I'm afraid the whole "lets imagine how people suffered in the evil past" thing does nothing for me, and in many cases inflames imagined passions in the present - we had enough of the "up the rebels" v "Down with the Pope" in the recent troubles.
This is not to devalue the unimaginable suffering that the "hungry forties" were. I must be one of the few Yorkies without ancestors who fled Ireland during that time and whose families only got out of the slums after the Great War.