memory of the Irish victims of Slavery

[johnlavelle]

this might explain why my father’s grand father would or could say nothing of his “roots” beyond, “They were nothing but horse thieves.” It is easy to understand how two generations back they hated the English so.

May God forgive us. Free the whole Republic.

 

[strngrnrth]

It seems there were 29 or so “famines” in Ireland from the 1600s into the 1800s. I put “famines” in quotation marks because it seems that what they all had in common was that Ireland exported to England enough food to feed three times the population of Ireland during each famine. The reason why the potato “famines” were so deadly was because that potatoes were the only food the Irish were allowed to eat. At least that is what I read. It was genocide, imo.

There were many periods of starvation in Ireland, and each sent immigrants abroad, but it wasn’t until 1822 or 1823 that the shipping industry was large enough to bring a lot to America in steerage. Until then, most Irish emigrants had to get the cheapest possible passage, which almost always would be to Britain – Northwest England, West Scotland, Wales. Some sought arrest on purpose to get to Australia, there to escape the prisons and head for the bush. It was a better shot at survival than any other available choice, for many. It was a daring chance to take, however, for arrest could mean execution rather than transportation.
The 1820’s and 1830’s saw an unprecedented number of Irish in America, and there was already an anti-Irish force confronting the near-dead arrivals of 1845.

Nazi Germany was punished for her crimes against humanity. England hasn’t been punished for hers. But I will hold no grudge. Vengeance belongs to God, not me. I do not hold against today’s English what their ancestors did to mine. That wouldn’t be Christ-like.

It would defy reason to resent people for things that happened before they were born. Besides, if you go back far enough, everyone is related and in between that point and this almost everryone has been the aggressor some time or other, and almost everyone has been oppressed at some time.

 

[celticcrusader]

the potatoes that were affected by the blight were not native to IRL. but shipped there to be grown to give the people something to eat after all thier food was taken. I am pretty sure potatoes came from USA.

 

[RC_Matt]

But yet I am of the sentiment that Northern Ireland should be handed over to the Republic of Ireland.

Well, the majority of Ulster (the six counties anyway - there are actually nine and three are in the Republic) is Protestant (read about the Protestant Plantation of Ulster for another sad chapter of Irish history), so that can’t really be done. I’m sure they would have LOVED to give it back a few years ago. And, LOL, I’m not sure Dublin would want to take responsibility for Ian Paisley and his lot either. That said, the Catholic birthrate is higher than that of the Protestant and the Catholic population is also younger; therefore the Catholic population is increasing faster while the Protestant population is declining faster. Within a generation, the communities should be about equal in numbers. Once that point is passed, Ulster can VOTE itself into Éire. However, by that time, the resulting political situation should be sufficiently stable that many Catholics may prefer to avoid the political disruption and just retain the status quo. In any case, unless it’s changed recently, most Northern Irish Catholics, like my mother, don’t consider themselves British Subjects anyway and take the Éire passport.

 

[celticcrusader]

it is very easy for us sitting in USA to say the 6 northern counties should be given back BUT there are econimic factors that play into to it , like unemployment and such and the south might not be able to handle that burden. the social factors of the people hating each other for generations that is still passed down today, ect.ect.ect. I think it is a good start that the UDP & SF can sit at the same table and not kill each other and share governing power.like the astronaut said this is one small step for man and one giant step for mankind.

 

[strngrnrth]

the potatoes that were affected by the blight were not native to IRL. but shipped there to be grown to give the people something to eat after all thier food was taken. I am pretty sure potatoes came from USA.

The potato came from South America and has thousands of varieties, developed in a methodical way by Native Americans to produce the hardiest crop for every possible climate/soil/altitude combination, as the Nothern Native Americans did with corn. The first Europeans in South America brought poatoes home with them. The Europeans experimented a little, and concluded that potatoes are poisonous because they contain so much solanine, the same phytochemical that kills people who eat too much tobacco or tomato leaves. However, if you don’t eat the eyes or green parts (of fruit or stems) and they are cooked until soft, they aren’t poisonous. The Irish were starving when Spaniards (probably) introduced them to potatoes (accounts differ). The potato has a little of almost every essential nutrient in it, and can almost sustain life for many years alone. There are some varieties that are more tasteless, less disease-resistant and less nutritious that can be grown extremely close together. The Irish had to grow these to have enough to eat. Nutrition suffered, and only rotating four varieties kept any disease from wiping them all out. But by 1840 rents were high, and almost all the people were crammed into tiny dirt-floor cabins on tiny plots where almost the entire plot had to go to pay rent. The remaining space would simply not have been enough to keep the family alive unless the family used one exact strategy: Plant it so thickly there was no space between potatoes at all, entirely or almost entirely with a variety called the Lumper, a bland, starchy type that needs little space to grow.
Different varieties had different resistances, The Lumper has no resistance to polyphora infestans. That particular blight was making the rounds of the world. Some potato crops fell to it and some were barely grazed. People who were out at night reported to the press that the blight came through Ireland in a huge black cloud that swept the island from west to east. The leaves had spots minutes after the cloud passed through. By dawn 20% of the potatoes in Ireland were inedible and soon almost all were rotten, black solanine-packed pellets of slime. They gave off a sickening rotten odor.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Wrong Cromwell.

Which is a good cue for asking how the stats quoted so far were arrived at, what they include not do not include, & whether they are accurate. People with an axe to grind seldom under-estimate the body counts for which they have not been responsible. ​

 

[Kaninchen]

Which is a good cue for asking how the stats quoted so far were arrived at, what they include not do not include, & whether they are accurate. People with an axe to grind seldom under-estimate the body counts for which they have not been responsible. ​

Well, Holocaust numbers are difficult to quantify exactly (beyond, say, ‘Before the Germans arrived, the Jewish population of Country X was Y, after the Germans were evicted, the Jewish population of Country X was Z’) and that’s only last century with a compulsively organized and bureaucratically exact people like the Germans.

Going back centuries, it’s inevitable that being ‘exact’ is more difficult - one of the reasons I questioned the ‘slavery’ numbers is that the idea that the mid-17th Century English had shipping resources to have physically transported 300,000 people in that time is a little beyond belief - my guess is that the total ‘slavery’ figure is ‘romantic’ - most of those people were dead.

Who knows or can know what even the ‘round numbers’ of Irish who succumbed to war, massacre, famine and plague was and does it really matter to us now? When we talk about these great tragedies, we sometimes get lost in the total numbers - whether 5 million or 6 million or 7 million Jews died in the Shoah mattered greatly to those people and their surviving families but the figures are, in another sense, ‘incidental’. At those sorts of levels of loss, the exact numbers are incidental to the social/cultural catastrophe that a people suffers - and, it’s clear that, on several occasions, Ireland suffered such catastrophes.

As an outsider, what I do rather question is the attribution of guilt - just who was to blame? ‘The English’ is pretty meaningless - to somebody who avoids blaming ‘The Germans’ because it hides the guilty amongst the innocent, anyway.