‘The Famine’, L. M. Cullen wrote in 1972, ‘was less a national disaster than a social and regional one.’ Modern accounts, by contrast, are commonly built around the image of a catastrophe engulfing an entire society. The publication of a book of essays focussing on Dublin, normally absent from writing on the Famine, provides an opportunity to revisit a fundamental difference in interpretation.

The editors have cast their net wide. Alongside essays on obvious topics such as the experience of different charitable bodies, there are discussions of retail, literary fiction and the visual arts. It has to be said, however, that not all the contributors have stuck to the terms of their assignment. There are chapters, for example by Rob Goodbody on the Society of Friends and Philomena Gorey on childbirth, where Dublin disappears for pages at a time, as the authors describe developments at national level. Other contributors, such as Declan Curran on the banking system and Peter Hession on the Irish Sea, consider developments across several decades, with the Famine as a subsection of a wider discussion.

How hard did the Famine hit the people of Dublin? Cormac Ó Gráda, in a brief, specially commissioned overview, takes a middle course: Dublin, he suggests, came somewhere between urban centres like Belfast and Derry, where the impact was ‘rather mild’, and centres such as Kilkenny, whose population fell by 20 per cent between 1841 and 1851, where it was ‘severe’ (p. xx). Other contributors lean in the same direction. Ciarán Reilly, looking at consumer spending, Declan Curran on joint-stock banking and Kathryn Milligan examining art exhibitions, all emphasise the extent to which large areas of life in the capital remained unaffected (although Reilly perhaps ignores his own evidence that by the third and fourth years of the crisis commercial Dublin was in fact feeling the effects of the general malaise, and in particular of reduced landlord spending power). Emily Mark-FitzGerald notes the absence of references to the Famine in the speeches accompanying the main public event of the era, the funeral of Daniel O'Connell. Ciarán McCabe and Brian Crowley emphasise the strains placed both on the city's charitable bodies and on its main prison. But much of this, as they note, was due to the arrival of large numbers of destitute migrants from the countryside. Dublin became, in the much-quoted phrase of Maurice Craig, ‘a gigantic refugee camp’.

That leaves the question of how far the city's own poor were also affected by rising food prices, the dislocation of economic life and outbreaks of disease. Work published elsewhere by Ó Gráda and Timothy Guinnane, and by David Dickson, suggests that the city's medical services, and its two poor law unions, were well managed and coped better than many other institutions with the extreme demands made on them. That assessment is consistent with the census statistics where, between 1841 and 1851, the number of residents who had been born within the city's boundaries fell by 8 per cent. (The tables on pp xxi and xxiii are misleading in this respect, as the 1851 figure for total population given there excludes inmates of public institutions). For the people of Dublin, as opposed to the swelling body of migrants from the countryside, the experience of the Famine years was, thus, well short of a disaster. But there was a clear negative impact. And, as Ó Gráda has commented elsewhere, if even Dublin did not escape unscathed, then few places in Ireland can have been immune.