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|title=The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy

|sort=Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy, The

|borrow=Yes

|isbn=9780230109520

|pages=288

|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan

|date=November 2012

|website=http://www.timpatcoogan.com/

|summary=A history of the Irish famine of the 1840s, in which the author argues that Britain was partly responsible for the tragedy in what was one of the earliest recorded cases of ethnic cleansing.

}}

The great famine of Ireland in the 1840s was a major disaster and a tragedy. As a result, about a million of its citizens died from starvation and a further million emigrated, with so many perishing en route that it was said ''you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies.'' The net total was about a quarter of the existing population. Yet as Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan argues in this account, the famine was more than a tragedy. The title indicates a fierce polemic, and the thrust of his book is that the British government of the day was not merely responsible for exacerbating the famine conditions through mismanagement and failure to respond adequately to the failure of the potato crop, but in fact deliberately engineered a food shortage in what was one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing.

This is a forcefully argued and very angry book. Reading it will certainly bring home the general horror of the events it describes in such detail. Thankfully, despite the passion with which every page is written, the author concludes that a country which could weather such a trauma could also emerge with some strength from its contemporary difficulties, as 'a land that could survive the Famine can survive anything'.

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