"As for your concern about historians.
Can we clear this thing up about education and historians once and for all.
Historians today have slated past historians for dealing only with the effects of the famine - a tug on the emotional (National) heartstrings, rather than examining why what happened, happened.
Both Kinealy and Neilson seem to be arguing that nobody, to date, has dealt in any detail with the causes of the Famine.
Kinealy says that the reason for this, and the reason for why so many historians continue to do so, is to run the risk of handing the dissident Republican factions propaganda ammunition - a hint that she believes that the facts actually bear out the Republican (political) case.
It is automatically assumed that the responsibility for the Famine lies with the British - how could it be otherwise; Britain ruled Ireland and controlled its economy.
It was as responsible for assisting the Famine victims as it would have been if it had taken place in Manchester, Birmingham or Bristol; it chose not to help other than to provide financial assistance to leave Ireland
Any material assistance for the starving Irish came from charities such as the Quakers, and in some case, even this came with the price of changing your religion in exchange for a bowl of soup (not from the Quakers, I hasten to add).
This said, in the half a century I have been personally associated with Ireland, I have never encountered a scrap of anti-English racist abuse; that period includes the 20 years of partition and sectarian -generated 'Troubles'
We, and dozens more English people visited this town to see it draped in black flags at the time the hunger strikers were dying and received the same welcome we have always received.
This isn't to say that the Irish don't hate our politicians - don't we all?
Apart from one exception (itinerancy) the only place there is a significant race or sectarian problem in in the 'British' north, with arson attacks on the homes of asylum seekers and annual aggressive marches.
It is a scurrilous lie to suggest that Irish people have been taught, or believe in any way, that the English as a race are to blame for the Famine.
Jim Carroll