Events that live long in the public consciousness are the exception, not the rule. Very few remember the famine that hit Ireland in the early 1740s, even though its death toll was perhaps even worse, in proportionate terms, than the more famous one that hit just over a century later. A prolonged economic downturn in the US – lasting a full two decades from the 1870s to the 1890s – was, for a while, known as the Great Depression, until the disruption and chaos of the early 1930s struck. We don’t know yet whether, in Ireland, the Covid-19 pandemic will…

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