An ex-BBC journalist says her ancestor, referenced in the Fields of Athenry, 'failed' Irish people.
End of twitter post by Katherine Mezzacappathat the Fields Of Athenry had been sung at her, and she had been directly challenged about her family link to the famine by Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness in the 1990s.
"I assured him it was a coincidence but he didn't think it was at all and that's when I tripped up against Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan. Asked for her personal view of Sir Charles Trevelyan, she said: "When I wrote a book in 2006, A Very British Family, I'd read everything that had been written about him to that point."Where one ends up is, as [the then prime minister] Tony Blair said in 1997, those who governed in London at the time of the Irish famine failed their people by standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy.
"And he also seems to suggest that in some ways this is the divine punishment of God for a one-crop economy. It's very hard to defend any of it."
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