The Irishman is not a great movie or even a good movie. It's a depressing, four-hour eulogy to an era of filmmaking that will never come again. Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast. I had high Hope's. For a movie to be 3 hours long it need to grip you, it was boring. Great Famine, famine that occurred in Ireland in 1845–49 when the potato crop failed in successive years. The Irish famine was the worst to occur in Europe in the 19th century: about one million people died from starvation or from typhus and other famine-related diseases. S4Ro.