Maggie O’Farrell

So

There's a huge disparity in that and of course the reason would be that there are many, many complicated political, socio-economic, colonialist reasons for why the famine was so particularly devastating in Ireland.

And I'm just going to tell you one thing.

The man who was appointed famine relief officer was a man called Charles Trevelyan and he worked for the British government.

He wrote in a letter that the famine was an act of God, a punishment for an idle, ungrateful people.

After he wrote this, a year after he wrote this, he was given a knighthood for his services.

So this is a man whose job it was to give famine relief, but his attitude to it was that it was an act of God and a punishment for people who were lazy.

They were very brutal places.

In order to go into one, you had to give up your land in order to get the relief of the workhouse, so to speak.

Not only that, you had to basically give up your family because when you went in, you were separated husband from wife, children were separated from parents.

And I think what happened was often you were separated and it seemed to me that there was a whole swathe of children, particularly, who actually had no idea if they happened to survive, which was not a given.

Just the idea of where they were from and where they belonged and who their people were had completely gone.

There was a story that I read about a young girl who was from Killarney and when she went into the workhouse they made a mistake and they put down that she was from Killarney.

And her father had emigrated to America and the rest of the family had died and he knew that there was one child who'd survived and he came back to find her and he said, I've come for my daughter from Killarney.

And they said, we don't have anyone from Killarney.

And the father went back to America without her and she was left behind.

Of course, they had no way of finding him.

And that one tiny story just absolutely skewed me through the heart.

It's such a tragic representation of just a tiny administrative slip-up, but the disaster that it causes in both these people's lives.

So I had to put a version of that into the novel.