Hello and welcome to the Irish History Podcast, my name is Finn Dwyer.

This week's episode continues the story of Coffinchips.

In the last show we heard from Dr. Keen T. McMahon, a historian in the University of Nevada

Las Vegas.

Keen's an expert in the area having written the book The Coffinchip Life and Death at

Z in the Great Irish Famine.

Now our last week's show covered the why and how people left.

This week's episode continues the conversation with Keen, looking at why immigrant vessels were

called Coffinchips and how many died trying to escape the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s.

We also talk about what it was like for survivors who found themselves in a strange land

and how immigration and enforced exile helped to forge modern Irish identity.

Keen's book The Coffinchip Life and Death at Z in the Great Irish Famine is available at the

link in the show notes below. As I said last week I found it a very different famine history,

it's deeply personal and you get a real sense of what life was like at the time.

Before we begin don't forget my exclusive supporters series on the Irish Civil War,

starts over on Patreon this week. The first episode drops on Thursday that's January 26th

and in that episode myself and Dr Brian Hanley from Trinity College Dublin will be talking about

the causes of the Irish Civil War and how Irish people reacted to the outbreak of the conflict.

The answers to these questions is often simply summarized in two words, the treaty,

referring to the Anglo-Irish treaty which brought an end to the war of independence.

That's part of the story but as you'll hear in the first episode in this exclusive series the

real picture is a bit more complex than often portrayed. Now that series will be exclusively

...