Former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan has revealed she would be prepared to pay reparations if the Irish government said her played a role in the catastrophic handling of the potato famine.
Trevelyan is a descendant of a British colonila administrator.
She has previously given £100,000 to an economic development fund in Grenada, where her ancestors owned sugar plantations.
According to The Times:
That move raised questions about whether she would also provide compensation based on Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan’s role as a British government administrator during the Irish famine of the 1840s and 1850s.
The famine, which led to more than a million deaths, was marked by his personal ill will to the Irish. He once said that the “judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”.
Trevelyan, who recently ended a 30-year career in journalism at the BBC to become a campaigner for slavery reparations, has previously said that she would not pay compensation to Ireland because her great-great-great-grandfather was enforcing government policy and was not personally profiting off the backs of the Irish.
However, she opened up the possibility of reparations during an interview with BBC Radio Ulster. “If the Irish government said the Trevelyan family are liable for what Sir Charles Edward did, then of course that would have to be considered,” she said.
His role in the mishandling of the famine is storied in Ireland, particularly around the failure to reduce exports of homegrown corn to England.
The song The Fields of Athenry, which is still sung as a sporting anthem, refers to Trevelyan by name. It tells the story of a man who stole “Trevelyan’s corn” and was subsequently deported to Australia.
In 1997, Tony Blair’s government admitted that the British government had been culpable for the famine’s severity. “Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy,” he told a 150th anniversary event.
Trevelyan was unaware of her ancestor until she worked as a journalist in Northern Ireland and covered the Good Friday agreement 25 years ago. She said that her time there caused her to investigate her family story — “I tripped over my own history,” she told BBC Radio Ulster.
The Fields of Athenry was sung at her, and Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein politician and a former Provisional IRA leader who later became deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, asked her: “Is this a coincidence that the British have sent a Trevelyan for the BBC, a state institution, to cover these negotiations?”
Trevelyan recalled: “I assured him it was a coincidence but he didn’t think it was at all.”
On another occasion, she was confronted by an Irish republican from Crossmaglen in Co Armagh. “[They] looked at me in horror and said, ‘How can you be driving around south Armagh with the blood of the Irish on your hands?’ And to my embarrassment I didn’t even really understand what either of them were talking about. When I got back to Britain, I began to read up on Sir Charles.”
She also discovered her ancestor’s other colonial roles, including as a member of the East India Company and later as governor of Madras.
The family also owned Caribbean plantations and were compensated when slavery was abolished, receiving about £34,000 (about £3 million in today’s money).
However, the former journalist did not anticipate any calls for reparations from Ireland. “To the best of my knowledge there isn’t an inter-government request from the Irish government to the British for reparations to be paid for the famine because of the action of officials like Sir Charles,” she said.
