Famine food ‘facts’ don’t add up

With reference to Shane Minogue’s letter (Apr 17), I think it is high time that mis-statements regarding export of “food” during the Great Famine were challenged.

The “food” which Ireland exported both before and during the Famine was mainly oats. Oats, as Dr Johnson famously stated in his dictionary, are “usually given to horses”. In the contemporary period the preparation of oats for human consumption took four to five hours. Oats were used in some of the workhouses, and the flax growing area in the North, but It is doubtful whether the average Irish farmer would have had either the knowledge, or the means, of rendering them palatable.

One also wonders what the likes of Shane Minogue would be saying now if the British had only supplied the starving Irish people with food which, in that period, was “usually given to horses”.