This is hard to evaluate since I've read almost nothing else about the famine aside from novels, and not very many of those, in fact. Coogan, a veteran journalist (the Irish Times, I think?) believes that most previous scholarship has been far too kind to the English, presumably because no serious person wanted to make the IRA even angrier than they already were. Coogan takes the gloves off and calls the famine genocide, including the Geneva convention definition as an appendix. At the same time, he is very careful to make distinctions among the players: the first famine Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, was ineffective but tried to ameliorate the problem. The second, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, was far worse, not least because he left the purse strings in the hands of Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Trevelyan is on record as saying that the famine would deal effectively with the problem of excess population in Ireland, thereby clearing the land for highly profitable cattle rather than potatoes (and the poor buggers who farmed them.) Challenging reading which assumes a good bit of prior knowledge of the land, the people, and their history.
N.B. The Quakers earn a lot of praise from Coogan - efficient, hard-working, compassionate, and not interested in converting anyone from Popery in exchange for a meal.
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