Of course, historians have less than complete knowledge of the past, simply because the events that interest them happened then and not now and motives and causes have to be deduced from outcomes. But this applies to all writing of history, not just Irish history. To possess an Irish ancestry is not a qualification for writing good Irish history. The only requirement is a respect for the fundamental principles of the historian's craft, which are to be faithful to the evidence and to interpret that evidence honestly and fairly. The greater challenge facing an historian attempting a comprehensive account of the Great Famine is that any famine is a tissue of complex social, economic, political and psychological strands.
Famine affects society at large.
It may or may not result in the death of men, women and children, who may starve because they have no food or, more commonly, die from diseases made worse by severe malnutrition. But such sufferings are not inevitable. She offers no definition of famine and makes no use of theoretical writings on famine, such as those by David Arnold and Amartya Sen that would have clarified these issues. Arnold draws a useful distinction between event and structure. It may be war, frost, flood, drought, pestilence or, in the Irish case in the 1840s, phytophthora infestans .