“Political history, not natural history, turned a potato failure into a famine.”

Between 1845 and 1851, one million people on the island of Ireland died of famine-related causes. Another 1.5 million people emigrated.

On Free State today, historian Padraic X Scanlan, author of the outstanding history of the Famine, Rot, joins us to discuss what caused Ireland to suffer as it did.

He considers the main characters like Charles Treveleyan and the failure of an ideology that believed in the pure virtue of the market. “The blight was a consequence of a novel pathogen spreading among fields of vulnerable plants,” Scanlan writes. “But the famine—a complex ecological, economic, logistical, and political disaster—was a consequence of colonialism.”

Scanlan looks at how Ireland has dealt with the famine and how the potato itself became a symbol for those who blamed the Irish people themselves for the great hunger.

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In Ballymena this week, those who have come from abroad to make their lives in the town were putting union jacks in the window in the hope it would prevent them being attacked.

In the random and brutal rioting that saw the homes and businesses of foreigners attacked and terrorised this was they did to protect themselves and their families.

On Free State today, Joe and Dion ask what is the root cause of this savagery which the police described as feral. Is it hatred or fear, supremacy or inferiority?

Joe looks at how hate has been transferred from nationalists to other minorities - with plenty held back for nationalists too and projects like Casement Park.

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“The kids were coming down for breakfast when these five men wearing cargo pants, big jackets arrived. They came into the third floor, stood in front of the bedroom door, took the three kids back in and told them to pack up. We heard them say: ‘You are going to be deported.’ As soon as the other children heard then they were all crying. It was such a horrific scene.”

This was how a resident in an IPAS centre in West Dublin described the scenes when families were deported last week and sent back to Nigeria.

“This is not a pleasant part of my job,” Jim O’Callaghan said on RTE. On X he said, “Another deportation flight left Dublin last night and landed safely this morning in Lagos, Nigeria. There were 35 people on board who had received but had not complied with Deportation Orders.”

On Free State today, Dion and Joe asked who these messages are aimed at? What is Ireland doing to combat the fantasies being spun by people like Conor McGregor about a lost Ireland that never existed?

Is appealing to those with concerns about immigration necessary to head off the far right or is this world without compassion and empathy Ireland’s dystopian future?

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