A deeply stricken country

When, many years ago, I finished reading Cecil Woodham-Smith’s fine and tragic The Great Hunger, I swore never to read another book about the Irish famine of 1845-9. But they continue to be published, and they do not always agree. Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says everything about the book, claims that ‘fully a quarter’ of Ireland’s population died of starvation or emigrated. John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking puts the proportion at one third. There is a huge difference between one third and one quarter. Which is correct?

There is also much emotion. Coogan writes:

If ever one required an object lesson as to the validity of a saying I first heard in Vietnam — ‘when elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled and the people are the grass’ — one need look no further than Ireland.

But if the analogy is to make any sense at all, who are the elephants? Again, Coogan quotes A.J.P.