The history of Ireland
A powerful Irish film about the Great Famine reaches British cinemas
“Arracht” takes viewers back to the dark period between 1845 and 1855
It would be wrong to say that Irish people do not commemorate the Great Famine. Since Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom a century ago, generations of schoolchildren have learned that, between 1845 and 1855, the island’s population fell by perhaps a third after a million people died of starvation and disease, and perhaps twice as many were forced to emigrate. The proximate cause was a blight which ruined the potato crop on which small-holders, especially in the country’s rocky west, were dependent for survival. Among the background causes was a system of land ownership in which swathes of the country were controlled by English grandees who had no interest in their tenants except as a source of revenue.
In many parts of Ireland there are monuments devoted to this horrific episode in history. In a remote part of Mayo, for example, people walk to a memorial stone to remember the fate of hundreds of sick and hungry people who were forced to make a long march to present themselves for famine relief. A permanent exhibition in Dublin displays photographs, testimonies and other artefacts from the period.
Despite that, for the places and communities that were most acutely affected, the sheer ghastliness of what happened has remained to some extent a private memory, passed down in the intimate lore of families who felt the details were too grim to be shared with outsiders. Padraig O Tuama, an internationally known poet and theologian, says that one of his forebears was probably the only member of his immediate family to survive the famine; taken in by a Protestant teacher at the age of seven, he left at 14 and spent the rest of his life searching vainly for his kin. Many others from Ireland’s far west could tell such stories but generally prefer to keep them private.
That reluctance may be shifting now, with the release in British cinemas of “Arracht” (“Monster”, pictured), an Irish-language film. Shot on a low budget, the film nevertheless gained keen attention on the festival circuit and was Ireland’s submission to the Best International Feature Film category of the Academy Awards in 2021 (though it was not nominated). It is the second film in recent years to examine the suffering of the famine; the first, “Black ’47” (2018), followed an Irish veteran of the British forces who finds his community starving and sets about taking revenge.
The story of an individual caught up in the wider tragedy, “Arracht” is more solemn and slow-moving by comparison. The intense, brooding hero is a farmer and fisherman called Colman Sharkey, who protests to his Anglo-Irish landlord about rising rates and warns that half the local community may die within months. After a shootout at the landlord’s house—for which he is wrongly blamed—Colman is forced to flee and takes refuge in a cave. Still pining for the wife and infant son he has left behind, the fugitive adopts a starving orphan girl and they help each other to endure some terrible adversity.
Donall O Healai, who plays Colman, is a native Irish speaker from the west of Ireland. After he was hired by Tom O’Sullivan, the film’s director (who also uses the Irish version of his name, Tomas O Suilleabhain), Mr O Healai had to starve himself for many weeks to achieve a credible look of emaciation. The relationship between him and the girl he adopts, played by Saise Ni Chuinn, provides some of the most powerful moments in the film.
But its most haunting feature is not any one character but the numinous and beautifully filmed landscape of Ireland’s west coast, materially the poorest but perhaps culturally the richest part of the island. Travelling anywhere along that coastline brings a sense that an entire Gaelic world came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation but somehow survived, at least in parts. The governments of independent Ireland carefully tended to the fragments that remained.
The film draws viewers into that shadowy world and brings home the miracle of its endurance. “Arracht” was filmed largely in the settlement of Lettermullen, on the Galway coast, with locals helping out as extras. Although it enjoys handsome subsidies, the world of Irish-language creativity (a mixture of ordinary folk in remote places who have never lost the tongue, and Dublin intellectuals such as Mr Sullivan) is a small and intimate one. With this film, that community has shared some of its inner life with the wider world.
The result is a tough but beautiful watch which takes viewers right to the dark heart of events that defined the history of the British Isles, and created what many still see as an unbridgeable gap between the English and the Irish. When British newspapers—including The Economist—ganged up to editorialise that the famine was the result of the victims’ fecklessness, that augmented the tide of Irish anger and helped to make a political separation between Britain and Ireland inevitable.
Attempts by British governments to apologise for the famine, and for the government policies that compounded the suffering, have so far failed to strike the right note. It did not help when it emerged recently that Tony Blair’s expression of regret, issued in 1997, was in fact penned by a civil servant and was never seen by the prime minister. Perhaps this film will help people in England empathise with Ireland, and understand the half-hidden well of Irish rage, a bit better. ■
“Arracht” is released in British cinemas on October 15th