"No Greater Evil Than Interfering with Market Forces"

"Recognizing that the British handling of the famine was 'parsimonious, short-sighted, grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology' rather than deliberately genocidal is important because while powerful, paranoid, racist madmen like Hitler are relatively rare, our own time is replete with men like Trevelyan. The Moralists saw the famine as a combination of divine judgement on the Irish people and the market working itself out in accordance with God’s plan, an equation of brutal capitalism with pseudo-Christian piety that can be just as destructive as outright malevolence."

Laura Miller in Salon reviews John Kelly's The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People.