Life
b. nr. Liverpool of Irish parents; wrote doct. thesis on the Poor Laws (Ph.D, TCD); appt. Deputy Director of the Belfast Historical Foundation, 1987; Research Fellow, University of Liverpool, 1990; publ. This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (1994), winner of Irish Post Award in 1995; also Death Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ierland (1997) and A Disunited Kingdom? Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1800-1949 (1999).
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Works
This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill &Macmillan 1994), Death Dealing Famine: The Great Hugner in Ireland (London: Pluto 1997); A Disunited Kingdom? Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1800-1949 (Cambridge UP 1999).
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Commentary
British Association for Irish Studies Newsletter, 20 (October 1999), Interview [Focus 10] - discusses position of Ireland in the Union and the development of English nationalism post-devolution; disparages Lord Russell’s failure to stop export of food from Ireland in 1846-52 in comparison with the different measures taken by the Castle in 1782-83; Govt. ‘utterly failed to [provide] a humanitarian response to the escalating mass mortality among a starving people who should never have been seen as marginal within the much trumpeted United Kingdom [...] The British Treasury operated a system of relief which increasingly became a mixture of minimal relief, punitive qualifying criteria and preferred free enterprise. Famine problems in Ireland were a low priority to [a] government at the centre of a large and still expanding empire. […. &c.].’ (BAIS Newsletter, Oct. 1999, pp.2-5.)
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