Review: The end of outrage: post-Famine adjustment in rural Ireland (Breandan Mac Suibhne)

In Ways of Seeing (1972) John Berger wrote of how ‘capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible’. Echoes of Berger’s poetic yet clear-eyed assessment of the wrenching forces of modernity, writ through small and large acts of exploitation and advantage, recur throughout Breandan Mac Suibhne’s The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland, a study of the transformation of rural society in west Donegal in the post-Famine years. In Mac Suibhne’s telling this period marks the ‘era of infidelity’ when the erosion of traditional bonds of community is an incremental, adaptive, but devastating response to the changed world experienced by those who survived the Famine.