At first, Seymour wondered whether anyone would reply to his invitation. He needn’t have worried. “Within a fortnight I had sufficient material to make a book,” he recalled later; “within a month I had so much material that I could pick and choose.” Seymour’s True Irish Ghost Stories was published the following year. Reading the book on the last train home, my face doubling in the window during the black interludes between stations, I wondered what a more modest appeal for Irish ghost stories would produce today. So I began to ask around.

Claire, one of the people I heard from, used to work in the Old Library at Queen’s University Belfast. One evening, not long before closing time, a man strolled in through the door. Normally Claire would approach latecomers to remind them that the library would soon shut. But on this occasion, she decided to leave well alone. “I made a snap judgment”, she says, “that there was something a bit off about him, and actually I didn’t want to speak with him unless I had to”. He was dressed in an antiquated fawn raincoat, and there was something strange about the way he moved through the old building, first built in 1868 and subject to many changes since. “His path through the library,” Claire says, “just seemed somehow out of line with the entrances and archways.”

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He walked deeper into the library, towards an area dedicated to reference works, and disappeared from view. When the time came to close up, Claire realized that she hadn’t seen the man leave. Not wanting to lock him in for the night, she went looking for him in the reference section. He was nowhere to be found. She thought little of it at the time, despite his unsettling demeanor. He must have left without her noticing. It was only years later that she discovered two things. First, that a student once claimed to have seen a man walk through the wall of the reference section. Second, “there used to be an exit in that area, that had later been blocked off. It was behind the wall.”

A ghost in the workplace is unnerving enough. But while haunted libraries can be avoided if need be, there is no avoiding your own home — a place where, as Seymour noted, the “poor human being is placed at such a disadvantage”. Orla, another contributor, was three years old when she saw a ghost at her house in Portstewart. She doesn’t remember the experience herself, but the story has entered family legend. “My grandfather had died the week before,” she tells me. “Apparently I was looking out through the door into the hallway and saying ‘Poppa, Poppa, I want to see Poppa’.” Orla’s mother said that there was no one there. Orla insisted that there was. “My mother was genuinely spooked, I think because I was so earnest about it,” Orla recalls. “Things like that are scary enough to experience yourself, but it’s worse to see it through the eyes of your child.”

Seymour didn’t believe that Ireland was any more haunted than other parts of the world. Nor did he think that the Irish were any more given to superstition than the average Englishman. He did, however, suspect that religion had a role to play. As an Anglican cleric, he wondered whether Irish Catholicism had incorporated “certain elements which may be traced back to pre-Christian times” — resulting in a more richly supernatural cultural lexicon. This is rather amusing coming from a man who had written a book about witches and subsequently spent a year eagerly collecting ghost stories for publication, especially since a great many of his respondents were Protestants themselves.

Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that Ireland can draw on a wealth of ancient ghostly lore. One of the earliest Irish ghost stories appears in the Ulster Cycle, a series of linked epic tales preserved in medieval manuscripts, but certainly much older. The Adventures of Nera takes place on Samhain night, at the court of Queen Medb at Raíth Cruachan. When Nera is challenged to tie a supple twig around the ankle of a hanged man, the swinging corpse offers him helpful advice on how best to secure the binding. He then demands a drink, and Nera carries him from house to house until something is found to quench the cadaver’s thirst. Things go downhill from there, as Nera is subjected to horrifying visions of destruction and eventually finds himself in the Otherworld. This is a truly Irish tale, born of the island’s ancient literature. The complex of archaeological sites associated with Cruachan still lie in County Roscommon today, as does the so-called “Cave of Cats”  — a granite opening said to be one of the entrances to the Otherworld.

Other phantasmagorical traditions have emerged over the years. There’s an entire scholarly industry devoted to what you might call the “Irish Protestant weird”, exemplified in the fiction of Bram Stoker, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charlotte Riddell. And, of course, each townland will have its own stories, its own reservations about certain lanes or bridges after night has fallen.

If I have a misgiving about Seymour’s book, it’s that his tales don’t reflect the depth and complexity of Ireland’s ghostly cultures, whose antiquity and energetic cross-pollination resist summary. For the most part, they are ghost stories that happen in Ireland, not Irish ghost stories. You could transpose them to Caithness or Norfolk without losing much. This may have something to do with his method of collection. Ask the readers of The Irish Times for paranormal experiences and you are going to receive answers from a very particular stratum of society.

Yet there are certain threads that feel quite specific to Ireland, chiefly the matter-of-fact way in which the supernatural is discussed. So, when a visiting Major is shoved awake in the middle of the night and grasps a human hand, “warm, plump, and soft”, the servants inform him that this is merely old Aunt Betty, 50 years in the grave. And when a squireen is driven from his new country pile by phantom knocks at the front door, a local herdsman says not to worry — it’s just the specter of a former resident. Yes, it’s a bit of a nuisance, but the knocking will stop in time. If Seymour’s tales seem a bit dated, then consider the 2015 case of Jack McKee. A councilor in Larne, McKee objected to the installation of a plaque in memory of eight women and one man who were pilloried and jailed as witches in 1711. His grounds for complaint were simple: he “could not tell whether or not the women were rightly or wrongly convicted”.

Orla agrees there’s a frankness about ghostly matters in Ireland. Recently, sitting with her boyfriend’s family, she realized that everyone had a tale to tell, including one alarming experience of a headless rider on the Donegal backroads. When I ask whether she thinks that Ireland is a more haunted place than England, a country with its own proud ghostly traditions, she doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely. 100%. Perhaps because a lot of bad things happened here. Or whether we’re just more likely to take this stuff seriously… But it’s not a reach to say this is a much ghostlier country [than England]. There’s definitely truth in that.”

Naturally, Ireland has always had its skeptics too. A flick through the August 1812 edition of the Belfast Monthly Magazine uncovers a pseudonymous piece entitled “On Ghosts”. The author wonders why, given the marvelous advances of the age, so “many remnants of superstition still linger amongst us”. He concludes that stories learned in childhood are chiefly to blame, and admits that “in spite of skepticism, I am rather afraid to remain in a room without light, which I ascribe to the numerous hobgoblin stories I heard in infancy”. Even William Carleton, the great 19th-century collector of Irish folk tales, warned against “the popular nonsense of ghosts”. This would be a more forceful statement if it did not come at the end of “The Fate of Frank M’Kenna”, in which Carleton breathlessly relates the tale of a ghost who insists on the charitable donation of his best breeches.

Still, even those who are unconvinced by ghostly phenomena can have uncanny things happen to them. At the age of seven, Stephen attended a family wedding at Glenavna House Hotel in Whiteabbey, on the northern shore of Belfast Lough, where he and his cousin spent the day playing in the grounds. “We were just running about, and the two of us saw…” He pauses for a slightly embarrassed laugh and continues: “When we saw what we immediately went and told people was a ghost of a young woman wearing blue.” She was moving through the trees. And then she wasn’t. Gone. “We both saw this independently. And it wasn’t as if either of us were prone to making shit up, basically. But whatever we saw, we saw something.”

Stephen doesn’t believe he saw a ghost that day, merely describing the experience, and what followed, as “a deeply weird coincidence.” Weird enough to remember — and weird enough to bear repeating long after that afternoon in Whiteabbey. Because, as with Claire, the conclusion came some time afterwards: “It must have been 15 years later that I found out about a particularly grisly murder that happened there, almost in the exact spot that we supposedly saw whatever we saw.”

Like Orla, Stephen thinks there’s something about Ireland. A small tremble where there should be stillness. In part, he attributes this to both geography and history, an island at the end of Europe that has seen centuries of turmoil. “The wound of the famine is surely in a collective residual memory in one way or another,” he says. “I can’t imagine that there isn’t something that’s left after that. So I think that there’s not a lot of…” He pauses, hunts for words. “English rationality kind of doesn’t exist in the same way.” He finishes with another laugh.

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I’m not sure I believe in English rationality — the oeuvre of M.R. James is dedicated to the slow sanding away of that particular veneer — but I take Stephen’s point. It seems to me that ghost stories are a good way of metabolizing time, change and pain. They may not be believed by the listener, or even by the teller. When Claire, Orla and Stephen speak to me, they all give caveats of one sort or another. None are convinced that they saw a ghost. And yet the unsettling moment is remembered. The story is told.

“On November eve,” wrote W. B. Yeats, “the dead are abroad, and dance with the fairies.” Halloween or Samhain, whichever you prefer, is a time for uncanny tales. Most of all, a time for tales that encourage us to pay attention. Stephen likens ghost stories to old customs around fairy thorns. “You don’t cut down hawthorn trees,” he says. “They serve a purpose in the places that they are. I’d wonder if seemingly irrational explanations for things are actually the result of however many hundreds of generations of received wisdom.” Perhaps strange stories and traditions, whether Irish or English, have this in common: they invite us to take care. To pay close attention to the world around us. They remind us of doors, long bricked-up, waiting patiently behind the wall.

There’s plenty of food just beyond Gaza’s borders, just as in the Irish famine of the 1840s there was plenty of food in Great Britain. Almost 50 years before, Britain and Ireland had entered into a political union, so one might think that a famine in County Cork would have been treated in much the same way as one in Kent or Sussex. The British state, however, wouldn’t have allowed a million people to die of starvation in the Home Counties, but seemed rather more relaxed about the prospect of children in Galway or Donegal stumbling around with permanently green mouths because of the grass they stuffed into them.

When the British finally got their act together and provided soup kitchens in Ireland, it was far too late. Before then, ideological dogma prevented them from giving anything free to the poor. So famished men and women had to take up picks and shovels they scarcely had the energy to hold in order to build pointless roads, futile towers and other edifices for a nominal wage. You can still see these famine works in Ireland today: roads to nowhere, pathways laid down and then dug up again and rebuilt, all to preserve the principle that giving charity to the dying undermines their moral independence. A good many morally independent men and women lie buried throughout the country. Those who couldn’t stand on their own two feet with empty bellies were sent to the dreaded workhouse.

It’s clear that starvation in Gaza is being used as a political weapon, and this was also the case in Ireland. There was indeed a disaster — the failure of the potato crop across almost the whole country for several successive years; but it wasn’t natural at all, since one has to ask why at least a third of the Irish population was forced to rely on potatoes alone for their daily nourishment. The fact is, there was food in Ireland — it’s just that much of it took the form of crops, which the small tenant farmers had to sell in order to pay the landlord’s rent, while they themselves subsisted, for the most part, on potatoes. No Anglo-Irish landowners were stripped to skeletons.

Like some in the Israeli Cabinet, many in Westminster saw hunger as a political instrument. Some politicians saw in the famine a God-given chance to shake up this pathologically indolent nation and reorganise its ramshackle agriculture along the lines of the thriving British farm. Providentially, the potato blight killed off or drove into emigration a great many cottiers, rural laborers and small tenant farmers, whose pathetic patches of land could then be consolidated into more economically viable units.

Some Irish nationalists at the time denounced the whole project as genocidal, a view which modern Irish historians, anxious not to give comfort to the IRA, have generally derided. A number of them, however, have now come round to exactly that claim, just as the most unlikely people are beginning to believe that genocide may not be an excessively lurid term for the situation in Gaza. Some bien-pensant middle-class liberals are having to adjust their views in this respect. They might even come to admit that their past support for Israel has helped to embolden its predatory activities.

Hunger can be used by the people against their rulers as well as the other way round. Margaret Thatcher’s government was confronted with a hunger strike by Irish Republican convicts demanding the status of political prisoners, and responded to it without the faintest understanding of the history and significance of hunger-striking in Ireland. In fact, almost the entire treatment of the country by the British state during the Troubles overlooked that sagacious maxim, “Know Your Enemy”. In medieval times, a “mere Irishman” who felt that his lord had denied him justice might starve himself to death on his doorstep. The point of hunger striking isn’t to refuse food, but to refuse food from a certain source, and thus to deny that source any power over you. It may drive you to death, but it can’t rob you of your autonomy, an autonomy achieved by doing precisely nothing. By discarding your body, you also discard those who would seek to use it for their own ends. You can turn your utter powerlessness into a kind of victory. (Though whether killing yourself in the name of a united nation is a morally permissible act is another question. There’s a thin line between the genuine martyr, one who dies so that others may live, and the suicidal.)

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It’s ironic that the Irish Republican prisoners’ demand was so moderate. Whatever atrocities they may have perpetrated, and there were certainly a number of truly vicious types among them, it was obvious that they were political prisoners, and should therefore have been granted the rights usually associated with that status. Refusing to do so was simply vindictive. Would they have gone around torturing and murdering for any reason other than to secure a united Ireland? Not even the apartheid government of South Africa pretended that Nelson Mandela was in the same category as a serial rapist. If you insist on viewing your political adversaries, however violent, as nothing but common thugs, it becomes harder to beat them. You have to try and see the world as they see it, if only to challenge their power.

The opposite of the hunger striker today is the people of Gaza, whose shrunken bodies reveal their political impotence. In his book Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes of the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps as exhibiting what he calls “bare life”, existing in some liminal state between life and death. Such men and women are images of Nazi power at its extreme; but they are also in a sense independent of that power, since they are no longer responsive to it and appear not to care whether they live or die. You can’t conquer an enemy who doesn’t even acknowledge you. The bodies of these inmates are dehumanized, but it’s in this way that they are also most human, since to be deprived of one’s humanity is a fundamental possibility of being human. Being human is more than a biological affair, since it involves that surplus or excess over bare humanity which we call culture or civilization. Excess — having more than we strictly need — is part of our nature, so that having only what is strictly necessary, like having less than it, disfigures what we are.

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Some on the Israeli far-Right deny that there’s any hunger in Gaza, which casts some interesting light on the nature of ideology. What I mean by ideology is not doctrines or systems of ideas, but those values and beliefs which are so close to us that they are hard to objectify. It is the invisible color of everyday life — a matter of what Donald Rumsfeld might have called “unknown knowns” (though he missed that one out of his classifications). Certain convictions are vital to our identity, and those who hold them will sometimes swear that black is white if the alternative is to abandon their whole sense of selfhood.

There’s no end to the rationalizations by which men and women might evade a truth which involves having to transform their identities. You start by insisting that Hamas is hijacking all the food in Gaza, or that TV images of starving children have been lifted from elsewhere, and end up claiming that Palestinians tend to be rather scrawny in build and are allergic to flour, while those who aren’t are on hunger strike. Whenever there’s a sudden drop in the intellectual temperature, one can usually be sure that one is in the presence of ideology, which means that there are certain things that must, at all costs, not be said.

Whether she has or hasn’t, you can’t pluck the tormented love story of Heathcliff and Catherine out of its complex context without inflicting some serious damage on Emily Brontë’s fiction. The novel is about a lot more than love. In its intensely materialist way, it also concerns the conflict between nature and culture, labour and gentility, power and rebellion, struggles over property and inheritance, the relations between the English landowning class and the small farmers or yeomanry, and a good deal more besides. 

How do you put these issues on screen? You can’t. You can tell a story entitled “Cathy and Heathcliff”, but it isn’t what Emily Brontë wrote. Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners. The background to the Brontës is the world of poverty, political repression and smouldering social rebellion known as the Hungry Forties. The sisters would have seen a good deal of destitution on their own doorstep, and were alive to the turbulent times in which they lived. They were shrewd, hard-headed, lower-middle-class Yorkshire women, not three weird sisters lost in erotic fantasy in the moorland mists.

Nor is Wuthering Heights what you might call a romance. In fact, you might even call it an anti-romance. The relationship between the two lovers, if you can call it that, is implacably impersonal. There’s a relentless, elemental, even brutal quality to it, which lies much deeper than mere feeling. We are no longer in the mannered world of Jane Austen. Heathcliff is no Hugh Grant but a pitiless exploiter. Beneath his flinty exterior beats a heart of stone. If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue. In his dealings with Catherine, what Freud calls eros and thanatos, sexuality and the drive for extinction, are impossible to disentangle. Like Jane Eyre, the best-known work of Emily’s sister, Charlotte, the novel is shot through with sado-masochism. If this is love, then there’s nothing in the least pleasant or affable about it. One can’t even speak of it as sexual. It’s more like a fight to the death — an absolute, remorseless, inhuman need for each other with a fierce undertow of violence, one which has little to do with tenderness or affection and perhaps refuses to be placated even in the grave. Almost uniquely, we have a Victorian novel which doesn’t end on a genially upbeat note with that magical solution to all human heartache: marriage.

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This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great 18th-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfilment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.

Wuthering Heights may tacitly suggest a reason for the strangely asexual nature of the bond between its protagonists. Heathcliff is brought home one night by Cathy’s father and dumped unceremoniously on the family, but he might be “family” even so. He may be old Earnshaw’s bastard child, in which case he and Catherine are half-siblings, and their non-sexual relation springs from an unconscious incest taboo. It’s hard otherwise to see why this gruff yeoman farmer, who doesn’t seem given to spontaneous acts of charity, should give house-room to such an unprepossessing little brat. We shall, alas, never know. Anyway, the intense unity of selves which Catherine and Heathcliff feel, which is hard to speak of as a relationship since relationship implies otherness, works even without this incestuous subtext.

Heathcliffe’s ethnic origins are hard to pin down — hence the pearl-clutching at the news of Fennell casting a white actor in the role. Variously labelled as a gypsy, a Lascar or Indian sailor, a Creole, and a Spanish castaway, it’s hard to know how dark he is, or how much of it is pigmentation and how much the fact that he needs a bath. The fact is, his origins are deliberately made obscure, to highlight his status as an outsider in the tight-knit patriarchal community of the Heights. What kind of outsider doesn’t really matter. Whether he comes from Bournemouth or Borneo is less important than the fact that he is cruelly treated, and thus turned into a monster who seeks to wreak vengeance on those who have abused him. As W.H. Auden writes, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” 

Even so, there are a number of clues buried in the story to Heathcliff’s actual identity. One can make a strong case that he is Irish, as Emerald Fennell is to judge by her surname; and whether the Irish are black or white, as well as orange or green, wasn’t clear to the Victorian middle-class mind. They are of course formally “white” — whatever that means — but they were consistently portrayed at the time (in Punch cartoons, for example) as dark, dangerous and chronically rebellious. They were perceived, so to speak, as spiritually dark-skinned, the Blacks of the British isles. 

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Why might Heathcliff hail from John Bull’s other island? Well Wuthering Heights was written as the Great Famine was beginning to grip Ireland, resulting in a million dead and a further million driven into exile. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney illustrate, a lot of the latter group ended up in Liverpool, a city to which the Brontës’ ill-starred alcoholic brother Branwell took a trip in 1845 and perhaps reported to his sisters what he had witnessed there. A few months later, Emily began writing her novel. By 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish immigrants had landed in the port. Images of them as starving scarecrows dressed in rags and with an animal-like growth of black hair appeared in various English magazines. Earnshaw picks up off the Liverpool streets “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” who speaks a kind of “gibberish”. Many of the children who washed up in Liverpool would have been Irish speakers. In fact, the Famine almost dealt the language the coup de grace, since it was spoken mainly by the poor, and the poor were mostly the ones who died or emigrated. The Irish language didn’t in fact die, but nor did it ever fully recover. Most Irish people speak some Irish in the way that most educated English people speak French, i.e. very badly.

Consider, too, the fact that the name “Brontë” was originally “Brunty”, which like most surnames ending in y (aigh in Irish) is an Irish name. The sisters’ Right-wing clerical father Frenchified it in his quest for respectability in England. Brontë country in Ireland isn’t the Yorkshire moors around Haworth but the region of County Down from which Patrick came. When the gin-soaked, stage-Irish Branwell displeased the local people, they burnt an effigy of him with a herring in one hand and a potato in the other. Branwell was a loyal supporter of the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, leader of the greatest reform movement of 19th-century Europe.

So assuming, therefore, that Heathcliff really is Irish, perhaps it’s fine for a white actor to represent him. But why are we even thinking in these terms? Why cling to such a naive view of dramatic representation? For to think that every aspect of an actor must accurately represent every aspect of the character he or she plays is absurd. Margot Robbie, who will play Catherine, represents her accurately in so far as she’s a woman, but not in so far as she’s quite a bit older than Catherine is in the book. She may also have a differently shaped nose. Nobody imagines that every feature of an actor’s performance is in this sense representational. If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?

On this view, then, a black actor can play a white figure because his or her ethnicity need not be representational, any more than their height or weight need be. And white actors can play black individuals because we, the audience, provisionally bracket off their ethnicity and don’t take it as representational. But obviously this means that white actors muscle in on most of the parts. 

Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones. 

For all this to happen, though, we will need change not just in the theatre or film industry but in society at large. And the signs, as the far-Right continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious.

Within five years, the outbreak of “Murrain”, or potato blight, had led to around one million deaths from disease, hunger and fever. A million more emigrated, and the death rate on some of the “coffin ships” to America was more than 50%.

For those who remained, the decades following the famine saw the percentage of Irish people who never married climb dramatically. With age at marriage also going up, the imprints left on the country’s demographics were multiple. Today Ireland is the only country on earth with fewer people than it had in 1840, indeed it is still well over a million short of that total; for comparison, the population of England and Wales has grown four-fold.

Reading about the Famine is harrowing: something, if I’m honest, I would almost always prefer not to do. The suffering endured is the kind that goes beyond evoking shock or pity. It can tear holes in the everyday understanding of what it means to be human that we, living in more secure, comfortable, affluent societies, have acquired.

There is a Famine Museum in Strokestown, Co. Roscommon, but, at the same time, I have never detected a very strong desire among the Irish to linger too long on the 1840s, apart from in song. Written in 1979, “The Fields of Athenry” — with its lyrics “For you stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn” — has become a kind of second national anthem. However, transmuting history into stirring melodies can be a way of taming and repurposing it, not facing it down. And, in the end, the Irish came out the other side — even if for many this meant coming out on the other side of the world — and eventually built a new and stable republic.

Nevertheless, if only at times like this, when an anniversary bell solemnly tolls, we are called back to peer again into that national abyss; to ponder events that would still have been in the living memory of people my grandparents knew when they were young. Lingering over those events brings the usual risks of entering closed circles of anger, lamentation and the apportionment of blame. But, what may be most intriguing about the Famine now are its long-term effects, rippling through the Irish psyche over the course of a century and a half, beneath the surface but with consequences felt in thought and behaviour.

This is a subject that comes up in public discourse every now and then. At the time of Live Aid, Bob Geldof was asked during a television interview about the high per capita contributions the Irish had made to the cause of defeating hunger in Africa.  Why was this so? Geldof speculated that the Famine lived on in the Irish in the form of a deep folk memory and that this lay at the root of their spectacular generosity.

Perhaps. But there was another more proximate and direct cause that did not require pursuing something as nebulous as “folk memory”: namely, the relentless exhortations that generations of Irish people had heard in their churches, homes and schools about the importance of charity and the evils of selfish materialism. These ideas were of course part of Christian teaching the world over, but in Ireland they were preached bluntly, relentlessly. Moreover, in a strange way, Africa didn’t feel all that far away. While it would certainly not be the case now, many Irish people of the Live Aid era would have known men and women, friends and relations, who had served, or were still serving there, in Catholic missions, schools and hospitals.

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But even if Geldof was stretching it with his theory of a folk memory, he was surely right to suggest that the Famine did not simply come and go without making deep impressions on the Irish mind. Other possible repercussions from the Famine demand attention, beginning with the Irish concern with respectability that came to form such a large part of the country’s image and identity until recent times.

Figures such as the Jesuit priest Fr Richard Devane, who campaigned strenuously to keep Ireland free from alien decadence, have a distinctively Irish feel. Among other things, Devane, joining forces with the Legion of Mary, played a large role in the closure of “Monto” in Dublin, reputed to be biggest centre of prostitution in Europe in the 19th century.

And the rearguard action led by Devane and others like him was the defensive counterpart to the positive vision proposed by 1916 rebel and later Taoiseach and President of the Republic, Éamon de Valera, when he beckoned the Irish towards “a land whose country would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God deserves that men should live.”

In my own home city of Cork, our main thoroughfare was dominated and watched over not by the statue of a rebel or a poet or a legislator, but by Fr Theobald Matthew, the temperance campaigner, his hand extended above the heads of the populace in a benevolent but restraining gesture.

But what had this prizing of respectability — this obsession, even — to do with the Famine? No doubt more than one stream fed this river of the Gaelic mind, but we should not forget the effect of the virulent insults that rained down on the heads of the Irish as the tragedy unfolded. For many quarters of the Establishment, the outrageous pain and misery of the Irish peasantry was first and foremost their own fault, a product of their own slovenliness, superstition, stupidity and recklessness. In March 1847, for example, an article in The Times declared the Irish “a people born and bred from time immemorial, in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and consequent destitution”.

Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury believed that the Famine “had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson”. And, lest there be any doubt, these critics in high places saw the failings of the Irish as ultimately a product of their faith. Here is Lord Farnham: “There is no thinking man who does not perceive in the preponderance of the Roman Catholic religion in this country, the fruitful source of most of the calamities and agitations with which it is afflicted”.

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What to make of all of that? Edmund Burke, Irish-born though dead for nearly 50 years before the outbreak of the Famine, might have identified a different cause for the fragile, ramshackle state of the Irish peasantry of the 1840s. Speaking of the penal laws instituted in the previous century, he saw “a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man”.

Given the callousness of the remarks about the Irish pouring from establishment figures, one might wonder whether, in their “perverted ingenuity”, these laws had a debasing effect on the class who made them as much as the classes who suffered under them.

My purpose here, though, is to ponder what effect the loud and frequent condemnations of their attitudes and behaviour had upon the Irish themselves. A famous observation made by Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political philosopher, comes to mind. Fanon once wrote that the first thing the coloniser does is to “plant deep in the mind of the native population the idea that, before the advent of colonialism, their history was one which was dominated by barbarism”.

Perhaps the words of Trevelyan, Farnham and others — Carlyle, for instance, who wrote about the “wild Milesian features” of the Irish poor and their “false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason” — planted themselves deep in the mind of the natives, causing a variant of Fanon’s thesis (originally put forward in a book about Algeria).

In this variant, the colonised would strive to show the coloniser that they were not barbarians, that they would never have these accusations flung at them again, that they could outdo the colonisers at one of the things they, the colonisers, prized most highly and for the lack of which they criticised the Irish so savagely. Moreover, Irish respectability at this high noon of the Victroian era would be of a higher order, less prone to error, because Catholic. There would be no going back to the abyss, no return to the “completely unhinged” society already diagnosed by a Catholic Bishop, John MacHale, at the time of an earlier though less catastrophic failure of the potato crop.

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It is possible to over-egg such speculations. While the statue of Fr Matthew in Cork was unveiled in 1864, 15 years after the Famine, he had actually begun his Total Abstinence Society in the 1830s. And the prizing of respectability no doubt had other causes too. The Famine had exposed the Irish to the human body in its most degraded and, frankly, disgusting states, which may have bred a certain revulsion towards the flesh and in turn a sub-conscious desire to keep corporal urges under lock and key. In the 20th century, darker impulses towards social control may have played a part, but perhaps so did also the building up of the distinctive identity required by a people emerging blinking into the light of nationhood — and, too easily forgotten, genuine, popular fidelity to the Christian moral code.

Whatever the exact balance of forces, the exceptionalism of Irish respectability is, of course, a thing of the past now: largely unlamented, bulldozed away in the wake of social changes so enormous they can probably be seen from space. But, even these changes were themselves, in part, a reaction against the elevation of respectability to one of the country’s greatest social goods. And, if Irish social history is a series of chain reactions, the explosive consequences of the Famine are still being felt today.