The Perfect Holocaust, A Ballad of Ireland’s Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór)

The Perfect Holocaust — A Ballad of Ireland’s Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór)

This is not a famine song. This is a cry from the soil.

“The Perfect Holocaust” is a modern Irish protest ballad rooted in the Great Hunger of 1845–1852 — a catastrophe that reshaped the Irish identity forever. The common schoolbook line calls it “the potato famine.” The real history is harsher. Ireland during those years was exporting grain, beef, butter, and provisions at industrial scale, while entire parishes starved. This ballad points directly to that contradiction — that the land was productive, yet the people were dying.

In this piece, the music is built around uilleann pipes, low whistle, fiddle laments, and the relentless pulse of the bodhrán. The sound is intentionally stark — not romanticised, not softened — because the story demands uncomfortable honesty. The ballad names the policy makers and the ideology behind them. Trevelyan’s famous belief that starvation was “a moral lesson” echoes through the verses. Food convoys, guarded and escorted to ports, are the counterbeat. The Great Hunger was not simply crop failure. It was a lethal economic system fortified by empire.

This song remembers those Ireland lost — not as helpless victims, but as a people betrayed by a government that prioritised ideology and profit over life. The empty cottages, the mass graves, the emigration ships — these are not abstractions. They were lived by real families, and many alive today are their descendants.

The Perfect Holocaust is not about sadness alone. It is about testimony. It is about naming the structures that chose theory over humanity. When the chorus rises, it isn’t pleading — it is bearing witness.

The Great Hunger was not inevitable. It was administered.
And this ballad refuses to let the silence continue.





LYRICS

Eighteen forty-five, the blight came black, Turned all the spuds to rot in the sack, But the ships sailed heavy with grain and beef, While the workhouse gates screamed "No relief!" "It’s God’s own hand," the landlords cried, As they burned the cottages, starved us inside "The Queen’s got a plan, but it’s not for you…" Oh-oh-oh, the perfect crime, Ledgers and ledgers and killing with time, Oh-oh-oh, the world looked away, While the empire made sure we’d all decay! Trevelyan’s pen wrote the hunger in ink, "Let them die quiet - no meat, no drink!" Ottomans begged, "Take our gold!" But the Crown said "No - let the market hold!" "A million graves in the devil’s math, Two million more on the coffin ships’ path… And the world just watched as they called it ‘fate’ But genocide don’t need a gas chamber’s gate." Oh-oh-oh, the perfect crime, History’s written by the butcher’s line! Oh-oh-oh, they thought we’d forget, But the land still screams....... "An Gorta Mór… but the famine’s a lie. The hunger was built—and they watched us die."
Location: Ireland

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