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With astounding tolerance, the magistrate found there were extenuating circumstances, since the man was subject to the mania that struck people in the late stages of starvation. Elsewhere in Ireland, a passionate observer wrote, ‘Insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England.’ Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the Ethiopian army officer who ran with questionable success his country’s relief agency, had the same reaction when he saw cannibalism in an inadequate feeding centre in the Ethiopian highlands. These people were not to blame, he argued, as the Irish magistrate had nearly 130 years before. Starvation was not only a blight on the physical organism, but also on the brain. There was evidence that, under its influence, children were abandoned or suffocated by their mothers.
    Because of the blankness of the Bengali record, we do not know if, or on what scale, famine cannibalism existed. But Bengal would have been unique if it had not happened there also.

6
Villains: Ireland
    M OST FAMINES LEAVE behind in the survivors and their offspring the name of a supposed chief villain – the mal-administrator or tyrant, whom those who live and remember and pass on remembrance will forever after condemn and curse above all others. Particularly in the case of the Irish and Bengal famines, it could be argued that the disaster had many fathers, and even Mengistu, who is justifiably and overridingly the culprit for the Ethiopian famine, had the full-throated support of members of the ruling military, the Derg, and of his head of security, Legesse Asfaw, in all he did and did not do.
    But to begin with Ireland: in a song often sung by Irish rugby fans, ‘The Fields of Athenry’, a young Irishman about to embark on a convict transport exchanges final words with his wife as ‘the prison ship lies waiting in the bay’, ready to bear him into exile in Australia. One of the verses points to the often-named great Satan of the Irish famine.
    By a lonely prison wall
    I heard a young maid calling,
    ‘Michael they are taking you away,
    For you stole Trevelyan’s corn
    That the young might see the morn.
    Now the prison ship lies waiting in the bay.’
    The corn referred to represents the grain that was shipped out of Ireland throughout the famine, popularly believed to have been sufficient to save the Irish. And Trevelyan is Charles Edward Trevelyan, who never visited Ireland during the crisis but who was, by way of his office at the Treasury in Whitehall, administrator of government relief to Ireland.
    Certainly, there was an unyielding quality in the gifted Trevelyan, a man of nearly forty years when the famine struck. He was an evangelical Christian, and when he became convinced that certain events were in accord with the workings of Providence, he could not be moved from accepting those events. Similarly, at a secular level, his belief in the theory of political economy promoted by John Stuart Mill, a prophet of the uselessness of government intervention in famine, and others was immutable and to be embraced rigorously. These qualities were construed as virtues by his masters and many of his contemporaries, and that was the way he construed them himself.
    Born in 1807, Trevelyan was the son of an Anglican archdeacon of Taunton in Somerset, and a child of a cultivated family of limited income but of broad intellectual and religious connections. In 1834, he became the devotedhusband to Hannah Moore, the sister of Thomas Macaulay, the great historian, who was then a member of the Supreme Council of India. In his twenties, working as assistant to a commissioner of the East Indian Company in Delhi, Trevelyan helped to reform the Indian civil service and donated his own money to public works. He was anxious to clear barriers to trade – something that would be consistent with his behaviour in the Irish famine, when he saw