“I really did feel I was talking to Sir Charles Trevelyan 122 years ago, assuming all was well in Connaught, that the new potato crop was coming along nicely, and that in any event the Irish always were a bit disorganized.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant to the President for Urban Affairs in the Nixon administration, describing a meeting with a British official who claimed the malnutrition producing famine in Biafra was only 5 or 10 percentage points above normal, quoted in Sam Roberts, “Papers Show Moynihan in Full Voice Under Nixon,” The New York Times, July 3, 2010
You might think that it was mostly by academic training that the late Senator Moynihan possessed a long memory. But the tart voice coming out of the memo quoted above could only come from an Irishman with total recall for historical wrongs.
Moynihan’s sometimes vaguely Anglophilia manner (enhanced by a stint as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in the early 1950s, as well as by a donnish air) could sometimes put people off. But anger over the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, at least on this one occasion, led him to burst out more like a former denizen of Hell’s Kitchen than Harvard Yard.
The bureaucrat Charles Trevelyan—father of the British civil service, and, in the late 1840s, the treasury administrator with primary responsibility for Irish famine relief—is the dominating sensibility—obtuse, hidebound by economic ideology—of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s great history of the Potato Famine, The Great Hunger.
The identity of the British official of the late 1960s who provoked Moynihan’s outburst is unclear from the Times article, but I certainly believe his type existed.
After all, that long blindness on the part of many British government officials persists into our own time. After all, it took the 12-year, $295 million inquiry by Lord Saville before a Conservative Party government finally admitted that government troops had fired without provocation on Ulster Catholics in a 1972 civil-rights march, in the day that will be forever known as Bloody Sunday.
You might think that it was mostly by academic training that the late Senator Moynihan possessed a long memory. But the tart voice coming out of the memo quoted above could only come from an Irishman with total recall for historical wrongs.
Moynihan’s sometimes vaguely Anglophilia manner (enhanced by a stint as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics in the early 1950s, as well as by a donnish air) could sometimes put people off. But anger over the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, at least on this one occasion, led him to burst out more like a former denizen of Hell’s Kitchen than Harvard Yard.
The bureaucrat Charles Trevelyan—father of the British civil service, and, in the late 1840s, the treasury administrator with primary responsibility for Irish famine relief—is the dominating sensibility—obtuse, hidebound by economic ideology—of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s great history of the Potato Famine, The Great Hunger.
The identity of the British official of the late 1960s who provoked Moynihan’s outburst is unclear from the Times article, but I certainly believe his type existed.
After all, that long blindness on the part of many British government officials persists into our own time. After all, it took the 12-year, $295 million inquiry by Lord Saville before a Conservative Party government finally admitted that government troops had fired without provocation on Ulster Catholics in a 1972 civil-rights march, in the day that will be forever known as Bloody Sunday.
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