Will this pandemic lead to revolution? No-one knows for sure, but if the Black Death is anything to go by, there could be some sort of re-balancing of power in society. Fin Dwyer, creator and presenter of The Irish History Podcast, thinks we can learn a lot about what might be ahead of us from looking at medieval plagues and their aftermath. Fin covered many of the topics featured in his long-running podcast on Thursday's Ryan Tubridy Show: everything from gruesome diseases to the Great Famine and the real Peig Sayers.

Fin took Ryan on a journey through the Black Death in Europe, at a safe distance of almost 700 years. The historian says it ripped through population at great speed, with a death rate many times that of current estimates for COVID-19:

"You're talking about 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 people in your community not surviving this. It's way worse than the famine in terms of catastrophe."

But Fin also points out that some people decided they might as well live it up during plague times and in the period after the disease had done its damage. He says it was probably a combination of joy at having survived and acting quickly while the Church took its eye off the ball:

"After the Black Death, you hear priests complaining that people are getting together all over the place and that they're not performing proper marriages and that they're getting together for a couple of months or maybe a year and then they'll go off and meet someone else. And obviously this is outraging the authorities at the time, and they can feel their power slipping."

The grim death toll revolutionized the role of those at the bottom of society, according to Fin, something that may interest people on the lookout for a Covid-19 dividend:

"The number of peasants in the world had decreased, so their bargaining power increased because of this. They demand higher wages, they demand better conditions, in some cases."

Those gains were partly eroded in the ten years following the Black Death, but Fin says some of the changes carved out by the plague were there to stay:

"A lot of the damage in terms of the power structures is done, and it does erode into it over the following decades."

If you want to hear more of Fin's historical take on plagues vs pandemics, the connections he sees between The Famine and Irish revolutions, how Peig may have been censored for her raciness and more in the full chat with Ryan here.

Fin Dwyer's Irish History Podcast can be found online here.

Ruth Kennedy