The News from Ireland by William Trevor | Introduction & Overview

The News from Ireland Introduction

"The News from Ireland" hearkens back almost 150 years, to a cataclysmic event in Ireland's history: the Great Famine, which left over a million Irish dead from hunger and drove as many as two million to leave their country of birth. Many Irish peasants were dependent on the potato as their only source of food, and the blight that struck in the 1840s virtually wiped out the country's potato crop. Yet as the Irish author George Bernard Shaw pointed out in his play Man and Superman, the term "famine" was a misnomer: throughout the entire period, food products were being exported from Ireland instead of being made available to the starving population.

In "The News from Ireland," Trevor demonstrates the disparity between the starvation of the poor Irish and the comfort of Anglo-Irish who profit from their labor. He evokes the situation through the viewpoint of outsiders who feel...
(read more)