on tangents that were inconsequential to the Famine. What immigrants encountered when they reached new shores is very interesting and might have been appropriate but it really belongs in another book or at least a much longer book. Substantial amounts of information was left out of this book- presumably to share those details and it weakens the book.

My fourth complaint is the fact that Kelly did not finish the book- or at least the story of the Famine. What he said about crop failure in 1848 was not complete. 1848 was probably the worst year of the famine and the crop failures were total. After the partial failure of the crop in 1845, the crop in 1846 totallly failed, as he said. His information about 1847 was incomplete. In 1847, the crop was disease free- for the most part. A large part of the reason for that was that many farmers hadn't planted potatoes out of fear of another failure. In 1848, potato planting was way up but the cropped failed- completely. By then the British had grown tired of the Irish and decided they would no longer help. The Quaker organizations that had been trying to help the desperate people grew tired of fighting with Whitehall and finally gave up. After that, the Irish were basically on their own. It is hard to understand why Kelly decided to devote so little time to this part of the disaster. I can only surmise that perhaps going into too much detail might undermine his conclusion.

Finally, Mr. Kelly's conclusions are not supported by the facts. He seems to underplay that many of the Irish never dealt in money. They grew potatoes to sustain their own families but grain to pay the rent with. Kelly never mentions this fact. He does quote people many times talking about the Irish being lazy because they had to worry only about the potato crop which has a short growing season. By failing to include the facts about grain, he allows the argument of Irish laziness to stand. He never discusses the importance of Ireland being a barter economy plays in the famine. If people bartered to pay rent and other expenses, it doesn't matter how little the British government charges for corn, it is too expensive. Moreover, he makes little mention of the terrible effects the corn had on people. When it wasn't milled at least twice, it punctured the intestines of people. Trevelyan ordered that it not be milled at one point because it wasn't good for the morals of people. Given the evidence that the author himself put forward, saying that the British government meant well just doesn't cut it. It is odd that Kelly left out the comment of the economist Nassau Senior who expressed his worry that the famine might not kill more than a million people and that would hardly be enough. http://schillerinstitute.org/economy/...
Could it be that statements like that weaken his arguments? Kelly always fails to mention that at a time when the British argued that the government didn't have enough money for aid to Ireland, they did have enough money to send 15,000 British troops there.

I am not arguing that the Famine was a genocide based on the narrow definition used to convict Hitler. The British did not cause the blight. Kelly makes mention of the fact that ports in other parts of Europe were closed during the entirety of the blight. It is not good enough to argue that Britain didn't because of their zeal for laissez faire economics. The deep rooted hatred of the Irish certainly had something to do with it. They hated the religion of the Irish and never understood them. After so many years, one would think that the English might have learned something about the Irish but they hadn't. As late as the 1980's when IRA prisoners went on hunger strike the British did not believe that the prisoners would actually starve themselves. There can be no question that Britain was guilty of cultural genocide. Since the days of Cromwell it had been an objective of the British to get rid of the language, the religion, and all identifiable traits of the Irish making them quasi British. While it may not be as straight a line to draw between the British and genocide during the Famine, there has to be some question of the intent of the British by their policies. Maybe they did not intentionally commit genocide but Kelly has certainly not proven that.

This book is interesting. Kelly is witty and an able writer but the flaws aforementioned makes for disappointing reading. There are interesting details in this book which may not be found elsewhere so I might suggest reading it- but not until after reading a more thorough, better researched book. The Great Hunger remains, in my opinion, the best book available on the subject.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People was a well researched and documented history of the Irish Potato Famine beginning in 1845 when a fungus-like organism spread rapidly throughout Ireland, and ran rampant over the next several years, causing suffering and death throughout Ireland. John Kelly documents all facets of this suffering from the accounts of the families that are impacted to the government entities that so dramatically failed these people. This was a heartbreaking account of starvation and suffering as brought to life by Kelly, as he meticulously narrates the essence of the individual lives that were affected and as a witness to our humanity.

"In this 'Hidden Ireland,' Irish remained the first language: myth and legend attached itself to every feature of the landscape; the storyteller and the poet remained revered figures; and the old Irish families--the dispossessed 'ancient race'--were remembered and honored."

"In ten thousand townlands--in Kerry, in Clare, in Donegal, in Mayo and Roscommon: places as impoverished, overcrowded, and potato-dependent as southwest Cork--other 'little families' awaited death in cabins, in fields, and in roadside scalps and ditches. History has made fatalism a habit of mind in Ireland."

". . . The Belfast Vindicator raised the specter of universal famine. No one would escape the effects of what was coming, the paper warned. 'The cry is heard in every corner of the island. It startles and appalls the merchant at his desk, the landlord in his office, the scholar in his study, the lawyer in his stall, the minister in his council room, and the priest at the altar.'" "Give us food or we will perish."

"In 1846, emigration, though large--116,000 people left Ireland--had had an orderly character. By the spring of 1847, people were not leaving Ireland; they were fleeing, the way a crowd flees a burning building: heedlessly, recklessly, with no thought other than to get out."

[♥ Sandi ❣ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

I was totally unprepared for this book. I read a lot of non-fiction, but usually what is now referred to as 'contemporary' or 'novel' non-fiction, which has it's facts put into an easy to read story-like format. This book was true non-fiction - textbook non-fiction. It took me chapters to meld with this book and the information that was being presented.

Now saying the above, does not take away from the book. I feel it did a good job of explaining the Irish potato famine in the mid 1800's. It told of the extenuating problems brought on by the country overseers, detailing various ways that were used to keep the poor Irish at a disadvantage. Eviction, soaring costs, work houses, non-paying jobs were all used to 'up the character' of the impoverished Irish, to no avail. Political greed and religious doctrines caused more than 2 million people to flee their country and at least one million more deaths.

I probably did not like this book as much as others. Over and above the dry text book feel to it, I became tired of it bouncing back and forth between the years of 1846 and 1847. I realize those 24 months were the most turbulent, but just when you were mired in something from 1847, then you were sent back to 1846 for something else. I also felt that there were an exceptional amount of secondary - or even lessor - characters that were introduced, which I did not feel carried any of the story. I am not sure that the epic amount of facts did not get in the way of telling the story.

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well researched book about the potato famine in Ireland. It is a very powerful and compelling read.
It is the story of the great hunger in Ireland and its destruction.
This all started in 1845 and killed more then one million men women and children. At the time it was considered the greatest disaster in the 19th century.
This catastrophe started with potato fungus fueled with political greed and religious intolerance.
When I started to read this book, I thought I knew about the potato famine which devastated Ireland.
I was wrong. This book is not only about potatoes. It was about people’s lives.
“The Englishman’s hand is strong and harsh-
the might of his laws and the slaughter of his victories-
his promise is a lie, his blade bloody-
and it is high time for me to flee across the sea.”
By the spring of 1847 people were not leaving Ireland, they were fleeing, the way a crowd flees a burning building.
215,000 people sailed to North America, 150,000 to Britain.
This book is filled with details and information about the life of the Irish people and all the hardships that they endured.
It is a very interesting read.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughts soon.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Available as a two-part, 14-hour audio book download.

Honor the suffering of millions of now-still voices and forgotten names of Ireland by listening to or reading their story in this narrative or one like it. It's more appropriate than drinking cheap beer in a green cardboard hat.

Just like certain problems of today, the cause of the Irish potato famine (a fungus) was known, but the people who knew were insufficiently media-savvy and charming, so their voices were drowned out by people with wrong ideas but better communications networks.

And, just like certain problems of today, certain broad clues pointing to the cure for the Irish potato famine (a chemical compound containing copper) hid heartbreakingly in plain sight. A non-expert wrote into a Welsh newspaper to note that the potato fields downwind of a local copper-processing plan remained strangely untouched by the blight. At the time, however, it was just an odd detail in a time of chaos and calamity. The signal was lost in the noise.

Memo to self, inspired by this book: Listen to the people whom others are not listening to. It's patience-trying, but they might know something.

[Anne ✨ Finds Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well researched, this is a very detailed history of the The Great Famine of the 1840's. With a perfect storm of circumstances, a natural disaster (potato blight) in Ireland snowballed into a horrendous tragedy of famine, disease, and death to over a million people mainly in Ireland but also in England, US, and Canada as a result of mass exodus.

I had known very little about the scope and scale of this tragedy, so this was an eye-opening read for me, to learn of the many factors that were at play: weather, world-wide food shortage, major mistakes of the British governance, Irish peasantry class dependency on potato crop, merchant class greed, and much more.

The book was difficult to read at times with many grim descriptions of the poverty, starvation, disease, and death. But it's an important educational and illuminating book, and interesting to see the roots of major immigration of the Irish to England, North America and Australia.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I didn't like this as much as Kelly's previous book on the Black Death, The Great Mortality , it was certainly an absorbing read and a sobering one. I hadn't known much about the potato famine before reading this, but it wasn't one of those kind of books where prior knowledge was required to fully understand the text.

The saddest thing of all about the story, I think, is that it wasn't anything evil that doomed the Irish. Contrary to what some people believe, no one was deliberately trying to starve the Irish to death. The British weren't practicing genocide like the Soviets did to Ukraine during the Holodomor. Rather, it was a kind of Hurricane Katrina like situation: the government was trying to help, but it didn't have a clue what it was doing and ignorance and self-interest and misplaced priorities prevented any real progress from being made. And so millions died.

Well worth a read for anyone interested in this kind of thing, though I prefer straight-out plagues to famines.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

So many factors contributed to the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. Weather, geography, government, religion, and the class system all played a role in making a terrible situation worse. In The Graves Are Walking, we get a brief overview of Irish history before the 1840s and how the landed gentry played a role in exacerbating a horrible situation.

This is the first book I’ve read on the Irish potato famine, so I have nothing to compare it to. Because I know little of Irish history, I learned a lot, and its made me excited to learn more about Ireland and her people. The weak sentence structure and inconsistent time line detracted from my otherwise enjoyment of the book, hence the 3.5 stars.

[Overbooked ✎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an informative and comprehensive book on the potato famine which wiped out a third of the Irish population from 1845 to 1849. Drawing both from facts and anecdotes, it illustrates the social, economic and political situation of Ireland in the middle of 1800s when the potato blight hit the country. It chronicles, in exhaustive detail, its swift spread trough the countryside and vividly describes the snowballing consequences of deadly famine, life-threatening diseases (typhus, dysentery and fevers) and mass emigration.

It’s a hard book to read. While I loved the start, as the book progressed, it really dragged for me. The scale of the tragedy is overwhelming; there is so much information on human misery and suffering that the reader can absorb.

I felt that the author piled historical data and figures on top of each other without structuring his arguments with clarity, the author seeming to randomly point the finger to either side of the Irish sea for causes of the human catastrophe. At times he blames the Celtic peasant roots, the backward economic model, the poor infrastructure, the Anglo-Irish land owners’ management of their land or Nationalist rebellious factions for the catastrophic situation, and then, a couple of sentences later, puts the responsibility squarely on the impotence of the British government, the “education” program of the Moralist politicians, the greed of the food merchants, the racist propaganda of the press or insensitive political economists.

The timeline of the middle chapters was also inconsistent (jumping around often), contributing to my confusion. The ending of the was also quite abrupt, book concludes with 1947, the afterward briefly mentioning the years 1848 and 1849, but in fact the potato blight did not end then, it reappeared in 1848, so it would seem that the author simply ran out of time.

After such comprehensive analysis of the economic and human disaster caused by the blight, I would have liked more information how Ireland successfully overcome the ordeal. Unfortunately, the author limit himself to only the following scanty statements in the afterword section:

““During the 1850s, Irish farms grew steadily larger and Irish agricultural profits steadily bigger
...
In the mid-1860s, peasant agitation for land reform revived. The agitation led to the Land War in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Land War produced a series of reforms that reversed the land seizures of the plantation era. On the eve of World War I, 11.1 million of Ireland’s 20 million acres were again owned by Irish proprietors, and, as before the famine, many of the proprietors were small farmers.”

Overall this was eye opener book for me and a great source of information. Although it it proved not as good as I hoped it would be, I don't regret reading it. 3.5 stars

Fav. Quotes:

The plan presupposed conditions that existed only in a nation with a modern economy and a modern infrastructure, and, except for the regions around Belfast and Dublin, Ireland was one of the most backward countries in Europe. Unlike Britain and France, she had no significant class of rural shopkeepers to distribute food in the interior; and the relief committee system was an imperfect substitute, particularly in remote regions of the west and midlands, where local gentry was lacking to organize a committee and the nearest source of commercial food might be twenty or thirty miles away. The Irish economy was also too small to efficiently regulate food prices through market competition, as the British economy did; and the deficiency of domestic mills meant that, in a time of acute food shortages, relief provisions had to be ground in England or sent 1,300 miles away, to the mills at the big British naval base in Malta.

British relief policy was never deliberately genocidal, but its effects often were.

The Times and The Economist stopped lecturing the Irish on sloth, violence, ignorance, superstition, personal hygiene, and dependence on government; there were fewer comparisons with the Eskimos and South Sea Islanders; the adjective “aboriginal” was used less frequently to modify the noun “Irish,” as in the construction “aboriginal Irish”

[Jim Gallen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The Graves Are Walking” is another of the current histories of the Potato Famine that places much of the blame on British governmental policy, but this work goes much farther.

Author John Kelly shows how a potato blight, opportunistic disease and social policy combined to turn a natural disaster into a deadly famine. From 1845 to 1847 Ireland was transformed from a poor, overcrowded country into a living hell. The blight began on the continent whence it spread to Ireland and Scotland. What made the Irish devastation unique was the dependence of the population on potato cultivation and the lack of industry to soften the economic blow. One thing led to another. People, weakened by famine, succumbed to disease. Driven to despair, those who could chose emigration to escape the horror that surrounded them. By the time it had passed, a majority of the Irish were dead or overseas, in England, the United States, Canada or Australia.

This book’s particular contribution to famine studies is its focus on the people who influenced the famine and were influenced by it. As is the common saying, God sent the blight, but England made the famine. Kelly corrects the misconception that Ireland remained a net food exporter during the famine and gives credit to those who did provide relief to the suffering. He examines the changing policies of British politicians, most prominently the Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell and a civil servant, Sir Charles Trevelyan. Policies were influenced by deliberate attempts to reform the Irish economy, prevailing economic theories espoused by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith, whose invisible hand directed the famine response so as not to disturb food markets, and the belief that the famine was God’s punishment for Papists. The greed of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who evicted their tenants shows that not all of the blame is directed toward England. The last initiatives of The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, are given ample attention.

The story is not as clear as myth would have it. In many cases the shortage was less one of availability than one of payment. Even Indian corn and other foodstuffs that were imported were generally offered for sale, often to people without the means to pay. The relief work projects, through unwise incentives, left the landscape marred by roads to nowhere rather enriched by infrastructure that would have provided the basis for a modern economy.

Kelly has crafted a well written book. My only reservation about this work is the frequent detailing of the horrors of the Famine era. While some is sufficient to shock the reader into an appreciation of the extent of the tragedy but, at times, I felt that he had overdone it.

“The Graves Are Walking” compels reflection. As much as we resent the Famine England made, would we really want to be the heirs to an overcrowded island of subsistence farmers? Do our ancestors, who we remember and, to some extent idealize, deserve the esteem in which we hold them? When I read about the starving, illiterate and pathetic emigrants I think were Matthew Gallen and Thomas English like that? Did the Maher sister really leave, not the idyllic isle we visit, but a disgusting, filthy village visited by the Angel of Death? When you think about the conditions they left you can understand why the early generations were so anxious to assimilate, and why it took generations for love of and pride in Ireland to rise again. We now think of Ireland’s loss as America and Canada’s gain, but such was not the view at the time. Our ancestors were real dregs on the countries into which they fled. It makes anti-Irish prejudice of the time more understandable and should make us stop when we think about our views of contemporary immigrants. Over all, we of the Diaspora have done pretty well, which suggests that there was real quality beneath the degraded conditions of our forebears. Our cousins whose families stayed have inherited an Ireland that is better suited to compete in the world economy than the one of the 1840s. The price was terrible, but the Irish survived and emerged from the Famine stronger than they entered it. Well, I have mused enough. Read it for yourself, contemplate our people’s place in history and draw your own conclusions.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Irish potato famine is something I remember hearing about in school but never really understanding it. "The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish" filled in that gap in my historical knowledge. It is incredible to me, as this book shows, how ideology and religion can blind people, and be used to justify terrible suffering.

Ireland in 1846, at the beginning of the famine, had a population of about 8 million. At the end of the famine 1.5 million were dead and at least another 2 million had fled the country for England, Canada, and the US. So in the space of about five years Ireland lost a third of its population. I had no idea of the massive scope of the famine until I read this book.

The British government at the time viewed the Irish as backward, lazy, and Catholic. Many in the British government, including the man who was assigned to lead the Irish relief efforts, believed the potato blight was God's judgment on those lazy papists. At the same time, these same officials were in the grip of a free market ideology that told them not to give away food to starving people as it will undercut the prices for the merchants who are trying to sell it. (They also didn't want the Irish to become dependent on government handouts. They actually used that language about people who are staving by the thousands every day...plus ca change...) This lead the British to sell government corn at the market price which was more than a poor person could make in a day, let alone feed a family. Anyway, this book is a very interesting book about the potato famine and the immigration of so many Irish all over the world. It is because of the famine and the immigration to New York that we had Tammeny hall in New York, we use the phrase "paddy wagon" for a police prison transport, (Paddy was a derogatory term for the Irish). There are all kinds of really interesting information and anecdotes in this book. I recommend it to any history buff, especially those interested in Irish history.

[Jud Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was some warning that the potato blight was on its way--the fungus worked its way across Europe in a westerly direction--but the questions uppermost on the minds of laissez-faire public officials were "How can we 1.not allow relief to encourage a lifestyle of dependency 2.make the Irish landord (as opposed to the English taxpayer) bear the cost of relief and 3.enable the Irish agricultural export market to continue as usual?"

When the blight hit, producing two years of near-total potato crop failure, the result was famine and, in its train, an epidemic of typhus. The scale of human loss was enormous. The severity of the famine was particularly bad due to overwhelming Irish dependence upon the potato as its food staple and the attendant economic effect on landholding patterns. The considerable number of farmers with a large families and small potato plots were rendered suddenly penniless and without food--and with very little understanding among their socio-economic betters that the situation of the blight victims should be remedied in any effective way.

The almost-complete absence of an effective relief effort was exacerbated by religious, class, and ethnic attitudes that understood the famine to be God's will or the result of Irish backwardness. In Ireland, landowners tried to evade any financial responsibility for the provision of relief and used the catastrophe as an excuse to expel tenants (unable to make rent payments without a crop) and clear their land for more profitable uses. The more "charitable" ones made the financial calculation that it was cheaper to pay tenants' passage to England or Canada than it was to pay to keep them alive with food. Of course, in their weakened condition in the disease-choked holds of ships, emigrants died in droves.

A functioning system of soup kitchens was not in place until three/fourths of the way through the second year of the famine.

A gripping story, powerfully told.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book. My knowledge of the potato famine was naive enough to believe that the major problem was the blight that caused the famine. It was the impetus, but what transpired afterward was heartbreaking and maddening. Between the governmental abuses of power and their ineptitude in handling the situation, the "moralist" attempts to use the famine and ensuing pestilence to show God's punishment on these "lower people", and the overall prejudice toward the Irish, it is amazing that any survived. John Kelly's writing keeps you turning pages with his easy style.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply devoured this non-fiction read in two days...a page turner and scholarly. This book was amazingly comprehensive in the impact of the potatoe blight on the Irish and subsequently, the rest of the world. My only complaint would have been the lack of how the Irish found themselves in the position they in the first place, that's only because I would have like to read how THIS author wrote it. Going to hunt down his previous book about The Plague.

[Elizabeth Theiss Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

My great grandfather sailed from Ireland to Baltimore in the mid-1800s and I was always curious about what precipitated the move. His wife had died and he was left with two small children and no prospects. From Baltimore he came to New York where he met my great grandmother, child of a small farmer in the area of what is now part of the Bronx. The context of course was the Great Famine and this book is a disturbingly rich account of it.

Ireland in the early 1840s was largely a land of small tenant farmers who paid land rent and depended on the potato for daily sustenance and the means to pay the rent. The poorest among them were those who could afford to rent only a handful of acres and thus were unable to accumulate any surplus. In 1846, a blight infected the potato crop and resulted in a spoiled harvest. The smallest farmers were the first to starve but ultimately starvation became widespread.

English poor laws were brutal and became more so as the famine deepened. People sold everything they owned including shoes and clothing in order to buy food. British tariffs kept food prices high and quickly out of reach of tenant farmers. Poorhouses were established and landlords their elected guardians levied a rate of support against landlords. In order to avoid this duty, landlords evicted tenants en masse who were left to roam the land in search of something, anything, to eat for themselves and their children. Many landlords found it cheaper to pay tenants to emigrate rather than pay the poor tax. As ships arrived in New World harbors, many passengers were already dead of starvation or typhus.

It is impossible not to feel deep sadness and horror while reading the descriptions of how and why people died. The research behind this book is deep and rich. The political scientist in me blames the deep inequality between the tenants and the landlords, and the distant English government elites for the situation. The Moralists of the era had decided that the real problem was that Irish tenants were unwilling to work and overly dependent on England for their welfare. Thus, the solution was to cut the dependency by making any aid unpalatable and difficult or impossible to obtain.

The primary source material here is excellent and I have found no better book on the famine and its sources.

[Elia Princess of Starfall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tell me, have you ever wondered why there is such a wide-ranging and entrenched Irish diaspora throughout the world? Have you ever thought about why there has been great bitterness between England and Ireland in the past? Or why the Irish were so determined to achieve national independence through the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence or the Irish Civil War?




Growing up in Ireland, I often heard vague and quiet references to the Irish Famine of 1845-1851. When you're Irish, its a given that at some stage of your life, you will hear about "the Great Hunger" be it from your relatives, your school or trawling through any decent Irish history book. In a weird way it both talked about and not talked about. At times, an uneasy silence hangs over the Irish Famine and how it was handled. It's a subject of deep, entangled emotions and frustrated anger to some. Look at what happened to Channel 4's attempted sitcom Hungry!

A catastrophe both natural and man-made, the Great Famine saw between a million and a million and a half die from hunger or disease and a further million and a half emigrate to England, Australia or North America leaving behind "Old Ireland" in its death throes. The famine may have happened over 150 years ago butt its effects still linger on be it in Ireland or the wider world. My point is that because I'm Irish and am aware of the crippling impact of the famine Ireland this is a subject that will inevitably stir up emotions of anger, horror, resentment and despair.




The Great Famine, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, was a time of widespread starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland when the potato crop which feed the poor peasantry failed successively due to presence of Blight. Unable to buy alternate food or even to earn sufficient money as there nearly no employment to be found, the peasants died in the ditches, in their cabins, in the fever sheds, the workhouses, on the roadworks, in alleys, in fields or by the sea side. During this period, Ireland was under the control of Great Britain and a part of the United Kingdom thanks to the Act of Union passed in 1801. Therefore, as Ireland was being ravaged by famine and disease, the decisions that literally concerned the life or death of the Irish peasants were being made by a government in another country, run by high-minded, moralizing, laissez-faire fanatics and bigoted men who clung to term "political economy" and "the Will of Providence" as a drowning sailor clutches a life raft. The result was death, despair and devastation for Ireland.

Prior to the Famine, Ireland was a desperately poor, run-down, badly managed and squalid nation with no industry, no regular employment, no Poor Law or national government. With very little steady employment, a piece of land on which to grow nutritious and high-yielding potatoes meant the difference between life and death for the wretched poor of Ireland. Visitors to Ireland were appalled at the prevalence and depth of Irish poverty with Gustave de Beaumont noting that although paupers were found throughout all countries, an entire nation of paupers was not found until it was found in Ireland. Before 1845, and thanks to the potato, Ireland's population stood at around nine million. To put that in context, Ireland's population in 2011 was around six million and four hundred thousand.

The heavy reliance on the potato, and the fact that the very poorest of the poor ( 3 million) subsisted entirely on potatoes and nothing else , meant that the introduction of blight caused widespread hunger and disease with the most common being typhus, dysentery, relapsing fever and scurvy. The truly awful thing about the famine is that Ireland was full of food be it corn, wheat, oats, vegetables, meat, fish and other products; no only the potato failed. But the people of Ireland were so poor and had no access to money or employment that the food available in Ireland might as well have been on Mars. A famous quote by John Mitchell, a passionate devotee to Irish freedom and a rigid anti-abolitionist, stated that "the Almighty sent the blight, but the English sent the famine". In reading about the narrow-minded and highly restrictive famine relief policies of the ruling Whig party of the English government, you cannot help but feel that these men saw the famine as a brutal but effective means of revolutionizing Irish agriculture, improving the supposedly lazy and degenerate Irish character through decreased potato dependence and in decimating the unprofitable small-farmer class. At the end, John Kelly states that the intentions of English policy may not have been genocidal but their aftermaths were in reality.

John Kelly has written a hugely insightful and well written narrative history on the Great Famine and the amount of diligent research and thought that has gone into it is keenly felt by the reader. Kelly describes in detail how the famine contributed to the beginning of the Irish diaspora as desperate, starving hordes fled Ireland in droves for the slums of New York, Montreal or Liverpool, how it deepened the chasm between Irish and English and why the famine still lingers on in Ireland till this day. This is not by any stretch of the imagination an easy or cheerful book to read: readers are confronted by tales of fathers forcing their young sons to die neglected by the roadside to die of fever, of mothers who abandoned infants with typhus in Ireland as they journeyed to America, of entire families fighting with crows over the rotting remains of a week dead horse, of families when the potatoes ran out closing their cabin doors to die unseen of hunger, of relief workers encountering the grotesque and swollen bodies of infants three times their natural size and of wailing mothers holding up their dead children and begging not for food but for a coffin.

Readers will painfully aware that famine is sometimes not about lack of food but about access to it in times of want.

This is not a book for light reading and several times during my reading I felt a distinct antipathy to the English politicians and civil servants who wreaked such horrible cruelty and callousness on a starving people. It is eloquent, sparse and visceral in its language; Kelly describes in disturbing detail the three stages of starvation and they are beyond harrowing. The Graves are Walking is chronological in its layout and follows the events of the famine from the years 1845-1851 looking at Ireland, Canada, England and North America in detail. I would recommend it but beware: this is a difficult and serious read that will stay long in your mind.

[Fred Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens exactly 100 years before my birth and describes the horror of the failure of the Irish potato crop and the resulting famine, the horrible machinations of government and private landowners to attempt to correct the problem through ill conceived policies and actions. (Let the price of food stay high, for example, it will serve to regulate excessive consumption.) This is one of those books which definitely will cause you to pause and count your blessings and be glad that in our lifetimes we have not endured this type of hunger, disease and death or war in this country. Methinks we take far too much of our good fortune for granted and this work will drive home just how horrible circumstances could become. While a bit wordy and repetitive in places, the book details much of which we are only dimly aware. "A million people dead and over two million fled abroad, Ireland's population reduced by a third or more...But the relief policies that England employed during the famine - parsimonious, short-sighted,grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology - produced tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. The intent of those policies may not have been genocidal, but the effects were." "No wonder, in the decades after the famine so many Irish immigrants were incapable of saying 'England' without adding 'Godda__ her".

Thanx to fellow bookworm and high school buddy Claire for passing this one on.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the early part of this historical account of one of the great human tragedies to affect mankind, we are introduced to the political players, local persons affected, and relief brought in earnest but severely mismanaged, as well as a plethora of good intentions seemingly gone awry. In all truth, there was an effort and attempt to diagnose, understand, and then salvage what could (or what was believed to be an ability to salvage) for humanity with the P-infestans that afflicted the potato with this disease that hit throughout northern Europe. Ireland was hit the hardest and the author holds no punches back; however, he informs the reader through a novel type of approach. He puts blame not on the English as a nation; but where the blame was due and this within the framework in part of the political machination of the time and placed within this critical and well researched book. The event of this era of 1845-47 does not read like a text book; it reads as a story that includes real people, Priests, and Politicians with real names, real events and real efforts to correct a problem of the direst type. Stereo types in the Press prevailed during the time frame to which not only didn’t help matters to the persons of the time who could read – these printed stereo types would provide verbal fodder for generations thereafter yet to come. This maybe one small reason that so many accusations followed suit with people when they later told stories of relatives that had lived long before their own existence.

In 1845 the Irish potato crop was larger than the previous years; the P-infestans affected roughly 25% of that enhanced crop. Meanwhile by comparison of the same year the Dutch had lost 75% and Belgium 87% were on record as having been destroyed. There was a complex “Corn Law” in the U.K. that seemed to compound matters; however, they worked through that and American “maize” along with wheat and oats were able to be imported and provided to Government established regions the commodities at loan rates to Ireland; imports also came from Egypt, India, and several other countries. The “Corn Law” didn’t just mean “corn”; it meant other grains as well as referenced. American maize however required two grindings for the Irish and other European nations citizens to fully be able to digest the grain; for some unknown physical reason Europeans weren’t physically adaptable to digest the grain as their American counterparts. At first, there was merely enough ability (due to cost) to grind the grain once – another issue that was solved with time. By all accounts, the 1846 portion of the potato famine was by far worse than the 1845 infestation. The 1846 resolve to address this continuation proved more challenging politically. The challenge arose for several reasons, first the potato crop had been studied throughout Ireland and a determined 75% failure rate was expected – within a month between August and September of that year it rose to an expected failure rate of 83% and then 87% within a week of the increase. In 1846 the resolve to financially assist Ireland during this event became heated – where PM Sir Peel worked effectively in 1845; PM Lord Russel seems to have been haunted with several factors; one of which was his physical height. I couldn’t tell if the author was attempting to introduce a Napoleon complex of sorts or if he was providing the facts as they were without any complex being present. This is but one small encounter one reads along the course of this work to History.

I found myself having to put down the book during periods of passages that felt more like the Holocaust of 100 years later, than a potato famine of 1845-47. The treatment of these Irish folks for their time was at minimum unfortunate and at worse based on stereo-types of the time. One thing is for certain, the Irish economy could not withstand the devastation that this had brought, and I am curious today how better the Irish economy stands 160+ years after this tragedy. This work is important, and I recommend this book by this author for any person interested in European History, Irish History, or History of Mankind in general. Be forewarned however, the depravity of human existence is as horrific as accounts of the 20th century Holocaust of the Second World War. The prevailing myths of the Irish prevailed in the press of the time; I didn’t quite care for the anti-Catholic stance of the author. Protestant faiths were as guilty of withholding food until a conversion of faith by the famine ravished person took hold – this was a practice going back many centuries and is in fact one reason why today when people in North America research their familial history, the difficulties arise because Church records hold conflicting pieces of information of family members “switching” over to the “other side.” Still, this is an important accounting and one that should be read by persons interested in the resulting failure of a crop; that forced an emigration to many locations around the globe. The impact on Montréal, Quebec City, New York, Boston, and though not reported was also an effect upon places like New Orleans and other Southern American cities was quite devastating.

[Casey Donovan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good book for those who wish to read about how the British were not really that much responsible for the famine, because the authors promises they had such good intentions. It was like reading a book arguing that the US Government shouldn’t be blamed for the loss of life on the Trail of Tears, because, you guys, they had really good intentions, honestly.

Seriously the author skirts around the history and prevalence of Anglo-Protestant oppression of the Irish Catholic majority so often you’d think he is allergic to it. It all ends up being blamed on the Irish peasants themselves, literally in the book the author explains how the Anglo-Protestant landowners were “more interested in prompt rent payment than in providing tenants with modern farm implements or schooling them in the techniques of modern agriculture.” And then the very next sentence is: “Nonetheless, the fact remained that the Irish peasant was poor because he was unproductive and he was unproductive because his work ethic was wanting.” Like, damn, who wrote this book, Thomas Carlyle? (Carlyle, like many British and Scottish men of his time thought the Irish (the Irish Catholic majority that is) were uncivilized savages, Carlyle is even quoted as calling them “white negroes”). The author seems to agree with much of the British sentiment at the time of the famine, that the Irish peasants were suffering because they were lazy and backwards and not because of the oppressive system the British instituted that kept them poor and uneducated. It’s like getting upset that the prisoners of Auschwitz didn’t live up to the productivity expectation of “Work Sets You Free”.

Also it drove me nuts each time the author referred to British peers who owned land in Ireland and poorly managed it as “Irish” Landlords because they were not Irish and it further helped the author mislead the reader into thinking the actions of the Irish people were the main cause of the famine, not the British.

Honestly I only got so far into the book before I realized this author was manipulating a lot of the facts and relying heavily on British, anti-Irish anecdotes to, for some reason, make a case that the British really didn’t have such a big role in the famine. It just got pretty offensive to me, I put it down and did not bother to finish it.

[Abbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written and the audio book narrator was fantastic. This was a pretty grim listen but well worth it and I learned a lot.

[Will Singleton]

Just couldn’t get into this even after 145 pages. I really wanted to like this. Sorry to say i abandoned this one.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the title of this book is a clear sign that it is not a shiny happy story. In fact there is very little good in this book. As the author said in the second to last paragraph England has a lot of wonderful moments in history it can be very proud of. The Irish Potato Famine is probably one of the periods of history it should be most ashamed of (kind of like America's history with slavery. . .).

John Kelly did an excellent job explaining how the political responses to a crop failure lead to the death of over a million people. Add the eviction of thousands and the emigration of 2 million, and Ireland was gutted of a third of it's population. Kelly argues that England didn't come into the crisis intending to cause a genocide of the troublesome Irish poor, but he says that the government's failures could easily lead the victims to believe that. In summary there were bureaucratic delays, incompetence, shipping shortages, cowardice and stupidity. Most to blame in my opinion, were the officials that were stupidly devoted Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. It was very easy for decision makers of the time to assume poverty was a direct result of laziness, lack of character, or immorality. Sadly the famine proved to history (if not to the people of the time) that the rich are often lazy, and immoral (we have plenty of examples of this today too).

This book should be required reading for people who want to run for any major office. We can learn a lot of lessons from this period of history. The biggest lesson I got out of this book is the fact that human lives should not be used as a currency to buy your ideal way of life. The leading Englishmen of the time wanted to turn Ireland into a modern agricultural society with fewer poor, fewer small farmers, and more "English" ideals. When the potato blight arrived they didn't purposely try to starve out the inconvenient poor population, but they did use their ideological glasses to color all their decisions. They were willing to help the Irish, but not too much. Fix the poor laws, but heavens knows the Irish must pay for it! Let a man have relief, but he must give up any rights to his land to do it. Let the poor be cared for, but if they are cared for too well, they will obviously decide to rely on it forever. The result of this kind of thinking was mass deaths by starvation and disease that followed. Mass evictions also became a way of life.

I highly recommend this book, but warn it is not for the faint of heart. There are a lot of descriptions of the horrors these poor people faced. If you are devoted to the "if you are poor you must be lazy and immoral" mindset, you won't like this book either. Too many of the "villains" in this story have that same point of view. Lastly, this is a tough read because of how many descriptions of children and babies suffering. Now that I've finished I'm going to search out a fluffy happy book, and snuggle with my little girls. I will also Thank God for the blessings he has given me, and pray for the many people in the world today who are suffering.

[The Overflowing Inkwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

"There were days when I came back from some scene . . . so maddened by sights of hunger and misery I had seen in the day's work that I felt disposed to take a gun from behind my door and shoot the first landlord I met." Would that he included those who sold grain at 'famine prices'!

The first several chapters of the book, when read in a single sitting or two, do begin to make you feel like the British: there are too many repetitions saying it is nearly the worst, it is nearly famine, if it goes on much longer it really will be the worst, it really will be the utmost extremity, that at some point you almost become inured to it. Time keeps passing and people are still living no matter how many times all the writers say it's already the worst. It's only when you get into the mass death section of the book that you sort of wake up again to the devastation being wrought.

The text itself does somehow manage to keep you distant from Ireland. With a lot of talk about what's happening in Britain and how their plans keep going wrong, you never fully enter into the plight of the Irish. It doesn't feel immediate, or horrific, in the way that I expected it to, but very dry. I wish he had really gotten in depth on one or two specific towns or areas to continually refer back to: I think seeing a more 'real time' view on the same location might give a better sense of how things moved and progressed.

I didn't care for the author's over-reliance on the imagery of So-and-So arriving in Such-and-Such a place as a visitor and stepping back for a moment to give some quaint imagery of the person's figure and the landscape surrounding it. A time or two at the start of the book -- that's fine. But nearly every chapter had a pause at some point to describe some new visitor taking in the sights and it got tiring quickly. It also made you feel like there were a lot of loose ends: all these visitors get vivid introductions and backstories and are then promptly dropped. I can only think of one of them that gets mentioned in passing later on in the book, adding that he's now in Scotland and you suddenly realize that you never heard anything about his work again after he was introduced. Why is he in Scotland now? Did his work ever get anywhere? Have any influence? Crickets.

There were also a few random picture placements -- like that of the jig just thrown in near the beginning during a chapter that had nothing to do with it, or the picture of Queen Victoria visiting Ireland fully three years and at least a chapter out of place. Reading other reviews for recommendations, I have other books I plan to read on this subject and am now wary that perhaps Kelly's book is not as well-researched as promised.

[Lorri · Rating 2 out of 5]

This took me well over a month to read, which is never a good sign. I enjoyed learning more about the political part of the Irish Potato Famine but I felt Kelly overdid it. I studied history in college so I understand that all historical writing has some sort of bent and I've read a few accounts of the Irish Potato saga told from a pro agricultural reform side as well, warning against growing just one variety of one crop, in this case potatoes. I like reading books from all political views so I can understand how different people think but an author can take it too far. I felt like Kelly spent more time playing the blame game than actually painting a clear picture of the famine victims. In fairness, I hoped to get more stories about how people survived or the result the famine and upheaval had on Ireland, not a pedantic retelling of political and ideological battles in England so perhaps this is just a case of unmet expectations.
Also, Kelly's use of ellipses bothered me. They seemed excessive - sometimes four or five in one quote!

[Mary Nodulman · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author's constantly inserting details of individuals is probably intended to create realistic, novel-like stories, but it merely serves to interrupt the action of what is an historical and social narrative. I'm sorry to have abandoned the text because I am interested in what happened in this time and place.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you didn't wake up hating the English today, just see how you feel after a few chapters of this book.

Incredibly well researched with a digestible narrative. I am not an economics person so grasping the market concepts took a little time for me, but Kelly was able to write in such a way that even let me understand the basics.

This book is tough to get through because it is heart-wrenching. While the history mainly focuses on the decisions made by the English government and less on the first-person perspectives of devastation, there is no shortage of imagery to make you want to simultaneously pick up a sandwich and destroy the parliament.

I knock-off one star because there were points where the timeline jumped around, especially when introducing new figures. This threw me off but someone with a more thorough background of English gentry in the mid-1800s probably wouldn't have this issue.

There were also times when I was not sure if Kelly was writing about the negative Irish stereotypes so fervently held by the English as satire, or as matter of fact.

Overall a great and devastating read that introduced me to modern Irish history.

[Adam Jarvis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book details the backstory of the great Irish potato famine, how it came about, qnd how they worked through it. This book was a difficult read. The individual stories of the utter horror of dying from starvation were heartbreaking.

I probably should have done a refresher on the on the old measurements and currencies of the time, because I had no mental framework for the statistics of costs and weight that were mentioned multiple times throughout the book.

This book was also full of politics, explaining how the people in power were attempting to resolve the issue of the famine and help (one way or another) the Irish. While I can see the value of including this information in the book, it seemed overly laborious to me, because I wasn’t expecting to read a book on 19th century European politics. The author does a great job painting a portrait of the emotional tension of the times between different groups of people.

I did find very interesting the migration of the Irish to places like Canada and the U. S. as a result of the famine. The book did a great job explaining their reception and the reasons behind that- something that is relevant to all of us even today.

[Diem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable and stinging assessment of England's role in the tragedy of the famine. Eminently readable, which is not always the case with these scholarly works, while devoid of easy but spurious appeals to pathos, e.g., accusations of premeditated genocide. There are many grim descriptions of the deep suffering inflicted upon the Irish during this period of terrible governance, but it would be pretty hard to tell the story without these.

I find myself quite frustrated by the English government's misreading of Adam Smith, which having read it quite recently, I can only conclude must be willful.

[Ruby Grad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Difficult to read because of the suffering and inhumanity described, so I took it slowly. It is definitely worth reading, even if one already knows something about the great potato famine and emigration. Well researched and written, it is full of personal stories that make the history more relatable than simply a presentation of the facts.