Ireland 1845-1850

Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept It "Perfect" is Chris Fogarty's revisionist history of the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór). Drawing on British parliamentary and military records, Fogarty argues that the famine was not a natural disaster but a foreseeable, and in his reading deliberate, consequence of British colonial policy: food surpluses continued to be exported from Ireland under armed guard even as the rural population starved.

The book includes a map tracing the movements of British army regiments as they escorted livestock, grain, and other food exports to Irish ports, and identifies roughly 180 locations the author describes as unmarked mass graves from the period. Fogarty situates the famine within a broader argument about British colonial administration in nineteenth-century Ireland.

This framing — describing the famine as genocide rather than famine — is a minority position among professional historians, most of whom attribute the catastrophe to a combination of colonial land and tenancy policy, laissez-faire economic doctrine, and the potato blight, without applying the genocide designation. Readers should approach the book as an advocacy history built on a specific and contested thesis rather than as a consensus academic account.