An American company’s board game about the Great Famine is in “very poor taste” and a missed opportunity, the Irish Emigration Museum has said. 

Over €12,000 has been successfully crowdfunded to create The Great Hunger board game, which allows people to role play as tenant farmers who want to survive An Gorta Mór. 

Players have to help their characters grow their families and flee when the blight arrives. 

On Newstalk Breakfast, EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum, spokesperson Nathan Mannion said his first instinct when he heard about the game was that it “goes beyond the pale” and that a game about the death of one million people was “just a step too far”. 

 However, he added that he has since gained a certain level of “understanding” about the game and its objectives. 

“Is it something that can be used as a learning tool or something that we can happily accept here in Ireland?” he asked. 

“Previously, we have used board games as part of our schools program or in collaboration with other institutions of learning in a structured environment - and they've been very successful. 

“I think really what's missing here is there doesn't seem to have been any historical consultation with museums, cultural institutions, historical bodies.

“It seems to have been developed by an Irish American audience for an Irish American audience.”

Irish Famine depitction. Picture by: Alamy.com.

Despite this, Mr Mannion added that he views the way the game seeks to move people across the Atlantic in blocks and grow populations is in “very poor taste”. 

“If I was charitable, I would say that they've said that the purpose of the game is to try to create a sense of empathy; that there's a detachment from what they called the English ruling classes in the game and the poor Irish peasantry and that they see parallels today in the United States,” he said. 

“Some of the cards in the game are obviously well thought out; they have looked at the period, someone has definitely read a book or two and brought in a few coherent and cohesive elements.

“But I think overall, it really misses the mark.”

The Great Famine took the lives of an estimated one million Irish people and forced a further million to emigrate. 

When the Famine struck in 1845, the island had a population of eight million people but that dropped by around two million over the next seven years. 

Ireland’s population has never recovered to pre-Famine levels.

Main image: A split of the Irish Famine statues in Dublin and a board game. Pictures by: Alamy.com.