http://www.drb.ie/essays/a-jig-in-the-poorhouse

The “grey zone” is "the space which separates victims and persecutors -‑ one populated by obscene and pathetic figures, where sometimes, but not always, judgment is impossible. ...

"The grey zone of the Great Famine is the demimonde of soupers and grabbers, moneylenders and meal-mongers, and those among the poor who had a full pot when neighbours starved, and the poorhouse bully who took the biscuit from the weak. It is where one finds the mother who denied one child food and fed another, a boy who slit the throat of two youths for a bag of meal, and, indeed, rumoured and reported cases of cannibalism. ..."

Picture left, beleagured mother and children during Ireland's Great Famine.

Author Breandán Mac Suibhne is a historian of society and culture in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland. His publications include John Gamble, Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2011) and (with David Dickson) Hugh Dorian, The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Nineteenth-Century Donegal (Dublin: Lilliput, 2000; South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001). He teaches at Centenary College, New Jersey.

What do you think of this piece, which suggests that the story of the survivors, and how they came to survive is coming under closer scrutiny in Famine historiography. And some of the spotlight is indeed quite jarring.