The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm) is a thoroughly conventional retelling of one of the darkest chapters in Irish history – and it is all the better for it. The sheer horror of the Great Famine is devastatingly conveyed with contemporaneous accounts. “Are we really living in a portion of the United Kingdom?”‘The British abandoned people to starvation,’ says Prof Kevin Whelan. The case can be made that the Famine changed Ireland forever and that we live today in its shadow. Left for another time is the debate about whether the Great Hunger qualifies as genocide as we define it in the 21st century.

Source: The Irish Times November 30, 2020 22:35 UTC