Of Famine and Green Beer
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The 1997 St. Patrick's Day parades commemorated the 150th anniversary of "Black '47," the worst year of the Irish potato famine. "The Great Hunger" was the most searing event in Ireland's long and sad history. It killed a million Irish and drove a million and a half more to America. Among them were Ellen Burke and Thomas Leo, my great-grandparents.
It was the last big famine in Western Europe and the greatest loss of life in the century between the Napoleonic wars and World War I. When a wind-borne fungus wiped out the potato crop, the Irish died of yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, and starvation. They ate dogs and rats, often dogs and rats that had already eaten human corpses. When one English traveler spat out some gooseberry skins from a passing carriage, a mother raced to pick up the skins and place them in the mouth of her starving infant. The roadways were littered with bodies of people with green stains around the mouth, from eating grass as a desperate last meal...