Ancestor’s Irish famine role could merit compensation, says Laura Trevelyan

Laura Trevelyan quit the BBC earlier this year to campaign for reparative justice over the slave trade. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

The former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan has said her family would consider paying compensation to Ireland because of an ancestor’s role in the Great Famine of the 19th century.

Her great-great-great-grandfather Sir Charles Trevelyan, a senior British government official, was among those who “failed their people” during the humanitarian catastrophe in the 1840s, she said.