Good coverage there by Allen Conn.

I should clarify - I'm not at all saying that the famine in Scotland was not a terrible one - it's a sensitive subject in Scotland, I know, because the massive clearances of tenants, to be replaced by more profitable and compliant sheep, were done by "our own" rather than by the hated government in Britain.

No, I don't give "the nationalist version" of anything; I give the human version.

There were two groups of real heroes in the Irish Famine: the Quakers and the Choctaw people.

The Quakers, meticulous and wary of groupthink, made studies of the situation and did what they could to rectify it, setting up soup kitchens where people could get food without any requirement to betray their own sect, and buying nets and licences for the starving fishing families of the Claddagh, for instance. They made a study of fishing conditions and revealed that the normally rich fish stocks off the west coast of Ireland had moved due to climatic changes and the seas were virtually empty.

The Choctaw collected a large fund and sent it to buy food for the starving, an action which has led to continued links to this day.

Others internationally helped; in one case an Indian maharajah, whose name escapes me right now, was about to send a good chunk of money when he was quietly taken aside and asked to send less - his donation was much larger than Queen Victoria's, and she would have been embarrassed, though starvation (http://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/famine.gif) was possibly more embarrassing for those without food... Fynes Morrison's description of three children "all eating and gnawing with their teeth the entrails of their dead mother" is typical of the reports. But maybe this is just the nationalist viewpoint, and it was rather nice really.