One hundred and fifty years ago, famine ravaged Ireland when the potato crop was destroyed by blight. Over a million people fled the horrors of starvation and disease by taking ships to Britain, Canada, and, most of all, to the United States.
In the second of two programmes, Dublin-born writer Ian Gibson tells how thousands of the Irish poor died on board the "coffin ships" that carried them across the Atlantic to the fever sheds of Quebec and the slums of New York. He explores some of the myths of famine history, finding them to be more complicated than on superficial examination, and explains how the bitter experience of the mass emigration has shaped Irish-American support for nationalist causes, from the Fenians to the Irish Republican Army.