The Hunger, RTE 1, Monday
As if we didn’t have enough anniversaries to consider at the moment, RTE has reminded us of another – the 175th anniversary of the beginning of the Famine.
Anniversary dates are a curious thing. We tend to go in decades up to 50 and then in jumps of 25 until we forget about things altogether around 200 years.
Although, we can transfer to people’s birth date if we’re looking for a reason to commemorate someone. Recently, for instance, the music world marked the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birthday.
Regardless, the famine is one of the most significant events in Irish history and a reminder for new generations is always a good thing.
The consequences were horrific. One million died (around one in eight of the population) and up to two million more emigrated. The population of the country would never recover and the enormous Irish diaspora was established, particularly in the new worlds of the US, Canada and Australia.
It began in 1845 when a potato blight travelled on ships from the Andes, with the first famines beginning in mainland Europe.
But the prevailing conditions in Ireland meant the death toll was much worse here.
The principle problems were that the Irish relied on the single crop more than other nations, the existing abject poverty of the tenant farmers and the intransigence of the British rulers.
It’s striking that just before the famine, in the census of 1841, that the population of Ireland (eight million) was one third of the population of the UK.
This leads to a theory that the British were happy to allow the famine to thin the population of the Irish underclass, although there was a more complex picture.
While some of the British ruling class raised money to feed the starving, the majority official position appears to have veered between Trevelyan’s view of the blight as an ‘act of God’ not to be interfered with and the idea that to give the Irish free food would simply encourage them in their fecklessness.
It was one of the first acts of Tony Blair when he became prime minister in 1997 to apologise for Britain’s role in the deaths of so many in Ireland.
"That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people," he said.
The Hunger, a two-part series which concludes on Monday, was a solid job featuring some of our finest historians, including the pre-eminent Professor Joe Lee.
Convince your children to watch it.
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The World’s Biggest Murder Trial – Nuremberg, Channel 5, Tuesday
The second commemoration programme of the week was the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which opened in November 1945, a matter of months after the end of the Second World War.
This was a fine effort by Channel 5 and it remains arresting to see the highest-ranking Nazis – Goring, Donitz, Hess, Jodl, Speer et al – in moving pictures and disturbing to view again the horror of their regime’s most serious crime, the Holocaust.
Despite the outcome being preordained, the Allies were keen to demonstrate the legal process and avoid accusations of a victor’s justice.
It was only partially true of course. The crimes of the Soviet Union, particularly in Poland, were forgotten with the victorious Soviets represented among the Nuremberg judges.
And we also tend to forget the Tokyo Trials, which opened with less haste, in April 1946.
Nonetheless, fine television if you want to see it on catch up.
