"that is what my ancestors called "
I was surprised when I first heard it called 'The Irish Holocaust' but found it to be quite common when we moved here
The publicaton of Sir Charles Trevelyan's letter describing the Famine as 'God's punishment on the lazy Irish' tends to bear out that description and the closure of Peel's relief programme and the adoption of a policy which restricted the distribution of relief in order to protect type market prices is further evidence
It is a fact that there was enough food in Ireland to feed the population four times over, it was never distributed but kept in locked warehouses under military guard - whether that was a deliberate attempt to starve the Irish off their land or 'to solve the Irish problem' is really immaterial - 1 million died o starvation and illnesses related to the conditions and a million were forced to emigrate

One of the great mysteries (nor really) is the fact that for a century and a half there was only one major study of the famine, written by an Englishwoman, Mrs Cecil Woodham Smith - damning enough but extremely limited in scope.
The 150th anniversary, when Ireland was still basking in the glow of 'The Celtic Tiger', led to a landslide of published works on the famine
During one of these threads someone introduced me to the writings of Christine Kenneally - now the most respected Famine Historian
Jim Carroll