No, I hadn't, Asha. It's nice to meet you. Only last night, the boys and I were watching the movie "The Stone of Destiny."
What she says is true, though. There shouldn't have been a famine. There was other food in the country besides potatoes, and plenty of it, as the country was even more agricultural then than now.
I often wondered how my family and the others that remained managed. When I asked my Dad, he just shook his head and looked at the sea. His grandparents were famine survivors. He was very sarcastic when he said that the priests stayed fat during the famine. I think he felt that they betrayed the Irish as well. In spite of that clarity about "the way things were," he remained faithful to his last.
It would be just perfect if it was the potato that at last saved the Irish. The people over there have just tightened their belts; they're well used to it. There was a little piece in "The Economist" about a year ago that said that the Irish had cut back drastically on their spending and had increased their savings by some significant percentage that now escapes me.
Personally, I had been shaking my head over and over again, these past 15 years or so of the Celtic Tiger, smelling a bubble of the worst kind. The Unkind Kind. That 15 years of prosperity was barely long enough for the population to get acclimated. Witness the wild prices on the homes and the preponderance of BMWs, Mercs, and Rolexes. It was almost like everyone was having one great party before the other shoe dropped. And drop it did. Now they're trying to patch it back together. And they will. They're not quitters, and Irish families generally pull together, especially when times get tough. If the famine left any impact on the Irish psyche, it was a relentless drive to keep improving their lives.
