Hello I'm Fern Cotton from Happy Place, the podcast where I talk to wonderful people about what happiness means to them.

Happy Place is currently sponsored by British Airways holidays,

who want you to take your holidays more seriously.

Now for many of us our idea of happiness is a holiday.

Whether that's a trip with friends, time away with family or a solo adventure,

but the thing is, according to to research 42% of British adults

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In September 2016 the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, addressed the National Famine Commemoration

in Glassneaven Cemetery and with great emotion he described Ireland's tortured relationship with the great hunger of the 1840s when he said,

For a very long time it was something to which we could not give a name.

It was something to which we were not able to engage. It was something that

generated a great silence. The notion that Irish society struggled to deal with the

legacy of the great hunger until the 1990s is

pretty pervasive. The great silence is often used to describe a society traumatized

by guilt, shame and sorrow and left unable to talk about what had happened in the 1840s.

Many even argue the famine was something of a taboo subject in Irish society.

Now in this podcast I'm going to pick apart this idea of the great silence

and how Irish society handled the extreme trauma of the great hunger because I'm not convinced

at all there was a silence in Ireland in the aftermath of the great famine.

Now as usual I like to frame the history around stories so

we're going to begin today's show in the most unlikely of places with an Irish

...