Potato Famine Quotes

“The children looked like remnants of themselves. Spectral. Some were naked to the waist.Many of them had sores on their faces. None had shoes. He could see the structures of them through their skin. The bony residue of their lives.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“They entered the wild country. Broken fences. Ruined castles. Stretches of bogland. Wooded headlands. Turfsmoke rose from cabins, thin and mean. On the muddy paths, they glimpsed moving rags. The rags seemed more animate than the bodies within. As they passed, the families regarded them. The children appeared marooned with hunger.”
― Colum McCann, TransAtlantic

“Revolutions occurred in almost every European city with more than 50,000 inhabitants. The occasion for the revolutions was hunger.”
― A.J.P. Taylor, The Communist Manifesto

“The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread.”
― Rashers Tierney, F*ck You I'm Irish: Why We Irish Are Awesome

“A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford

Build the nation's mausoleum,
Light the people's funeral pyre,
For Hibernia's sons and daughters,
In genocide to expire.

Romantic Ireland has no grave,
It died foraging at the roadside for bites,
Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World,
An empire's boot on the throat for last rites.

Did you know your identity all along?
Or find it struggling and aghast?
Old Eireann was the first expendable colony,
And egregiously, not Britannia's last.

Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths,
Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind,
Force-feed our children grapes of wrath,
With liberation dead on the vine.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“This book attempts to evaluate the roles of the traditional landowners (whose reckless lifestyles led to bankruptcy and the acquisition of their lands by commercially-minded entrepreneurs); the new breed of accountant trustees (for whom financial probity was paramount); the Highland Potato Famine; James Cheyne, the clearing landlord; events elsewhere on Lismore, particularly on the Baleveolan estate, factored by Allan MacDougall; the influence of the Lismore Agricultural Society; investment in infrastructure on the Airds estate; the differing fates of farmers and cottars; the lack of alternative employment for the young; and opportunites elsewhere, particularly in the Central Belt of Scotland.”
― Robert Hay, How an Island Lost its People: Improvement, Clearance and Resettlement on Lismore, 1830 - 1914

“Stuck In One's Craw by Stewart Stafford

Nobody's beeswax,' still, you nosily ask:
'Is it the last supper to eat that fast?'
Try blackened potato skin's bitter taste,
A heritage of hunger's grim, gaunt waste.

From Celtic mist, this heir apparent,
My grandparent's grandparent(s),
Survived Ireland's holocaust famine,
As a local catch, not New World salmon.

Crop blight drove their starving plea,
With lots cast bleak to die or flee
Genetic appetite fed the strongest,
Those who eat fastest live longest.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford