It was so much more than a potato famine, which of course, there was an awful blight on the potato crop, but it was so much more than that. They thought the Irish had breeded too fast, and this was nature's way - in some cases they said God's way - of culling the Irish. And there are all these documents now that have come out and shown there was a British policy called extermination. So one of the things that Thomas Meagher tried to do was to stop food from being exported from Ireland. And was grain, there was beef, corn wheat, oats, barley - food from Irish land and Irish labor, but it didn't go into Irish mouths.

Horrified, Thomas Meagher joined others young rebels, and a gifted orator raised his voice.ĮGAN: There was plenty of food on the island while a million people died. The streets of Ireland's cities filled with starving families driven from their farms, and yet Britain insisted that crops continue to flow out to foreign markets. In his new biography of the Irish revolutionary Thomas Meagher, he writes of the terrible years when rural Ireland's main source of food, the potato, was wiped out by a blackening blight. TIMOTHY EGAN: But he gets radicalized rather dramatically by the Great Famine. Still, by the early 1800s, the young Meagher could have settled into a fine home and an easy life of picnics and fancy dress balls. At one point, an Irishman's fingernails would be pulled out for playing the harp. Catholics had been barred from practicing their religion or speaking their language. His father was a wealthy Catholic merchant at a time when Ireland had been occupied by Great Britain for hundreds of years.

In the Ireland of 200 years ago, Thomas Francis Meagher was born into privilege.

The immortal irishman