THE IRISH CONNECTION by NORMA JENNINGS

Synopsis: THE IRISH CONNECTION The year is 1847, and poor Irish small farmers and their families are dying of starvation or typhoid fever due to the Potato Famine. The problem is not a lack of food, which is plentiful, but the price of it, which is beyond what the poor, whose staple food is potato, can afford. SEAN O’SULLIVAN, a potato farmer devastated by the Famine, works in a soup kitchen and travels with sustenance to help keep the sick and starving alive. Along the way, he beats off hungry dogs gnawing at dead bodies, digs mass graves and buries the dead, and stops a woman from eating the arm of her dead baby, as starvation and insanity ravage her. Wrapping his mother’s body in burlap, he buries her behind their cabin, moments before the landlord burns it to the ground. Then he hears wealthy British landlords voice concerns about overpopulation, and their reluctance to help feed the starving because they “breed like rabbits.” They contemplate shipping the poor off to Canada, America, or the Caribbean. O’Sullivan barely escapes on a cargo ship to the Caribbean. A hurricane batters his ship and he slays a pirate who brutally murders his best friend. Penniless and alone in Jamaica, O’Sullivan is immediately employed by one of the cruelest British planters on the island, who beats and maims his slaves. Slavery is soon abolished, and angry planters do everything to subjugate free blacks. O’Sullivan watches the lynching of African Jamaican activists fighting for human rights, which pushes him to wage his own quiet war for the rights of African Jamaicans. O’Sullivan purchases two abandoned plantations. He converts them into a thriving farming community with parcels of land owned by his ex-slaves. But O’Sullivan fights to maintain this community, as more rebellions loom under a powerful human rights activist; his name is Marcus Garvey.