The so-called Great Irish Famine or Potato Famine (more accurately termed the Irish Holodomor and called An Gorta Mór, meaning The Great Hunger in the Irish language) was, in actuality, not a genuine famine at all, as only the potato crop was affected, while the vast majority of farmland was planted with other crops which were grown in sufficient quantities to feed the populace. The disaster resulted from the fungus called phytophthora infestans, also known as potato blight, that totally ravaged the potato crop from 1845 to 1852, coupled with the mass exportation of food from Ireland to England and elsewhere during these years by the British government. Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food. Ireland starved because its food—40 to 70 shiploads per day—was removed for exportation at gunpoint from its starving Irish producers by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment) During the famine years, Britain was exporting enormous quantities of food from Ireland. Indeed, up to 75% of the soil was devoted to wheat, oats, barley, and other crops which were grown for export, and which were actually exported, all while the populace starved. Thus, Britain seized from Irelands producers tens of millions of head of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry and dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons. Half the population of Ireland, all wretchedly poor due to the Penal Laws enforced against Catholics by the Judeo-Protestant British authorities, worked on farms not for cash wages, but for the right to grow potatoes on tiny plots. They lived on a subsistence diet consisting almost exclusively of potatoes and milk, with a herring once or twice a year. Fishing in rivers and lochs was strictly controlled by the British landlords and a person caught poaching fish faced penal transportation or worse. During the famine numerous evictions also took place. A principal reason was the manner in which the British poor law operated. The poor law stipulated that landlords had to pay the rent of all holdings valued at £4 or less. This proved to be an incentive for these landlords to rid their estates of those poor tenants unable to pay the rent on these small holdings. When the potato crop failed, these peasants had neither food for their families, nor money to buy other food. Initially, only the poor died, victims of starvation. Then as typically happens in conditions of starvation, epidemics of typhus and cholera broke out, felling the affluent along with the poor. Estimates of how many people died during the Irish Holodomor range from about 1.1 million people to 5 million. Nassau William Senior, Queen Victorias chief economist whose family were Sephardic Jews in ancestry, stated that the artificial famine would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good. This Jewish statement, was echoed by similar ones from The Economist of Lowland Scot (Anglo-Saxon), James Wilson, and other laissez-faire advocates which opposed any serious government intervention. Many of these were also Malthusian inspired, claiming Ireland was overpopulated. When an eyewitness urged a stop to the genocide-in-progress, Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, also a laissez-faire advocate, replied: We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. Thomas Carlyle; influential British essayist, wrote; Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it—by heavens—squelch it. The Times Leader of 2 September 1846 suggested Total Annihilation and in 1848 its editorialists crowed A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan. The intent of the British government in its purposeful exportation of Irish food while half the population of Ireland starved was to ethnically cleanse Ireland of its rebellious native Gaelic Catholic population and replace them with loyal English-speaking Protestant English and Scottish settlers, as they had done previously during the Plantations of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. irishcentral/opinion/niallodowd/British-TV-orders-up-a-comedy-series-about-the-Irish-famine.html
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 02:49:50 +0000
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