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A major contributing factor to the Irish Potato Famine was capitalism and the laissez-faire approach to it by the government of Victorian England.

This is what most of us learned in school. I’m quite sure there is a counter argument, although I can’t say I know what it is. I wouldn’t even dare to speculate whether the counter-argument is a good one. It just seems obvious that a system built upon familial inheritance of divine power, lording over a workforce organized through a soft-slavery and systematic racism, well, that isn’t exactly “the free market.”

Also, being American, the main focus on this era, in grade school, was the resulting diaspora. For this country, the flood of Irish immigration and the resulting ethnic tensions on this side of the pond strikes a lot closer to home than what happened to those who stayed behind (or died before they got the choice).

The vilification of the free market, no doubt, had a strong influence in the future politics of the Western nations, especially in Great Britain and America. For better or for worse, the enormous growth of the State over the century that followed included a goal of preventing the starvation such as that which occurred in Ireland, even while England’s economy remained healthy. To this day, proponents of the heavy regulation of private business imagine that, left to their own devices, business owners would gladly starve their workers to death given the opportunity to profit from it.

The movie Black ’47 addresses none of this.

The closest it came to looking at economics was a brief inclusion of the tax system and its unintended consequences. The landlord (of the story) mentions the tax burden he incurs by allowing poor tenants to remain on his land, which incentives him to evict. If I understand it, taxes were owed by renters when they had the means to pay but, for rental arrangements under a certain value (rents less than £4), it was the landlord who owed taxes. 1947 saw a mass eviction of poorer tenants and the consolidation of land into larger rental properties. On top of the food shortages, the already-suffering poor farmers lost their homes.

Black ’47 is another European government funded production – made in Ireland but with Australian actors in the lead. Top billed is Hugo Weaving*, playing a former British officer, now police inspector in Ireland. The main character, on the other hand, is played by Australian James Frecheville, portraying an Irish soldier. The choice to use an Australian is a little surprising given that his character is intended to be a native** Irish (Gaelic) speaker and the film itself features him doing just that.

Briefly, the film has Frecheville’s Martin Feeney return to his homeland after going AWOL from the British Army in Calcutta. He arrives in 1847 to find his homeland in the grip of the Irish Potato Famine. His mother has starved (having refused food aid from the Protestant charities) and his brother was hanged for resisting their forced eviction. After further mistreatment, he dedicates himself to bringing vengeance upon those who destroyed his family, starting with the Irish who enabled the English system. This is not an American story. It’s an Irish one.

The movie is a remake of a short called An Ranger, linked below. The feature-length version came out 10 years after the original. Although it was through this background that I found both films, I chose to watch the newer version first and then the original. I think this order made sense, as Black ’47 has more “story” to it, and more story means more of a chance to have that story spoiled.

I do hedge that last comment with scare quotes because the newer version happens to be fraught with anachronisms. In Black ’47 the film clearly indicates it is still 1847, at the height of the famine. An Ranger takes place in 1854, after the potato crop has recovered. Some of the historic inaccuracies seem to be resolved by this seven year difference, while others do not. For example, Weaving’s inspector travels from Dublin to Western Ireland on a train route that wasn’t constructed until 1851. For that matter, his very reason for being in Dublin, to interrogate a member of the Young Irelander Revolutionaries over a cache of weaponry, also jumps the proverbial gun. The Young Irelander rebellion would not occur until the summer of 1848 and, in 1847, this group was committed to non-violent action.

While the title of the full-length version would seem to highlight its historical issues, so does the title of the original. The titular Ranger – he’s an officer in An Ranger and an AWOL enlisted man in Black ’47– was in both cases a member of the 88th Regiment of Foot, the Connaught Rangers (called The Devils Own). In both films he has obtained, perhaps from either Afghanistan or India, a khukuri. The problem is, the Connaught Rangers were neither in Afghanistan nor Calcutta in 1854, much less 1847. The khukuri came to the attention of western Europeans after the soldiers of the East India Company fought the Gurkha War of 1814–1816 in Nepal. Likewise, it was the East India Company that fought the First Anglo-Afghan War from 1839 through 1842. The 88th Regiment were nowhere near that fight (they were on Malta) and, as a matter of fact, weren’t deployed to India until 1857, having fought in the Crimean War during the key times shown in either film.

Reception for Black ’47 is all over the map. The script’s loose appreciation of history is forgiven in that it got the “tone” correct. Yet that tone, all blackness, gloom, and cold silence from our main character, does not appeal to the popular American audience. A perusal of the comments on Netflix suggest viewers might have been hoping for “the continuing adventures of Elrond.” One wonders if this film is not, in fact, intended as an informational piece for those outside of Ireland – intended to explain to outsiders why the Irish still feel aggrieved by events nearly two centuries behind us.

As I started with, American grade-school treatment of the Great Famine focused on the diaspora. This film, by way of contrast, personalizes the horror. The presentation is not dissimilar to what Mr. Jones did for non-Ukrainians***. Irish-American writer Naill O’Dowd writes in Irish Central that Black ’47 is “essential viewing for any Irish American.” Irish Central is written for the Irish of North America, so one wonders whether it is simply that he’s talking to his audience or he, like I, see Black ’47 as corrective for those of us of Irish heritage who don’t fully understand this episode of our past. In the same vein, English reviews of the film were considerably less glowing. The debate over famine versus genocide continues to this day and I suspect some of the English writers resented the attempt to turn the still-politicized arguments into a formulaic action-thriller.

Whatever complaints I may voice about this film, it was still worth my time to watch it.

* A last-minute fact-check revealed to me that Weaving was actually born in Nigeria. His start in Australian film and television resulted from where his family ended up after a youth spent around the globe. His ties to Australia notwithstanding, he would be more accurately described as English. In fact, his first major Australian TV role was to play an English student in Australia.

**If the Irish were displeased with Brad Pitt’s affected accent of English in The Devil’s Own, I wonder what they thought of Frecheville’s go at their indigenous mother tongue.

***I’m even tempted to wonder how England’s view of Ukraine’s suffering under Stalin may have been shaped by their own extenuation for the somewhat similar circumstances in Ireland. Were not Mr. Jones actually the newer film, I’d try to draw a parallel between the scenes of Irish grain being shipped off to London and Ukrainian grain being sent to Moscow.