On a recent trip to Ireland to trace the roots of my husband’s ancestry, we found ourselves winding through lush, green landscapes transversed with meticulously built stone walls. The meaning of these walls reverberates within me—not the walls that divide property, wrangle sheep, and contain cattle, but the tragically named “famine walls,” built by destitute people and often serving no function.

For context, the Irish potato famine lasted from 1845 to 1852 after a mold infected the potato crop and created devastating hunger, causing one million people to die and another one to two million to emigrate. Following the 1800 Act of Union, Ireland was supposed to have been an equal member of the United Kingdom at the time of the famine. However, the British considered the Irish to have brought this fate upon themselves, and as such, it was only "right" to make them labor for their food, whether or not the often pointless work itself cost them their lives. These walls were ultimately built under a famine relief project because the idea of giving food out freely was seen as a "moral hazard — it risked the possibility of thousands of Irish people becoming overly reliant on the state for relief" (Crowley, 2020).

This is a stunning mirror of how we think about hardship, disability, and illness in the United States. The trope of the disability con artist feigning hardship in order to burden the taxpayer, has been embedded in our collective psyche since the Civil War (Dorfman, 2019). In the U.K, despite .07% of disability claims being investigated for fraud and 87% of those overturned, the image of the scrounger and fraudster persists (Pring, 2019). In the U.S., the rates of fraud are just as small — less than one percent........

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