The Ancient Order of Hibernians is expressing outrage over what it says is the trivializing of the Great Hunger by a games company.
In a statement, the Hibernians take issue with Compass Games for its planned release of The Great Hunger, "a board game that trivializes Ireland’s Great Hunger (An Gorta Mór) by reducing a human catastrophe to a competitive exercise."
The AOH expressed both sadness and outrage at the announcement.
The statement said: "While acknowledging that the game’s designer, Kevin McPartland, has suggested an intention to educate Americans through the medium of a game, the organization questioned whether an event that resulted in the deaths of at least one million people by starvation and the forced emigration of another million should be gamified at all."
Neil F. Cosgrove, AOH National Anti-Defamation Chair, said: “We do not doubt that there may be a kernel of good intention here.
“But good intentions do not excuse poor judgment. Some human catastrophes - particularly those involving mass death through hunger and forced displacement - should never be reduced to a game.”
Added the statement: "Mr. McPartland has publicly stated, 'I do not expect a single Irish person to buy this game,' and has instead presented it as an educational tool for Americans. According to the AOH, the game’s own promotional materials reveal a troubling misunderstanding of the historical realities they claim to teach.
"Promotional descriptions portray early 19th-century Ireland as a society of tenant farmers and field hands 'thriving' on a 'wonder crop,' the potato. The AOH strongly rejected this framing as historically indefensible.
“The people of Ireland were not ‘thriving,’” Cosgrove said.
“Centuries of dispossession, land confiscation, and discriminatory laws had forced the native population onto ever-smaller and more marginal plots of land. The potato was not a miracle of prosperity; it was the last fragile buffer against starvation.”
Ireland, continued the AOH statement, had already endured numerous subsistence crises and localized famines prior to 1845 - clear warnings that the population was living on the edge of disaster. Only months before the arrival of potato blight, the British Parliament’s own Devon Commission reported that it was “impossible adequately to describe” the “privations” of Irish labourers, noting that in many districts their only food was the potato, their only beverage water, and that even a bed or blanket was considered a luxury.
“Parliament had been warned,” Cosgrove said.
“Its own commission documented a society living with no margin for error. To suggest that Ireland’s Great Hunger suddenly emerged from a period of comfort or abundance is not education, it is distortion.”
While games can sometimes serve as a stimulus to learning, the AOH stated that education must begin with accuracy and moral seriousness.
"The decision to frame survival during the Great Hunger as a form of 'winning' profoundly misunderstands the lived reality of those who endured it.
“Those who arrived in America aboard coffin ships did not feel they had ‘won,’” Cosgrove said.
“Survival was not a victory. It was trauma carried across generations. The ability to exist is the most basic of human rights. It is not a prize to be awarded.”
