So in terms of the context of Anglo-Irish relations at this moment, what can you tell us about how the mood was, what the temperature was in the run-up to this famine commemoration event in County Cork?

Well...

Like all of these things, you think that it's just got a thin veneer at the surface and there might be a little bit beneath and you don't know how far it will go.

And as I've dug, I've realised how deep it went.

On the famine side, and this is maybe because I'm an ingenue when it comes to the famine, but it was extraordinary to me and the scholars who write about it, how little was written, almost nothing by academics about the famine for a good 120 years after the famine.

There were some stuff, of course, and many of you may well be familiar with it, but very little academic work.

And so that itself was interesting to explore.

Maybe both,