Half-baked ideas about Irish history.

By Franklin Foer

After 150 years of calculated disregard, the Irish potato famine has suddenly forced itself onto the U.S. political scene. Thanks to a bill signed by New York Gov. George Pataki, starting next fall, high school students in his state will be legally required to study the Irish potato famine. The legislation amends a 1994 act that mandated students take a course on human rights violations "with particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide, slavery and the Holocaust." Now the mandate also covers "the mass starvation of the Irish between 1845 and 1850."

Similar bills are pending in other states, and a bill pending in Congress would require the Department of Education to include the potato famine in all the model curricula it concocts. Meanwhile, organizers of the upcoming St. Patrick's Day parade in New York have made the famine the "theme" for this year's march, claiming it's a much under-studied instance of genocide. And groups have lobbied for the issue of a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the calamity.

The campaign bespeaks the transformation of Irish-American life. When the Irish were on the way up, intent on mastering and merging into American society, they viewed the Great Hunger as a somewhat shameful episode--a tragedy to be cordoned off in the past and overcome. Now that most have made it, the ethnic remnant that once ruled Tammany Hall, Albany, and Boston, and anointed the governors and presidents, has retreated into victimology.

Even though Irish-Americans face virtually no discrimination, some have embraced a politics modeled after the campaigns of African-Americans and Native Americans demanding their fair historical due--that American institutions recognize their old hardships. Tammany Tiger has died and come back as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the American Irish Teachers Association, the Irish American Foundation, and the Irish-American Caucus--interest groups and old fraternal orders playing new breed-identity politics.

But the potato-famine campaign, and the historical interpretation it aims to canonize, has more to do with the present than the past.

Like the Holocaust for the Jews or slavery for African-Americans, the potato famine is the omnipresent, haunting presence in Irish history. Consider the event's magnitude. At the start of the famine in 1845, nearly 9 million people lived in Ireland. Five years later, the population had dwindled to 6.5 million: Two million had emigrated, and over 1 million had died.

The famine is also synonymous with British oppression. Kept alive by folk tradition, the idea now reverberates in political symbols and pop culture. In speeches, Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political wing, continues to evoke the famine to condemn British occupation of Northern Ireland. IRA prisoners held by the British have famously used hunger striking, in part to allude to the famine--the most monumental historical example of British tyranny. Or take folk rocker Sinead O'Connor's song "Famine," released two years ago. Its lyrics argue that labeling the calamity "famine" fails to draw enough attention to the British role in provoking it.

These arguments draw on an interpretation of the famine that has flourished since the event itself. It goes like this: In 1845, the fungus Phytophora infestans arrived on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, when an infected potato peel from an American ship washed ashore. Within two months the blight had spread across Europe, from Ireland to Scandinavia. But because of a deliberate British policy, the Irish bore the brunt. Ireland's British rulers refused to curtail exports of wheat from the country, which could have fed thousands, and heartless absentee British landlords evicted starving tenants. For their part, the British claimed that laissez-faire policy precluded intervention in the market to halt the crisis, and that the Irish needed to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the interpretation goes, it was really racism and anti-Catholicism that led the Brits to sit on their hands.

By treating the potato famine as a human rights violation, the Pataki potato amendment in New York assumes a variation of this interpretation. Natural disasters don't violate human rights. As in the case of slavery and the Holocaust, alongside which the famine will be taught, there must be a culprit. And that would be the British. Pataki made this explicit at the bill's Albany signing ceremony: "History teaches us that the Great Hunger was not the result of a massive Irish crop failure, but rather a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive."