he-The Famine as Predatory Trauma and the Social Logic of Ignoring Sexual Abuse in Ireland

The potato blight was the ecological trigger, but the scale of human catastrophe was determined by political and economic structures that continued extraction and enforced dependency even as people starved. Historians emphasise that food exports persisted and that relief was limited, conditional and often punitive; such measures were embedded in the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland and in landlord–tenant power structures, policies that effectively left entire classes of the population exposed (Kinealy, 1995; Gray, 1995). In this configuration, institutional actors—landlords, local authorities, and imperial administrators—performed the social function of predators: controlling scarce resources, exercising coercive power, and failing to protect a dependent population. Reading the famine this way foregrounds the social author of the calamity as much as the ecological cause, and frames the trauma as one of exploitation and enforced vulnerability rather than only natural misfortune.

Repeated exposure to structural abandonment teaches behavioural rules. Survivors and their descendants internalised the lesson that visibility and protest could invite punishment or worse; in evolutionary and clinical terms, the adaptive strategies available to prey—flight, freeze, appease—became cultural dispositions. Silence and shame served immediate survival ends: keeping the head down might avoid eviction, corporal punishment, or stigma, and leaving (emigration) became the dominant “flight” option. Over time these tactics calcified into normative expectations about which emotions and behaviours were acceptable; vulnerability became a source of shame rather than a state worthy of protection. Trauma theorists have shown how large-scale political traumas become embedded in family narratives and social norms, producing intergenerational patterns of risk-avoidance and emotional suppression (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014). These frameworks help explain why communities can become skilled at protecting institutions and hiding harm rather than protecting vulnerable individuals.

As the nineteenth century closed and the new Irish state matured, other institutions—most notably the Catholic Church—accrued moral and social authority partly because they were seen as providers of charity, order, and relief in the aftermath of social collapse. That moral monopoly allowed ecclesiastical institutions significant discretion over schooling, health, and welfare; in practice, it also created opportunities for coercion and secrecy. Where famine trauma had normalised deference, the Church’s moral authority normalised obedience and the acceptance of punitive “correction” as a care strategy. The long shadow of famine, therefore, helped produce institutional arrangements in which vulnerable people (women, children, the poor) fell under powerful actors whose abuses could be rationalised as discipline, moral correction, or necessary social order. The official inquiries of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century reveal the consequences of those arrangements in the form of systemic sexual, physical and emotional abuse in residential institutions (Ryan Commission, 2009; McAleese, 2013).

Sexual abuse in families and communities is most readily concealed when three social conditions coexist: (1) strong norms of respectability and moral reputation; (2) powerful moral authorities or gatekeepers whose legitimacy discourages challenge; and (3) an intergenerational habit of silence about painful events. The famine both created and amplified these conditions. Respectability politics (the policing of sexual and social “transgression”) provided a convenient moral logic to blame victims and to treat sexual transgression as a punishable deviation rather than a wound needing protection; institutional actors leveraged that logic to justify confinement, punishment, or removal of children and women. Survivors who attempted to disclose faced social ostracism, family shame, or legal impotence; the culturally rehearsed response—do not bring shame on the family or parish—served to fold personal trauma back into secrecy. Scholarship on the Magdalene laundries, mother-and-baby homes and industrial schools has repeatedly shown how shame and reputational risk functioned to suppress disclosure and to delegitimise victims’ testimonies (Inglis, 1998; Fischer, 2016).

At the family and local level, the predator–prey model helps explain the mechanics of ignoring sexual abuse. When power is perceived as absolute or punitive (the predator), typical prey responses include appeasement, role-taking, and the displacement of anger. Persons with social authority—priests, employers, local officials, senior family members—could be perceived as predators whose status must not be jeopardised; accusing them risked retaliation, excommunication, economic penalties or social isolation. Conversely, vulnerable members (children, unmarried mothers) resembled prey whose survival depended on concealment and compliance. Communities learned, therefore, not only to fear authority but to internalise the predator’s moral grammar—blaming victims for “impropriety” while defending institutional reputations. Clinical work on trauma and abuse underscores how shame, loyalty and fear of disintegration of family ties frequently inhibit disclosure even when abuse is known or suspected (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014).

Because the famine and subsequent institutional regimes were collective experiences, their behavioural adaptations did not disappear with one generation. Families that had learned to suppress distress to survive transmitted those scripts to children: do not risk the household, do not expose institutional authority, and do not rely on outside protections that might fail. The persistence of collusive silence around abuse can therefore be read as an intergenerational strategy that once had pragmatic purchase—avoiding immediate harm—but which, when unexamined, perpetuated harm across generations. Contemporary reform efforts and survivor testimonies show how difficult it is to uproot such embedded patterns; truth-telling and reparative processes require not only legal redress but cultural transformation that revalues vulnerability and holds authority to account (O’Toole, 2016; Garrett, 2017).

Framing the famine as predatory trauma shifts responsibility from individual moral failure to structural and cultural inheritance. It explains why sexual abuse could be ignored—because the social ledger valued the avoidance of shame and the preservation of institutional reputations above the protection of vulnerable bodies. Undoing that legacy requires re-socialising norms around vulnerability: restoring the legitimacy of disclosure, creating responsive protective institutions, and teaching communities that protecting the weak is the mark of moral strength rather than social defeat. A trauma-informed approach—both in policy and in community work—can translate historical insight into practical change: acknowledging the predatory past, dismantling the behavioural scripts that continue to prioritise deference, and building routines and laws that make speaking out safer and meaningful.

Fischer, C. (2016) ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame: Magdalene laundries and the institutionalization of feminine transgression in modern Ireland’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(4), pp. 821–843.

Garrett, P.M. (2017) ‘Dissenting voices in the Irish “Revolution”: The case of the “Banished Babies”’, Critical Social Policy, 37(4), pp. 556–575.

Gray, P. (1995) The Irish Famine. London: Thames & Hudson.

Herman, J.L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.

Inglis, T. (1998) Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.

Kinealy, C. (1995) This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845–52. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.

Kinealy, C. (2002) The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

McAleese, M. (2013) Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries. Dublin: Government Publications.

Ó Gráda, C. (1999) Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

O’Toole, F. (2016) Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger. London: Faber & Faber.

Ryan Commission (2009) Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report). Dublin: Stationery Office.

van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.