Understanding our revolution - Our past asks challenging questions

FIVE years ago, Cork University Press published The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. That the book was named the best Irish book published in 2012 gave only a hint of how comprehensive it is and how influential it was to become in our appreciation of that awful time.

That book gave witness to the tens of thousands of Irish people buried in mass graves or lost on their journey to a country — Britain, Canada, or America primarily — where they hoped they might find a kinder, less inhuman fate. Some succeeded, many did not.

That atlas may not have rescued the Famine’s victims from the obscurity the passage of time imposes — they are utterly, utterly gone now, however, it revies the tragedy in a way that gives us and perpetuates, a far better, more rounded understanding of our past. A theme, maybe the over-riding and most important one of that book was to try to understand why such a catastrophe should or could, unfold in 19th