Irish Famine – English reporter describes fault of British government

One of England’s most celebrated TV reporters has described how the British ruling class was to blame for the deaths of up to a million people during the Great Famine in Ireland.

Mike Nicholson worked for ITN, the top commercial TV news service in the UK. His work took him to crisis spots all across the world covering wars, rebellions and famines. However, he says he never encountered anything on the scale of the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s, when a million people died and as many more were forced to emigrate.

Nicholson started out thinking that the British had been blamed unfairly for what happened, but the more he researched the subject, the more convinced he became of the guilt of the British government, particularly Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant supposedly in charge of famine relief.
Nicholson published a novel called Dark Rosaleen, which examines the issues of what happened and who was to blame. Here we read Nicholson’s own words from a personal article he wrote for the Irish Times , describing what made him research the Famine and write the novel.

Nicholson begins: “A million dead. A million fled.” It was those few words that had such an impact on me. Think of it. Try putting it into a modern context, something you are watching on television news, an apocalyptic disaster on an unheard-of scale, something that dwarfs Hiroshima.”

Watch the video for the full story.

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