Cultural Impact of the Irish Famine

Aware of it as an event, the famine?

I don't think we own it.

Uh,

well, I'll, I'll say two things about that.

Um, first of all, like, um, you could say

that in Ireland, you know, the survivors, um, of the, the

famine, it was difficult. Like, who wa- who wa- And for us, you know, like,

you know, five or six generations down, right?

Who wants to be told that their ancestors, you know, their

great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother, uh, you know, died on

the side of the road with the grass stains on their mouth because, y- you know,

they, like, they were treated like animals

and then they end up in bestial kind of

situation. It's not exactly a feel-good story,

you know? Is it?

Uh, so, like, we did sweep it under the carpet.

Do you think there's, there's a shame attached to it?

Yes, I absolutely think there was shame attached to it, and like,

you know,

we abandoned a huge amount. You know, we switched our language.

Mm-hmm.

Níl mé ag caint as Gaeilge, leath anois.

The, the Irish language, be- pre-famine was a bilingual culture.

Post-famine, it was increasingly just an English-only

culture, and you know, you

are marooned when you switch a language.

You leave a lot behind-

Yeah

... when you switch a language. And in some ways, we,

we still haven't really fully

kind of recovered from that either.

No other country in Europe, not one, has lost its language as much as

Ireland has. Now, that's one way of looking at it,

but the other thing one might

say is really if you look for the Irish response to the famine, it's the

Irish Revival itself. Like, why, why in the, from the

1880s to the 1920s did we produce-

Okay

... the greatest poet in the world at that time, in the Anglophone world anyway,

Yeats? Why did we produce the greatest novelist,

Joyce?

Why did we produce a, a tremendous slew of, uh, dramatists,

you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And the reason I, I would argue is because they're the ones who have to

take

responsibility for the famine. They're the ones who have to reimagine

Ireland

but in the English language. Because in a sense,

we had to make ourselves up.

We had to re- reinvent ourselves in the Irish language

from switching from

the Irish language to the English language.

You know, we had to kind of find a way to be Irish

in the English language-

Yeah

... and we had to take and break the English language

and remold it to

Irish purposes, but it's the post-famine generation

which does it, and then

they reinvent Ireland, and then that becomes, um, you know, takes a

political response later.

So-

But it's a, it's a legacy of the famine, Tommy.

The Irish Revival at the end of the 19th century is the real

cultural response to the famine.