And the Famine:

"I'd thought about that for a while-- what it would have been like to live in those holes, where the sand is silky but bone cold. Babies and children in there under branches, maybe, laid across the top, and the mother out on the grass trying to boil potatoes in a pot in the rain or the wind over a fire of sea-sodden sticks. But picturing a scene wasn't the same as feeling it. Yet the Famine and the destruction of rural Ireland had been experienced only a few generations back. There were people alive whose grandparents had lived through those years. The trauma must be deep in the genetic material of which I was made.

"I cannot forget it, I thought, yet I have no memory of it. It is not mine; but who else can own it?

[...]

"Our own forebears were part of the system too, you know. None of the gentry around here died. But you can be sure that our ancestors weren't out among the cabins of the dying any more than the gentry were. If you and I are sitting here in a warm room having a nice talk, we have to ask ourselves how our own people survived? What did our people do at the time, that you and I came to be born? Anyone who had a field of cabbages or turnips put a guard on it to keep off the starving. We were those guards."