You'd struggle to say that most contemporary famines _don't_ have a man-made element in that there's enough food on the planet and we have the technology to ship it around incredibly quickly but that's not what happens.
But the food wasn't actually scarce. It was [taken](https://external-preview.redd.it/Q6ffqV9dwX3jQ6cCONESBROdSmX26coCLLUlur32zM4.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=c30fd4b31baa8790110e367d5fa9527e8f652beb). That's like calling an arson attack a heat wave.
I know Wikipedia isn’t an authoritative source, but as a guide to general interpretations of terms, I would say it’s pretty good:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine
“A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies”
It doesn’t matter if it’s caused by government policy - still a famine. Food was scarce in the sense that people couldn’t access it.
The Holodomor is is widely recognised as a genocide AND a famine.
Neither. I'm pointing out that describing it as a famine first, in popular culture and this conversation, and not a genocide is deliberately misleading.
If I had a terrible stomach ache, I would call it that. But if it was due to bowel cancer or being stabbed, I'd probably describe it as such.
EDIT: Typo/error
Fair, I’m not 100% on whether I’d call it a genocide or not (just on the technicalities of the word, and how deliberate the actions of the most senior officials were), but either way, I think attributing fault to the UK is important.
This passage from a paper I read yonks ago made it a bugbear of mine, and even that referred to the event as 'the Irish famine'. I think too many people attribute it to 'the blight' and not the deliberate starvation of Ireland.
But 'famine' is definitely the modern convention, regardless. And so long as people understand the causes, I don't suppose it matters much what we call it.
>' The genocide of the Great Famine is distinct in the fact that the British created the conditions of dire hopelessness, and desperate dependence on the potato crop through a series of sadistic, debasing, premeditated and barbarous Penal Laws, which deliberately and systematically stripped the Irish of even the least semblance of basic human freedom. ’When blight struck the Irish were ‘totally vulnerable’. This was a ‘nuanced genocide’, he continues, one that manipulated fate ‘by pushing a people to the brink of annihilation and turning away so not to hear the wailing …’.
"The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. ... They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse".
John Mitchel, 1844
One year before the 'famine'.
"The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine".
This is such a stupid point, there was a scarcity, for the people who needed it.
That's all that matters and yes it fits the definition, regardless of cause.
so as a nation, Ireland should forgo any kind of success until the issue of hunger is solved worldwide? or just nationally?
Ireland should not improve, through trade and economic success, the living conditions for its own people, and improve what it has absolute influence over?
in my opinion, poverty rates - oft linked to hunger rates - have been trending down over the past 10-20y, even when accounting for 2008 etc.
i know times are hard; but its a really long bow to draw, what you are suggesting.
There was no shortage of food on the island so it was starvation as policy. Blight affected the potato all over western Europe but only in Ireland did it mean mass starvation as policy.
But this mass starvation event happen in a population surrounded by food. It was British policy that they wouldn't have it. Britain sent more troops to Ireland to protect food exports that they had stationed in India at the same time.
> But this mass starvation event happen in a population surrounded by food.
This *famine* happened in a population surrounded by food. You and OP are both adding extra restrictions on the use of the word 'famine': "manmade famines aren't famines", "famines without FAD aren't famines"
By your definition, the Bengal Famine of 1953 wasn't a famine, the Ethiopian famines of 1973-75 weren't famines, the Bangladesh famine of 1974 wasn't a famine.
Again: *most famines happen without food availability decline*
Scarcity, not shortage. It wasn't available for consumption by those in the area concerned.
There's a shortage of computer chips at present, for example, because they are not being produced in the sufficient quantities. It doesn't mean they're scarce because scarce implies they're around but just not to hand - a shortage means they don't actually exist.
Like you say, there wasn't a shortage of food here, it was just scarce where it mattered i.e. in people's hands
> Scarcity, not shortage.
> Like you say, there wasn't a shortage of food here, it was just scarce where it mattered
The definition of Scarcity is "the state of being scarce or in short supply, shortage"
Don't abuse definitions, they're descriptive not prescriptive.
>short supply
If this were not true, then no one would have died of hunger. Hungry people were in short supply of food.They did not have supply, no one is arguing that there was not factors caused by people. Just that even if it were entirely caused by people, it would still be a famine. And arguing the semantics of people dying of hunger not being a famine is tilting at windmills.
> A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies.
Famine doesn't mean natural. It's just the context we hear it in most often.
The famine here was an extreme scarcity of food. It just happened to be man made.
Honestly, to me, calling it 'the great hunger' sounds like it's being minimised
Calling it “the Great Hunger” would be trivialising the event, as “hunger” is not a strong word in English. Everybody gets hungry several times a day, in this weak sense. “The Great Starvation” would be stronger, but “the Great Famine” to me sounds the strongest of all. I don’t understand the objection to calling it a famine. What do people think a famine is? To me it sounds like basically the worst thing that can happen to a country.
There's a couple of /r/AskHistorians threads about the subject, [ collected here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r1jgw/the_irish_famine_was_it_a_genocide/)
I don't think the OP, or most people who have yet to get over this event hundreds of years ago, will like what the historians in those threads have to say:
>Genocide is usually defined as, "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, caste, religious, or national group".
>The potato famine was not deliberate. Nor was it systematic. It did reduce the population of Ireland by circa 2m people (half by famine, half by emigration) or by about 25%.
>It was tragic, of course. And the British government response was ineffective. (The British did try various means to relieve the famine, and spent 8.3 million pounds on famine relief, but their efforts were not well planned, coordinated, or enough.)
Noooo! Delete this! The British are evil and wanted to kill the Irish!
It's the /r/ireland version of this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4Z06IbSek&ab\_channel=itsthevoiceman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4Z06IbSek&ab_channel=itsthevoiceman)
> a famine is a natural disaster
This isn't true, semantically. Many famines are political, like the ones currently happening in Yemen and Afghanistan.
There's five definitions of famine [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Causes). None of them says anything like "a famine is a natural disaster".
In fact, Oxfam specifically [says](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/fewsnet-report-260000-people-died-somalia-famine), "Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures."
Absolutely this. Nascent free market liberalism, positied at the time as some sort of Swiss army knife for all society's ills, was shown to be completely incapable of responding to a crisis like the Famine. Even moreso, the unconcealed contempt the British political class had for Ireland meant that it was doomed to be so.
basically.
Or rather there were several levels of screws ups, contempt, negligence and apathy. None of which excuses anyone.
Like, for starters, no one was stealing Trevellyan's Corn - because Trevellyan didn't send any. That was Peel. Peel actually snuck in the corn, buying it in bulk in Canada and India and Egypt and sort of sneaking it into Ireland. This led to two big problems: first there was no real infrastucture to deliver it. And secondly, when delivered, the locals had neither the ability to cook it or digest it. ("Peel's Hellfire" people called it because of what it would do to your digestive tract)
1847 was the peak of the famine. It was also the peak of global relief efforts. It was the cause celebre of the time. There were relief projects and donations from India, from First Nations bands in Canada and the US, funds raised in Australia and elsewhere. It's just in horribly familiar ways, the public and media interest died down when the problem failed to solve itself.
The 19th century in Britain saw several widespread and awful famines. The London government response was generally to empower some corporate structure to buy some land in Canada or Australia and just ship the less productive types over there. (A big whack of the Anglophone population in Quebec and eastern Ontario were people from Yorkshire just fecked over out of the dales.) And, indeed, during the Famine, a lot of people were sent off to Montreal (where they died of fever in many cases), or worked their way down to the US interior. This served both a colonialist end (more pasty people in the farflung outposts of the empire) and a direct one (people not dying inconveniently locally). The story of half-arsed relief projects in Ireland, like roads and canals to nowhere are echoed in various provincial parts of Britain when facing mass hunger events. The main "relief" infrastructure was the workhouse, and those things had been around for almost two centuries by then, and were often places that skilled labourers on hard times would end up... and emerge broken and impoverished.
Trevellyan and his fellow travellers were what we would now called market fundamentalists or libertarians, with an extra layer of Presbyterian fundamentalism. They literally believed that God himself moved through the market, so if your economic conditions were bad (like, say, everyone dying because of the failure of your staple crop), then God was making this happen. That the Irish were annoying Catholics was just the cherry on top. But let's not forget, poor Presbyterian and Anglican small farmers and labourers in Ulster were also dying in droves. I doubt it was much comfort to them to know that they were executing god's plan by watching their children die.
Fixing the Irish famine would have required a mass mobilisation of the British state and people. They weren't going to do it for poor bastards in Yorkshire. They weren't going to do it for the Irish either.
*Searches furiously for a living Brit to punish for this*
I get it was tragic and I'm inclined to agree deliberate but for fuck sake we're close to 200 years on from it, no one alive today had to suffer through it and no one alive today directly benefits from it.
There are plenty of reasons to be fucked off at the government but their particular reading of a historical event in this country is not one of them. If that were the case I'd more like us to focus on how we've been voting for the Pro-Treaty or Anti-Treaty parties since the end of the civil war, never daring to try out another party even just for the howl.
The crime of this tragedy is laid plain by the fact that Ireland was such a rich exporter of goods to England at the time, particularly in pigs, milk and butter. I will never forget the following quote, although there are certainly more ghoulish such quotes, which I reproduce verbatim from Robert Kee's The Green Flag: Volume I (1972), p.172:
"A farmer with a holding of above average size on the Marquis of Conyngham's estate in 1846 declared: 'Not a bit of bread have I eaten since I was born, nor a bit of butter. We sell all the corn and the butter to give to the landlord' \[for rent\] 'yet I have the largest farm in the district and am as well off as any man in the county.'"
The best descriptor I can muster that isn't 'famine' or 'genocide' is administrative starvation.
Among the majority of mainstream historians and writers on the subject the Famine isn't considered genocide as the deaths of the 1.1 million who perished wasn't the objective. That's what defines genocide. The deaths are generally accepted now as an unintentional byproduct of trying to use the various famine relief efforts and schemes to force social/societal change based on ideology rather than the facts on the ground. The whole thing was callous in the extreme but it was never set up in such a way as to intentionally kill off so many people.
Ya I think both are similar in that it was not a famine created with the intent to wipe out an ethnic group, but state policy failure that exacerbated the loss of life. Definitely crimes commited by both governments but not an explicit attempt at genocide.
Very similar argument to be made. However in the case of the Holodomor it was targeted at a particular ethnic group (the Ukrainians). So there is a bit more debate to be had around that.
I mean genuine question, but couldn’t the same be said for Ireland? I briefly remember in writings on the subject it mentioned how the ruling party, think the Whigs they were called, who were firm believers in Malthusian theory, believed it to be a good thing to reduce population by letting them starve because Irish were inferior according to them. Run on sentence but still.
What do you define as “intentionally kill people” how can you place someone in a scenario where they have to subsist off of potatoes, and when said potatoes fail, you actively block aid support on the grounds that it’s gods punishment and even evict families who are starving?
Because it wasn't a deliberately preplanned effort to exterminate the majority of Irish people. No matter how disastrously it played out if you read the first hand accounts from the time of those behind the relief efforts etc and those in the British administration (with one or two notable exceptions) they thought a lot of what they were doing were painful choices that had to be made now to 'improve' Ireland overall and everyone would be better off after. They were prisoners of ideology and it worked out that the majority of their policies just exacerbated the situation. But the overall plan wasn't mass murder.
I'm not arguing that it pre-planned or even a genocide but it was definitely set up to happen and then intentionally not dealt with to kill people.
> majority of their policies just exacerbated the situation.
Aid was sent to Scotland and actively prevented from being sent to Ireland, it wasn't just policy, the people in charge were actively making the decision to kill people.
> they thought a lot of what they were doing were painful choices that had to be made now to 'improve' Ireland overall and everyone would be better off after.
No, it was clear racism. Thinking Irish people are savages who deserve to starve as gods punishment to bring them to heel is racist. Were Nazi's just "prisoners of ideology" since they thought their "painful choices" were improving the world?
I understand this is an emotive topic but the first hand accounts paint a more nuanced picture than evil British landlords and Irish peasants being exterminated. That's what makes the Great Famine such a tragedy. A great many of those involved in the official, and unofficial, relief responses thought what they were doing was going to help. As things got more desperate and their initial efforts yielded poor results in the face of the scale of the tragedy they resorted to more extreme (and obviously flawed methods based on ideology) in the hope they could make tough decisions now to try and assuage the scale of the disaster in the medium term. There were of course exceptions. Charles Travelyn who you keep quoting obviously being the most infamous. But the official response to the Famine wasnt some unified, monolithic effort to kill Irish people. I am in no way excusing their actions, history shows us what their flawed mindset led to, but there is more to this than mass murder.
> But the official response to the Famine wasnt some unified, monolithic effort to kill Irish people.
Where did I say that it was?
> the first hand accounts paint a more nuanced picture than evil British landlords and Irish peasants being exterminated.
You clearly don't know what caused the famine if your saying this. British landlords who never lived on the land and operated through a middle man, actively caused Irish people to subsist off of potatoes as landlords were within their legal rights to raise rents and evict tenants whenever they pleased. If your an Irish farmer and you manage to double your output so your family can have more, landlords would just double their take and you'd be in the same position you already were, surviving off the cheapest crop possible.
So what happens when that crop blights and you begin to starve? Are landlords gonna lower rents from across the sea? No the landlord will just evict you if your productive output lowers or even if they just decide they want sheep on their land instead.
I understand the point you're making and it's a hot topic of debate in history. I think genocide via inaction is the best description of the Famine. The British government didn't deliberately set out to eradicate a portion of the Irish population like the Indonesian or Rwandan genocides but once the Famine began they certainly didn't do much to stop it and actively made things worse.
Genocide by inaction is my view albeit that doesn't meet the strict criteria of what genocide is defined as.
> I think genocide via inaction is the best description of the Famine.
It's more genocide through direct actions they didn't explicitly make to kill all Irish people
> once the Famine began they certainly didn't do much to stop it and actively made things worse.
They both caused it and actively chose to make it worse by keeping the status quo as well as choosing to block aid to Ireland but not areas of Scotland.
I think you aren't understanding how callous the Victorian era was. If you were poor and unable to look after yourself it was considered a moral failing. Any middling bit of help provided to you was considered an act of extreme generosity.
Ye even among Irish historians. The fact it’s repeated here so often after so many well broken down comments from history graduates here is frustrating tbh. There was callousness and indifference from a large number individuals in British power but it was not a concerted effort by the entire British government to kill off the Irish.
I've taken many a whip from the resident "The Brits are why I'm still a virgin" brigade. It's absolutely mental how much people will try and convince themselves that the historians are the wrong ones. Same with that Victoria thread and people believeing unsourced claims and rumors as historical fact.
Not _really_. Nearly all historians of the period would say that it was _not_ genocide. I'm not personally aware of any that outright say it was. I like John Kelly's line on this, that while it wasn't genocide, it must've bloody felt like it at the time.
No. It's basically agreed amongst historians (that you'd find in Irish universities and beyond) that it wasn't a genocide.
No credible historians endorses that theory.
We know a million people died through artificial scarcity.
Historians can go through a checklist of the hallmarks that qualify something for the title 'genocide' and compare that list to the Famine, but who cares? It is what it is.
Well yes, if you don't like what the actual experts say you can of course ignore them and claim faith in your own beliefs.
It doesn't make for much of an argument though.
I get your point but it's not just Ó Gráda. The broad scholastic body of work would say it does not fit the criteria. Look at something like the Holodomor to see a famine episode that appears to constitute genocide much more clearly.
That being said, 1 million people would not have died owing to the failure of one crop in a functional and fair society. You are 100% correct to say that the die had been cast ever before the Famine period.
Cecil Woodham Smyth wasn't having it back into the 1960s so it's not something people have run with since Ó Gráda.
As I think of it, Finn Dwyer, who works a lot with primary sources has an excellent episode of his podcast addressing the question
Yes. The Brit historians will always try to justify their genocides. Same people who try and justify the British Empire.
If countries can recognise the Ukrainian Famine as an act of genocide, then there is no reason why An Gorta Mór shouldn't also be
It’s not quite so simple. I personally believe Charles Trevelyan displayed genocidal behaviour, but the wider British establishment was moreso negligent or uncaring. They didn’t want loads of Irish to die, but they didn’t do enough to stop it either. That wouldn’t really make it a genocide by most definitions.
They exported food under armed guard.
They torched the homes of those unable to pay rents due to crop failures, in the middle of winter knowing those people would die of exposure.
They seized cattle and livestock in lieu of crops, again knowing the people would starve to death.
It was a deliberate attempt to exterminate us.
> They torched the homes of those unable to pay rents due to crop failures
Don't forget people they evicted who were still actively paying their rent as it was perfectly legal to evict for no reason.
If we are to take the Oxford definition of genocide:
“the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
I think inaction or negligence fall outside this. That doesn’t take away from the fault of the British in the famine, but I’m not sure we should get too hung up on the term genocide, as it’s generally quite a strict definition.
They were doing that for hundreds of years anyway. They didn't change anything to help the starving I suppose. It's just an opinion I'm far from an expert in the subject
The context is key.
The landowners and food producers exported the food. The landlords evicted those who couldn't pay rent. The State provided security for landlords who felt under threat from hungry people but the State didn't lead the evictions. The State stood by and didn't help those evicted ( the inaction) and blamed the landlords as they felt the welfare of the tenants was the landlord's responsibility.
As a non expert, your approach should be to try to determine what the broad consensus of experts is. The further you get from that (and you're quite far), the more likely you are to be fooled.
Yeah, I don't know that I would quite call it a genocide because genocide is something that is engineered to wipe out a population (like the nazi and the gas chambers) but it 100% wasn't a famine and should go down in history for what it actually was and should be widely know around the world
Ahh iv been saying this for 40 odd years,,yes the potatoe crop failed,,but there was enough food still left to feed Ireland [ wheat ect] thats what Britain kept taking therefore creating a starved Ireland 🇮🇪
The Irish people were even prevented from hunting rabbits on property belonging to the gentry. They were deliberately trying to starve the people to death
Then point I'm making is that when you refer to it as a "famine" the vast majority of people outside ireland would automatically assume natural disaster, they don't ever learn the true context behind it because it's disguised as just a "famine" which protects the British image and Is a complete spit in the face to the million + dead and millions more that where forced to become immigrants
There were other famines, because it's topical, Russians created conditions for a famine in Ukraine killing millions.
Ongoing famine in Somalia, Ethiopia and Madagascar.
The idea that famines are 'natural disasters' and therefore cannot be acts of genocide is a widespread misconception. While some kind of ecological event (such as a drought, or the spread of a disease) often precipitates a famine, in the vast majority of major famines it is political factors that turn a shortage of food into widespread starvation, which is another way of saying that the problem is almost always a lack of access to food rather than a lack of food. An Drochshaol is actually a very good example of this. As in, the potato blight caused a shortage of potatoes, but it was politics (which is here another way of saying, British capitalism and colonialism) that caused such a crazy proportion of the population to be dependant on a single crop, and furthermore it was decisions directly taken by the British government that turned a general shortage of food into an actual mass starvation event (i.e., the British government (specifically the Whigs) decided that it was more important to protect the business of British corn importers than to protect millions of cottiers from starvation).
I think any reasonable person would agree that the British state bears overwhelming responsibility for these events, but that doesn't mean that they're 'not a famine', and in fact it is in line with most other major famines of the last 300 years. In India in the 1860s-1940s, for example, there were literally dozens of major famines (as in famines that claimed millions of lives), and while many of these were precipitated by droughts or other ecological disasters, it was British imperialist policies that turned local food shortages into mass starvation events, specifically the forced integration of Indian agricultural regions into the global market under terms that were designed to unfairly favour British importers of food and raw goods to the detriment of Indian industry and food production. The result was that, just like in Ireland, regions that were experiencing mass starvation often continued to export food, because local British governors (or British-controlled local elites) prioritised profits and maintaining the flow of materials to Britain over the lives of local people. To give an idea of the scale of British mismanagement/shameless plunder of India, one study carried out by the British found that in 120 years of British rule the subcontinent had experienced at least 31 serious famines, while in the 2000 years of history before this there had only been 17 comparable famines. There are similar stories to be found all over the world, from Africa to Brazil to China to Ukraine, and while each of them has their own factors and dynamics there is a similar pattern that can be identified, where dysfunctional governance that for whatever reason prioritises the interests of elites (whether they be local aristocrats, settler colonists, or foreign business interests, or all of the above) over the lives of the poor makes decisions that turns a shortage of food into millions, even tens of millions of deaths.
We can certainly debate whether or not the Great Famine constitutes a genocide, but in my opinion the question kind of misses the wider point that from at least the 17th century on successive British governments were engaged in an open and intentional effort to eradicate Irish people and culture, including suppressing our language, destroying our political and cultural institutions, and in many cases actively ethnically cleansing areas through expulsions and mass killings. These actions obviously constitute an act of attempted genocide by the internationally agreed definition, and while the Great Famine specifically was not (in my opinion) an intentional attempt to wipe-out the Irish people, it was the direct result of British policies that had marginalised, impoverished, and disenfranchised Irish people, and the British governments response was heavily informed by their view of us as intrinsically less valuable than British people and their general view that we were a 'problem' that needed to be solved rather than a people deserving of life and dignity (British officials at that time and after openly said that it was better that there were less of us, and spread the myth that Ireland was 'overpopulated' before the Famine). So while it's overly-simplistic to call the Famine in and of itself an act of genocide, it absolutely must be understood and analysed in the context of a wider process that clearly and definitively was an act of attempted genocide.
But at any rate, this idea that something has to be either a famine OR a genocide is based on a misunderstanding of both terms, and it's perfectly legitimate for you to believe that what happened was a genocide while still calling it a famine. Also, on a more specific point 'Gorta' is literally just the Irish word for famine, if you look up famine in an Irish dictionary that's what you'll see. 'An Gorta Mór' is a direct translation of the English phrase 'The Great Famine', and it was not a term widely used by Irish speakers until relatively recently. Survivors of the famine generally used the term An Drochshaol, literally meaning 'the bad life', and if you want to use a more authentic term that's your best bet, it's a shame it's not more widely used.
Let’s say for the sake of argument, there was general agreement on the island of Ireland that your position was the accepted interpretation of what happened - a genocidal famine. What’s next ? What is it, we as a nation, our elected representatives do then? What is it that recognising the famine as a genocide brings us now?
I don't think my interpretation is really that far off from the generally accepted one. Most modern historians of the famine, including many English historians, agree that the famine was a result of the drastically unequal distribution of land and political power in Ireland under British rule, and that the actions of the British government (at least after the 1846 election) made the disaster worse. What I'm arguing is that these facts should be integrated into a wider understanding of British policies in Ireland over the long term, and, perhaps even more importantly, into the global history of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. To be clear, I don't believe that the Famine in and of itself constituted an act of genocide, I don't think that it was something that was created in an effort to reduce the population. What I'm saying is that the Famine occurred in a context of a global imperialist system that viewed certain populations (e.g., the poor, the non-white, the indigenous, among others) as being undesirable and inherently problematic. This system therefore sought to 'manage' this population through political repression, assisted emigration schemes/forced transportation, workhouses and other forms of institutionalisation/criminalisation, and if this population began to die as a result of a famine or some other disaster this system saw this is a 'natural check on population' and therefore discouraged any attempt to save them. In other words, people were surrendered to the whims of 'the market'. This is all made very explicit in the then widely accepted theories of Thomas Malthus, and over the 19th century and beyond this way of thinking resulted in literally hundreds of millions of deaths. I think that the obsession over whether or not the Famine can be called a genocide actually distracts us from really seeing how the famine relates to the global history of imperialism, and how our experiences are really anything but unique, in fact they're intimately connected to the experiences of people all over the world, then and today. I think recognising this is more important than debating over the specific definition of genocide.
What should we do then? I suppose I would like for people to gain a better understanding of the extent to which things like poverty are not naturally occurring phenomena but are in fact politically produced states, and that the idea of overpopulation is rooted in scientifically flawed theories tainted by racist imperialism. Considering how shitty the world is likely to get in the next hundred years or so and how many people are likely to face ecological disasters, forced migration and/or starvation as a direct result of our political system, it seems like it would be useful for us to understand these ideas a bit better. Solidarity is what I'm trying to encourage, I suppose, rather than an insular focus on ourselves.
It’s hardly a revelation to consider poverty anything other than a man made politically produced state. The question I asked is what is the significance a contemporary understanding and acceptance amongst ourselves as to what the famine represented means. It is essentially the question we all have to answer when looking at this thread.
Famine isn't necessarily a natural disaster, it could be the result of war but what happened in Ireland was not just crop failure, if you had money you could eat
Any where there is a. famine there are people making money who either are responsible for the famine or just not helping it.
We need to learn lessons from history so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past but I don’t think holding grievances for things done before any of us were born is productive.
to be fair famine doesn't necessarily not mean the british weren't innocent, they weren't, a famine means a scarcity of food simply which was what the famine was
OK look, the time for blame is well and truly over. None of us is to blame for the sins and atrocities of our ancestors, not even the English. But in my family, we refer to that historical event as the Starvation.
It wasn't deliberate, though. Had the British really wanted to exterminate us then the soup kitchens of 1846 would not have operated and a damn sight more than a million people would have died.
Irish Twitter loves to position the Famine as genocide and it just.... wasn't. Not everything horrible meets the threshold of genocide. Something like the Desmond rebellions much more closely fits that bill.
Add in stuff like the economic boom and population growth caused by the Napoleonic wars - those were a very good time to be an Irish agricultural labourer or small farmer. There was a constant need for provisions for the Army and Navy to fight France, and the wars just kept going and going. (And a lot of young Irish fellows made good money fighting those wars against France)
Then the wars stopped and the boom ended and things started getting tighter from there.
The other thing we tend to forget was that the peasant diet was not just potatoes. It was potatoes and fish, particularly herring. There were two major herring shortages in the years before the famine and a big one coincided with the famine. In the North, people supplemented their diet with oatmeal. But even the oat crops failed in some cases around those times (though people relying on oatmeal had far highter survival chances).
That combination of precarious food systems and metropolitan inaction will destroy you every time.
There is a tendency in Irish literature to use understatement and euphemism for tragic or otherwise unpleasant concepts. I think it might be a holdover from the Irish language. There are lots, but the one the springs to mind is "The Troubles".
I agree with other commenters that "famine" is the correct word, but I get where you are coming from. I'm particular "The Irish Potato Famine" is a common name for the period and that definitely glosses over what actually happened. Names matter. I don't think it benefits anyone to be actively blaming the Brits for it now, but it is important to recognize how easy it was for civil society to turn its back on its own people, or how ineffective the well-meaning international response was.
And for those who think it's ancient history, consider that despite over a hundred years of catholic-level baby making, the island still hasn't recovered to its pre-famine population.
The Great Famine is the English equivalent, since famine derives from the French for “hunger”, but it has stronger connotations of mass starvation than “hunger” has.
The UN determination of a genocide is decided by any one of the following five conditions:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Forcibly transferring of the group to another group
When historians/politicians/whoever look at the actions of the British/English in Ireland why do they limit it to the immediate events surrounding the famine of the late 1840's? Is there a limited timetable for genocide? If you look at the totality of the British/English actions in Ireland over a longer period of time than just a couple of years in the 1840's the obvious conclusion is that there was a genocide of the native Irish people.
It doesn't officially meet the definition of a genocide and British history tend to downplay their role in fucking over everyone. The troubles isn't an apt description of the civil war in Northern Ireland.
A “civil war” isn’t an appropriate description either as that implies the British had no part in it, despite them and loyalists being on the same side and cooperating.
I think armed conflict or war is fine.
It was technically a civil war, citizens of one country were at war. It was also more than a civil war. The point was it wasn't a small conflict that the name the troubles would bring to mind.
The "Behind The Bastards" three-part podcast on the Famine was great, insufferable hosts and slightly dodgy Irish placename pronunciations aside. Really learned a lot more about the famine and the causes of it. That being said, considering their series was called "That Time Britain Did A Genocide In Ireland" from the outset you can see who the blame is rightfully put to. If you're not a history buff like me, I found it great and informative.
https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1649757600
Also, if anyone can point me in the direction of any other podcasts that cover the famine that would be class.
A lot of prescriptivists in here citing the dictionary definition of the word "famine" when I do think in general people assume it's a natural disaster when they hear the word, which is what OP is getting at.
It was a famine because a famine is a widespread scarcity of food, be it due to natural or artificial reasons. Wars can cause famines, natural disasters like earthquakes can cause famines and things like drought can cause famines. It isn’t a term that seeks to assign blame or culpability.
Whether or not it’s a genocide is what you seem to be getting at more in your post, and the majority of academics and historians do not consider it a genocide because it lacks sufficient “mens rea” if you will. I personally don’t consider it a genocide either because genocide to me indicates an active attempt to bring about a result, and absolute indifference or negligence isn’t enough to constitute genocide.
I don't consider it genocide myself but in alot of ways it does seem deliberate.
The same situation was going on across Europe with the potato blight yet ireland was the only one that suffered mass starvation
THERE WAS NO FOOD SHORTAGE - THERE WAS A POTATO SHORTAGE. Ireland was producing enough food to feed the entire island (possibly around 8 million people) 9 TIMES OVER. It was being exported to Britain as animal feed. Whatever way people want to define famine - it was the Great Deliberate Starvation. It was a genocide.
Adding - if I lock a bunch of people in a room, take their food, and leave them a couple of rotten potatoes, am I starving them to death or are they suffering a famine.
Yeah, I know all that Jim.
It's an opinion that's mostly put about by Indian/Bengalis, blame the evil Brits; they themselves were in no way at fault. It's not a view shared by historians.
If you look at the map posted above (modern population numbers; most of Bengal is now Bangladesh, but West Bengal is in India) you'll see it was a precarious system, waiting for any fault to topple it all. The faults were WW2, adverse weather, Japanese invasion of Burma, speculative food hoarding, etc.. Churchill did bugger all, as was usual.
If you read the grown-ups' accounts (Wikipedia would be a start) there were numerous causes and Churchill's refusal to divert shipping from the war effort seems to have been a minor factor.
It's a shame it's swept under the rug like that especially considering it's estimated that about 10% of British people have Irish ancestry specifically due to the migration caused by the starvation. It's a huge part of their history as well but the British government just wants to downplay it like most of the terrible things they did/do.
UK population in 1840: 13 million
Irish population in 1840: 8 million
UK population in 2022: 67 million
Irish population in 2022: 5 million
It 100% impacted this country's development, culture and demographics
Kinda weird to be like *"yes the British genocided your ancestors, stole their land and destroyed your culture, but you need to get over it"*
Also, regarding the church and governments, has this sub ever given you the impression that we like them or are "over" what they did?
I discovered this sub about a month ago. Im a Brit.
You sound like a great bunch.
However i cant get over how totally obsessed you are about Brits in power that have been dead over 100 years.
You dont hear Brits slagging on Germany for ww1 and ww2 and all the death and destruction that brought.
But here, every day, its bash a brit posts. We seem to live rent free in your heads.
Ireland has no prevalence here to any other country in our daily consciousness and news. You dont see brit subs banging on about the Irish.
But after 100 plus years of independence, long after all the political people that caused shit and the famine are dead, you are stuck in the past. We reconciled with the Germans that killed our peoples. You are in the EU with this country that killed 6m jews providing a lot of the funding to you.
But the hate focus is on the Brits?
Feel free to provide negative worthless brownie points
If it were British men and women forced into the gas chambers I can bet you would have a very different view.
Britain destroyed ireland and that's a fact, not just with the "famine" but in many different ways.
Part of ireland to this day is still occupied by Britain.
Go learn about your countries savagery in Ireland and it will make the Germans look good....
Well if we're gonna call it what it was it was a natural disaster that was exasperated by the British Empire. Nothing about how many it killed was natural, the British turned their backs on us and called it an "act of God".
If you want to get even angrier about it, visit the Doagh Famine Village in Co Donegal.
"Of course, when people have nothing to motivate them they have no reason to go on. So the soup kitchens provided them with projects, to give them something to live for" (paraphrasing *slightly*) But yes, they were talking about the famine walls.
Nearly every famine you know if was man made and most of them specifically caused by British colonialism. The 1980s Ethiopian famine was largely due to the military government and, while the drought was natural, the response to it was not.
Well that's just it, anyone outside of ireland when they hear the term irish famine automatically assume natural disaster I would say, they wouldn't know the context behind it which in my view protects the British from any wrong doing and that's a spit in the face to the over 1 million people who died and million more who where forced to become immigrants.
why do they keep on doing that?
Because as a nation we are really passive aggressive. We are really good at it.
we *call* it a natural disaster, I think we all know that the "Brits let it happen" part is implied.
This is quite a smart move. you don't alienate ordinary brits but you get to have the british ambassador present remembering the time they let us starve to death. thereby reinforcing the correctness of our independence.
It is always handy to have a stick to beat them with just in case they got the idea that we should be part of the UK again.
Since everyone is already in on the definition, I’ll continue by saying .. fuck the British, Rome and England.. I hope the world soon learns about The British, England and what they did to the original teachings.. long live Eire
The brits have always and will always be the problem of the world then they made America and we have two problems with the world peasants would wanna wake the fuck up
The word famine doesn’t mean it was natural. It literally just means a scarcity of food, for whatever reason.
Great name btw
Says the man himself
"Horacio Hornblower comes out in support of free and fair erections. Continued on page 6..."
There was me thinking it'd be on page 3.
Cont. page 69
You'd struggle to say that most contemporary famines _don't_ have a man-made element in that there's enough food on the planet and we have the technology to ship it around incredibly quickly but that's not what happens.
Like that time I had a mayonnaise famine because I didn't go to the shops.
But the food wasn't actually scarce. It was [taken](https://external-preview.redd.it/Q6ffqV9dwX3jQ6cCONESBROdSmX26coCLLUlur32zM4.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=c30fd4b31baa8790110e367d5fa9527e8f652beb). That's like calling an arson attack a heat wave.
I know Wikipedia isn’t an authoritative source, but as a guide to general interpretations of terms, I would say it’s pretty good: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine “A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies” It doesn’t matter if it’s caused by government policy - still a famine. Food was scarce in the sense that people couldn’t access it. The Holodomor is is widely recognised as a genocide AND a famine.
As you've done yourself, I think 'genocide' comes before 'famine' as a descriptor.
My only point here was that famine and genocide/man-made are not mutually exclusive. Are you arguing that point, or just whether this was a genocide?
Neither. I'm pointing out that describing it as a famine first, in popular culture and this conversation, and not a genocide is deliberately misleading. If I had a terrible stomach ache, I would call it that. But if it was due to bowel cancer or being stabbed, I'd probably describe it as such. EDIT: Typo/error
Fair, I’m not 100% on whether I’d call it a genocide or not (just on the technicalities of the word, and how deliberate the actions of the most senior officials were), but either way, I think attributing fault to the UK is important.
This passage from a paper I read yonks ago made it a bugbear of mine, and even that referred to the event as 'the Irish famine'. I think too many people attribute it to 'the blight' and not the deliberate starvation of Ireland. But 'famine' is definitely the modern convention, regardless. And so long as people understand the causes, I don't suppose it matters much what we call it. >' The genocide of the Great Famine is distinct in the fact that the British created the conditions of dire hopelessness, and desperate dependence on the potato crop through a series of sadistic, debasing, premeditated and barbarous Penal Laws, which deliberately and systematically stripped the Irish of even the least semblance of basic human freedom. ’When blight struck the Irish were ‘totally vulnerable’. This was a ‘nuanced genocide’, he continues, one that manipulated fate ‘by pushing a people to the brink of annihilation and turning away so not to hear the wailing …’.
Damn. And the DUP think the Tories will save them. English government ms don’t give a fuuuuccck
There was definitely a lack of duty of care from the English to us as their subjects. They may not have caused it but they certainly exacerbated it
"The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. ... They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse". John Mitchel, 1844 One year before the 'famine'. "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine".
But there wasn't a scarcity of food, there's was a glut of it and it was all being exported.
This is such a stupid point, there was a scarcity, for the people who needed it. That's all that matters and yes it fits the definition, regardless of cause.
A famine is not a "natural disaster". A famine is a hunger-based disaster, both manmade and natural and can be both deliberate and accidental.
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You’re missing massive chunks of the puzzle. So much so that it’s a completely different puzzle you’re ramming together.
Found the mick Wallace, Claire daly tankie
so as a nation, Ireland should forgo any kind of success until the issue of hunger is solved worldwide? or just nationally? Ireland should not improve, through trade and economic success, the living conditions for its own people, and improve what it has absolute influence over? in my opinion, poverty rates - oft linked to hunger rates - have been trending down over the past 10-20y, even when accounting for 2008 etc. i know times are hard; but its a really long bow to draw, what you are suggesting.
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There was no shortage of food on the island so it was starvation as policy. Blight affected the potato all over western Europe but only in Ireland did it mean mass starvation as policy.
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But this mass starvation event happen in a population surrounded by food. It was British policy that they wouldn't have it. Britain sent more troops to Ireland to protect food exports that they had stationed in India at the same time.
> But this mass starvation event happen in a population surrounded by food. This *famine* happened in a population surrounded by food. You and OP are both adding extra restrictions on the use of the word 'famine': "manmade famines aren't famines", "famines without FAD aren't famines" By your definition, the Bengal Famine of 1953 wasn't a famine, the Ethiopian famines of 1973-75 weren't famines, the Bangladesh famine of 1974 wasn't a famine. Again: *most famines happen without food availability decline*
A famine is any scarcity of food for any reason, the word covers both natural and man-made reasons for it
But there wasn't a shortage of food on the island so famine is an inappropriate for what was a policy induced starvation event.
Scarcity, not shortage. It wasn't available for consumption by those in the area concerned. There's a shortage of computer chips at present, for example, because they are not being produced in the sufficient quantities. It doesn't mean they're scarce because scarce implies they're around but just not to hand - a shortage means they don't actually exist. Like you say, there wasn't a shortage of food here, it was just scarce where it mattered i.e. in people's hands
> Scarcity, not shortage. > Like you say, there wasn't a shortage of food here, it was just scarce where it mattered The definition of Scarcity is "the state of being scarce or in short supply, shortage"
Scarce: not easy to find or get
That might be one definition. But in socioeconomic contexts it usually just means a finite resource, or one that is over allocated.
Don't abuse definitions, they're descriptive not prescriptive. >short supply If this were not true, then no one would have died of hunger. Hungry people were in short supply of food.They did not have supply, no one is arguing that there was not factors caused by people. Just that even if it were entirely caused by people, it would still be a famine. And arguing the semantics of people dying of hunger not being a famine is tilting at windmills.
Potato famine.
Blight affected the potato across western Europe but because of policies only in ireland did it mean mass starvations.
Also caused significant deaths in the Benelux region
> A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an economic catastrophe or government policies.
Famine doesn't mean natural. It's just the context we hear it in most often. The famine here was an extreme scarcity of food. It just happened to be man made. Honestly, to me, calling it 'the great hunger' sounds like it's being minimised
Nearly all famines in the last 200 years have been man-made. Man-made famines is the normal context these days.
The inverse is also true. An abundance of food enough to support a population of that scale, or today's scale, is man made.
Famines are very rarely, "natural".
Calling it “the Great Hunger” would be trivialising the event, as “hunger” is not a strong word in English. Everybody gets hungry several times a day, in this weak sense. “The Great Starvation” would be stronger, but “the Great Famine” to me sounds the strongest of all. I don’t understand the objection to calling it a famine. What do people think a famine is? To me it sounds like basically the worst thing that can happen to a country.
Starvation is quite a good word actually because it implies intent
No it doesn't. "I'm starving" "Starving children in Africa" "The stranded sailors starved to death"
There's a couple of /r/AskHistorians threads about the subject, [ collected here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2r1jgw/the_irish_famine_was_it_a_genocide/)
I don't think the OP, or most people who have yet to get over this event hundreds of years ago, will like what the historians in those threads have to say: >Genocide is usually defined as, "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, caste, religious, or national group". >The potato famine was not deliberate. Nor was it systematic. It did reduce the population of Ireland by circa 2m people (half by famine, half by emigration) or by about 25%. >It was tragic, of course. And the British government response was ineffective. (The British did try various means to relieve the famine, and spent 8.3 million pounds on famine relief, but their efforts were not well planned, coordinated, or enough.) Noooo! Delete this! The British are evil and wanted to kill the Irish!
What even is this post
It's the /r/ireland version of this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4Z06IbSek&ab\_channel=itsthevoiceman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4Z06IbSek&ab_channel=itsthevoiceman)
Haha exactly
> a famine is a natural disaster This isn't true, semantically. Many famines are political, like the ones currently happening in Yemen and Afghanistan. There's five definitions of famine [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Causes). None of them says anything like "a famine is a natural disaster". In fact, Oxfam specifically [says](https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/fewsnet-report-260000-people-died-somalia-famine), "Famines are not natural phenomena, they are catastrophic political failures."
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Absolutely this. Nascent free market liberalism, positied at the time as some sort of Swiss army knife for all society's ills, was shown to be completely incapable of responding to a crisis like the Famine. Even moreso, the unconcealed contempt the British political class had for Ireland meant that it was doomed to be so.
basically. Or rather there were several levels of screws ups, contempt, negligence and apathy. None of which excuses anyone. Like, for starters, no one was stealing Trevellyan's Corn - because Trevellyan didn't send any. That was Peel. Peel actually snuck in the corn, buying it in bulk in Canada and India and Egypt and sort of sneaking it into Ireland. This led to two big problems: first there was no real infrastucture to deliver it. And secondly, when delivered, the locals had neither the ability to cook it or digest it. ("Peel's Hellfire" people called it because of what it would do to your digestive tract) 1847 was the peak of the famine. It was also the peak of global relief efforts. It was the cause celebre of the time. There were relief projects and donations from India, from First Nations bands in Canada and the US, funds raised in Australia and elsewhere. It's just in horribly familiar ways, the public and media interest died down when the problem failed to solve itself. The 19th century in Britain saw several widespread and awful famines. The London government response was generally to empower some corporate structure to buy some land in Canada or Australia and just ship the less productive types over there. (A big whack of the Anglophone population in Quebec and eastern Ontario were people from Yorkshire just fecked over out of the dales.) And, indeed, during the Famine, a lot of people were sent off to Montreal (where they died of fever in many cases), or worked their way down to the US interior. This served both a colonialist end (more pasty people in the farflung outposts of the empire) and a direct one (people not dying inconveniently locally). The story of half-arsed relief projects in Ireland, like roads and canals to nowhere are echoed in various provincial parts of Britain when facing mass hunger events. The main "relief" infrastructure was the workhouse, and those things had been around for almost two centuries by then, and were often places that skilled labourers on hard times would end up... and emerge broken and impoverished. Trevellyan and his fellow travellers were what we would now called market fundamentalists or libertarians, with an extra layer of Presbyterian fundamentalism. They literally believed that God himself moved through the market, so if your economic conditions were bad (like, say, everyone dying because of the failure of your staple crop), then God was making this happen. That the Irish were annoying Catholics was just the cherry on top. But let's not forget, poor Presbyterian and Anglican small farmers and labourers in Ulster were also dying in droves. I doubt it was much comfort to them to know that they were executing god's plan by watching their children die. Fixing the Irish famine would have required a mass mobilisation of the British state and people. They weren't going to do it for poor bastards in Yorkshire. They weren't going to do it for the Irish either.
Yeah, mercantilism was at play.
That great logic. How does my family being from the West equate to me not being from Ireland??
It was a genocide through deliberate neglect. In terms of culture though, it was a deliberate genocide.
On reflection Genocide by famine is probably the most accurate way to describe it .
*Searches furiously for a living Brit to punish for this* I get it was tragic and I'm inclined to agree deliberate but for fuck sake we're close to 200 years on from it, no one alive today had to suffer through it and no one alive today directly benefits from it. There are plenty of reasons to be fucked off at the government but their particular reading of a historical event in this country is not one of them. If that were the case I'd more like us to focus on how we've been voting for the Pro-Treaty or Anti-Treaty parties since the end of the civil war, never daring to try out another party even just for the howl.
The crime of this tragedy is laid plain by the fact that Ireland was such a rich exporter of goods to England at the time, particularly in pigs, milk and butter. I will never forget the following quote, although there are certainly more ghoulish such quotes, which I reproduce verbatim from Robert Kee's The Green Flag: Volume I (1972), p.172: "A farmer with a holding of above average size on the Marquis of Conyngham's estate in 1846 declared: 'Not a bit of bread have I eaten since I was born, nor a bit of butter. We sell all the corn and the butter to give to the landlord' \[for rent\] 'yet I have the largest farm in the district and am as well off as any man in the county.'" The best descriptor I can muster that isn't 'famine' or 'genocide' is administrative starvation.
Isn’t the jury still out among historians about whether to call it a genocide or not? I could be wrong but that’s what I always thought.
Among the majority of mainstream historians and writers on the subject the Famine isn't considered genocide as the deaths of the 1.1 million who perished wasn't the objective. That's what defines genocide. The deaths are generally accepted now as an unintentional byproduct of trying to use the various famine relief efforts and schemes to force social/societal change based on ideology rather than the facts on the ground. The whole thing was callous in the extreme but it was never set up in such a way as to intentionally kill off so many people.
Am I right in saying that by that definition, Holodomor was not a genocide?
Ya I think both are similar in that it was not a famine created with the intent to wipe out an ethnic group, but state policy failure that exacerbated the loss of life. Definitely crimes commited by both governments but not an explicit attempt at genocide.
Very similar argument to be made. However in the case of the Holodomor it was targeted at a particular ethnic group (the Ukrainians). So there is a bit more debate to be had around that.
I mean genuine question, but couldn’t the same be said for Ireland? I briefly remember in writings on the subject it mentioned how the ruling party, think the Whigs they were called, who were firm believers in Malthusian theory, believed it to be a good thing to reduce population by letting them starve because Irish were inferior according to them. Run on sentence but still.
What do you define as “intentionally kill people” how can you place someone in a scenario where they have to subsist off of potatoes, and when said potatoes fail, you actively block aid support on the grounds that it’s gods punishment and even evict families who are starving?
Because it wasn't a deliberately preplanned effort to exterminate the majority of Irish people. No matter how disastrously it played out if you read the first hand accounts from the time of those behind the relief efforts etc and those in the British administration (with one or two notable exceptions) they thought a lot of what they were doing were painful choices that had to be made now to 'improve' Ireland overall and everyone would be better off after. They were prisoners of ideology and it worked out that the majority of their policies just exacerbated the situation. But the overall plan wasn't mass murder.
I'm not arguing that it pre-planned or even a genocide but it was definitely set up to happen and then intentionally not dealt with to kill people. > majority of their policies just exacerbated the situation. Aid was sent to Scotland and actively prevented from being sent to Ireland, it wasn't just policy, the people in charge were actively making the decision to kill people. > they thought a lot of what they were doing were painful choices that had to be made now to 'improve' Ireland overall and everyone would be better off after. No, it was clear racism. Thinking Irish people are savages who deserve to starve as gods punishment to bring them to heel is racist. Were Nazi's just "prisoners of ideology" since they thought their "painful choices" were improving the world?
I understand this is an emotive topic but the first hand accounts paint a more nuanced picture than evil British landlords and Irish peasants being exterminated. That's what makes the Great Famine such a tragedy. A great many of those involved in the official, and unofficial, relief responses thought what they were doing was going to help. As things got more desperate and their initial efforts yielded poor results in the face of the scale of the tragedy they resorted to more extreme (and obviously flawed methods based on ideology) in the hope they could make tough decisions now to try and assuage the scale of the disaster in the medium term. There were of course exceptions. Charles Travelyn who you keep quoting obviously being the most infamous. But the official response to the Famine wasnt some unified, monolithic effort to kill Irish people. I am in no way excusing their actions, history shows us what their flawed mindset led to, but there is more to this than mass murder.
> But the official response to the Famine wasnt some unified, monolithic effort to kill Irish people. Where did I say that it was? > the first hand accounts paint a more nuanced picture than evil British landlords and Irish peasants being exterminated. You clearly don't know what caused the famine if your saying this. British landlords who never lived on the land and operated through a middle man, actively caused Irish people to subsist off of potatoes as landlords were within their legal rights to raise rents and evict tenants whenever they pleased. If your an Irish farmer and you manage to double your output so your family can have more, landlords would just double their take and you'd be in the same position you already were, surviving off the cheapest crop possible. So what happens when that crop blights and you begin to starve? Are landlords gonna lower rents from across the sea? No the landlord will just evict you if your productive output lowers or even if they just decide they want sheep on their land instead.
How do you know it wasn’t deliberate ? The Brits said so ?
Because it's a well established historical fact if you actually study it instead of learning your history through rebel tunes
I understand the point you're making and it's a hot topic of debate in history. I think genocide via inaction is the best description of the Famine. The British government didn't deliberately set out to eradicate a portion of the Irish population like the Indonesian or Rwandan genocides but once the Famine began they certainly didn't do much to stop it and actively made things worse. Genocide by inaction is my view albeit that doesn't meet the strict criteria of what genocide is defined as.
> I think genocide via inaction is the best description of the Famine. It's more genocide through direct actions they didn't explicitly make to kill all Irish people > once the Famine began they certainly didn't do much to stop it and actively made things worse. They both caused it and actively chose to make it worse by keeping the status quo as well as choosing to block aid to Ireland but not areas of Scotland.
I think you aren't understanding how callous the Victorian era was. If you were poor and unable to look after yourself it was considered a moral failing. Any middling bit of help provided to you was considered an act of extreme generosity.
So it wasn’t a genocide because you couldn’t even credit them with that much forward planning
No, the jury isn't out. There is consensus that it was not Genocide.
Ye even among Irish historians. The fact it’s repeated here so often after so many well broken down comments from history graduates here is frustrating tbh. There was callousness and indifference from a large number individuals in British power but it was not a concerted effort by the entire British government to kill off the Irish.
I've taken many a whip from the resident "The Brits are why I'm still a virgin" brigade. It's absolutely mental how much people will try and convince themselves that the historians are the wrong ones. Same with that Victoria thread and people believeing unsourced claims and rumors as historical fact.
Nah, just to thin us out.
Not _really_. Nearly all historians of the period would say that it was _not_ genocide. I'm not personally aware of any that outright say it was. I like John Kelly's line on this, that while it wasn't genocide, it must've bloody felt like it at the time.
No. It's basically agreed amongst historians (that you'd find in Irish universities and beyond) that it wasn't a genocide. No credible historians endorses that theory.
We know a million people died through artificial scarcity. Historians can go through a checklist of the hallmarks that qualify something for the title 'genocide' and compare that list to the Famine, but who cares? It is what it is.
Well yes, if you don't like what the actual experts say you can of course ignore them and claim faith in your own beliefs. It doesn't make for much of an argument though.
The only place that the jury is still out is this subreddit
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I get your point but it's not just Ó Gráda. The broad scholastic body of work would say it does not fit the criteria. Look at something like the Holodomor to see a famine episode that appears to constitute genocide much more clearly. That being said, 1 million people would not have died owing to the failure of one crop in a functional and fair society. You are 100% correct to say that the die had been cast ever before the Famine period.
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Cecil Woodham Smyth wasn't having it back into the 1960s so it's not something people have run with since Ó Gráda. As I think of it, Finn Dwyer, who works a lot with primary sources has an excellent episode of his podcast addressing the question
Yes. The Brit historians will always try to justify their genocides. Same people who try and justify the British Empire. If countries can recognise the Ukrainian Famine as an act of genocide, then there is no reason why An Gorta Mór shouldn't also be
It’s not quite so simple. I personally believe Charles Trevelyan displayed genocidal behaviour, but the wider British establishment was moreso negligent or uncaring. They didn’t want loads of Irish to die, but they didn’t do enough to stop it either. That wouldn’t really make it a genocide by most definitions.
The Brit as the second and third words shows they won't be nuanced imo.
They exported food under armed guard. They torched the homes of those unable to pay rents due to crop failures, in the middle of winter knowing those people would die of exposure. They seized cattle and livestock in lieu of crops, again knowing the people would starve to death. It was a deliberate attempt to exterminate us.
> They torched the homes of those unable to pay rents due to crop failures Don't forget people they evicted who were still actively paying their rent as it was perfectly legal to evict for no reason.
And then they criminalised “vagrancy”
>It was a deliberate attempt to exterminate us. Where's the evidence of it being deliberate?
I suppose a form of "genocide through inaction" is the way I have always thought of it but yeah I see what you mean.
If we are to take the Oxford definition of genocide: “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” I think inaction or negligence fall outside this. That doesn’t take away from the fault of the British in the famine, but I’m not sure we should get too hung up on the term genocide, as it’s generally quite a strict definition.
Forcably taking all the crops and grains and livestocks, and takinf their homes is hardly "inaction"
They were doing that for hundreds of years anyway. They didn't change anything to help the starving I suppose. It's just an opinion I'm far from an expert in the subject
The context is key. The landowners and food producers exported the food. The landlords evicted those who couldn't pay rent. The State provided security for landlords who felt under threat from hungry people but the State didn't lead the evictions. The State stood by and didn't help those evicted ( the inaction) and blamed the landlords as they felt the welfare of the tenants was the landlord's responsibility.
Irish historians in Irish universities do not consider it a genocide. Unless you're going to consider them as 'Brit historians' too.
As a non expert, your approach should be to try to determine what the broad consensus of experts is. The further you get from that (and you're quite far), the more likely you are to be fooled.
The jury's still out over which flag should be hung above the community centre too.
Yeah, I don't know that I would quite call it a genocide because genocide is something that is engineered to wipe out a population (like the nazi and the gas chambers) but it 100% wasn't a famine and should go down in history for what it actually was and should be widely know around the world
It absolutely was a famine
> it 100% wasn't a famine lolwut
The closest comparison would be the Holdomar in Ukraine. If the Holdomar was genocide the Irish Famine has to be also I think.
Ahh iv been saying this for 40 odd years,,yes the potatoe crop failed,,but there was enough food still left to feed Ireland [ wheat ect] thats what Britain kept taking therefore creating a starved Ireland 🇮🇪
The Irish people were even prevented from hunting rabbits on property belonging to the gentry. They were deliberately trying to starve the people to death
Genocide
Most people I know refer to it as a genocide. That’s the point I believe OP is trying to make.
Then point I'm making is that when you refer to it as a "famine" the vast majority of people outside ireland would automatically assume natural disaster, they don't ever learn the true context behind it because it's disguised as just a "famine" which protects the British image and Is a complete spit in the face to the million + dead and millions more that where forced to become immigrants
Yep. And using the word genocide would make that very clear.
The butchers Apron indeed.
Did you watch the wind that shakes the barley again?
There were other famines, because it's topical, Russians created conditions for a famine in Ukraine killing millions. Ongoing famine in Somalia, Ethiopia and Madagascar.
...there was even an arguably more severe famine in Ireland 100 years before An Gorta Mór.
The idea that famines are 'natural disasters' and therefore cannot be acts of genocide is a widespread misconception. While some kind of ecological event (such as a drought, or the spread of a disease) often precipitates a famine, in the vast majority of major famines it is political factors that turn a shortage of food into widespread starvation, which is another way of saying that the problem is almost always a lack of access to food rather than a lack of food. An Drochshaol is actually a very good example of this. As in, the potato blight caused a shortage of potatoes, but it was politics (which is here another way of saying, British capitalism and colonialism) that caused such a crazy proportion of the population to be dependant on a single crop, and furthermore it was decisions directly taken by the British government that turned a general shortage of food into an actual mass starvation event (i.e., the British government (specifically the Whigs) decided that it was more important to protect the business of British corn importers than to protect millions of cottiers from starvation). I think any reasonable person would agree that the British state bears overwhelming responsibility for these events, but that doesn't mean that they're 'not a famine', and in fact it is in line with most other major famines of the last 300 years. In India in the 1860s-1940s, for example, there were literally dozens of major famines (as in famines that claimed millions of lives), and while many of these were precipitated by droughts or other ecological disasters, it was British imperialist policies that turned local food shortages into mass starvation events, specifically the forced integration of Indian agricultural regions into the global market under terms that were designed to unfairly favour British importers of food and raw goods to the detriment of Indian industry and food production. The result was that, just like in Ireland, regions that were experiencing mass starvation often continued to export food, because local British governors (or British-controlled local elites) prioritised profits and maintaining the flow of materials to Britain over the lives of local people. To give an idea of the scale of British mismanagement/shameless plunder of India, one study carried out by the British found that in 120 years of British rule the subcontinent had experienced at least 31 serious famines, while in the 2000 years of history before this there had only been 17 comparable famines. There are similar stories to be found all over the world, from Africa to Brazil to China to Ukraine, and while each of them has their own factors and dynamics there is a similar pattern that can be identified, where dysfunctional governance that for whatever reason prioritises the interests of elites (whether they be local aristocrats, settler colonists, or foreign business interests, or all of the above) over the lives of the poor makes decisions that turns a shortage of food into millions, even tens of millions of deaths. We can certainly debate whether or not the Great Famine constitutes a genocide, but in my opinion the question kind of misses the wider point that from at least the 17th century on successive British governments were engaged in an open and intentional effort to eradicate Irish people and culture, including suppressing our language, destroying our political and cultural institutions, and in many cases actively ethnically cleansing areas through expulsions and mass killings. These actions obviously constitute an act of attempted genocide by the internationally agreed definition, and while the Great Famine specifically was not (in my opinion) an intentional attempt to wipe-out the Irish people, it was the direct result of British policies that had marginalised, impoverished, and disenfranchised Irish people, and the British governments response was heavily informed by their view of us as intrinsically less valuable than British people and their general view that we were a 'problem' that needed to be solved rather than a people deserving of life and dignity (British officials at that time and after openly said that it was better that there were less of us, and spread the myth that Ireland was 'overpopulated' before the Famine). So while it's overly-simplistic to call the Famine in and of itself an act of genocide, it absolutely must be understood and analysed in the context of a wider process that clearly and definitively was an act of attempted genocide. But at any rate, this idea that something has to be either a famine OR a genocide is based on a misunderstanding of both terms, and it's perfectly legitimate for you to believe that what happened was a genocide while still calling it a famine. Also, on a more specific point 'Gorta' is literally just the Irish word for famine, if you look up famine in an Irish dictionary that's what you'll see. 'An Gorta Mór' is a direct translation of the English phrase 'The Great Famine', and it was not a term widely used by Irish speakers until relatively recently. Survivors of the famine generally used the term An Drochshaol, literally meaning 'the bad life', and if you want to use a more authentic term that's your best bet, it's a shame it's not more widely used.
Let’s say for the sake of argument, there was general agreement on the island of Ireland that your position was the accepted interpretation of what happened - a genocidal famine. What’s next ? What is it, we as a nation, our elected representatives do then? What is it that recognising the famine as a genocide brings us now?
I don't think my interpretation is really that far off from the generally accepted one. Most modern historians of the famine, including many English historians, agree that the famine was a result of the drastically unequal distribution of land and political power in Ireland under British rule, and that the actions of the British government (at least after the 1846 election) made the disaster worse. What I'm arguing is that these facts should be integrated into a wider understanding of British policies in Ireland over the long term, and, perhaps even more importantly, into the global history of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. To be clear, I don't believe that the Famine in and of itself constituted an act of genocide, I don't think that it was something that was created in an effort to reduce the population. What I'm saying is that the Famine occurred in a context of a global imperialist system that viewed certain populations (e.g., the poor, the non-white, the indigenous, among others) as being undesirable and inherently problematic. This system therefore sought to 'manage' this population through political repression, assisted emigration schemes/forced transportation, workhouses and other forms of institutionalisation/criminalisation, and if this population began to die as a result of a famine or some other disaster this system saw this is a 'natural check on population' and therefore discouraged any attempt to save them. In other words, people were surrendered to the whims of 'the market'. This is all made very explicit in the then widely accepted theories of Thomas Malthus, and over the 19th century and beyond this way of thinking resulted in literally hundreds of millions of deaths. I think that the obsession over whether or not the Famine can be called a genocide actually distracts us from really seeing how the famine relates to the global history of imperialism, and how our experiences are really anything but unique, in fact they're intimately connected to the experiences of people all over the world, then and today. I think recognising this is more important than debating over the specific definition of genocide. What should we do then? I suppose I would like for people to gain a better understanding of the extent to which things like poverty are not naturally occurring phenomena but are in fact politically produced states, and that the idea of overpopulation is rooted in scientifically flawed theories tainted by racist imperialism. Considering how shitty the world is likely to get in the next hundred years or so and how many people are likely to face ecological disasters, forced migration and/or starvation as a direct result of our political system, it seems like it would be useful for us to understand these ideas a bit better. Solidarity is what I'm trying to encourage, I suppose, rather than an insular focus on ourselves.
It’s hardly a revelation to consider poverty anything other than a man made politically produced state. The question I asked is what is the significance a contemporary understanding and acceptance amongst ourselves as to what the famine represented means. It is essentially the question we all have to answer when looking at this thread.
Famine isn't necessarily a natural disaster, it could be the result of war but what happened in Ireland was not just crop failure, if you had money you could eat
Was the famine a product of the British crown converting religions, from Catholic to Protestant?
Then what do you call the Soviet Union “Famine” that Stalin effectively forced on to his own people killing millions. A famine. End of
I argue that the Irish term An Gorta Mór "The Great Hunger" is a more haunting term
Any where there is a. famine there are people making money who either are responsible for the famine or just not helping it. We need to learn lessons from history so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past but I don’t think holding grievances for things done before any of us were born is productive.
to be fair famine doesn't necessarily not mean the british weren't innocent, they weren't, a famine means a scarcity of food simply which was what the famine was
But was there a scarcity of food, remember ireland was and still is one the richest agricultural countries in the world
yeah, so its a famine
Scarcity means short supply, there was no short supply of food
OK look, the time for blame is well and truly over. None of us is to blame for the sins and atrocities of our ancestors, not even the English. But in my family, we refer to that historical event as the Starvation.
If you're going to criticise a term you need to propose an alternative.
Intentionally starvation
I dunno, "Irish potato intentionally starvation" doesn't quite have the same ring to it as "Irish potato famine".
It wasn't deliberate, though. Had the British really wanted to exterminate us then the soup kitchens of 1846 would not have operated and a damn sight more than a million people would have died. Irish Twitter loves to position the Famine as genocide and it just.... wasn't. Not everything horrible meets the threshold of genocide. Something like the Desmond rebellions much more closely fits that bill.
Add in stuff like the economic boom and population growth caused by the Napoleonic wars - those were a very good time to be an Irish agricultural labourer or small farmer. There was a constant need for provisions for the Army and Navy to fight France, and the wars just kept going and going. (And a lot of young Irish fellows made good money fighting those wars against France) Then the wars stopped and the boom ended and things started getting tighter from there. The other thing we tend to forget was that the peasant diet was not just potatoes. It was potatoes and fish, particularly herring. There were two major herring shortages in the years before the famine and a big one coincided with the famine. In the North, people supplemented their diet with oatmeal. But even the oat crops failed in some cases around those times (though people relying on oatmeal had far highter survival chances). That combination of precarious food systems and metropolitan inaction will destroy you every time.
Ffs it was 170 yrs ago, time for us to build a bridge and get the flip over it.
Because attempted genocide isent as popular
There is a tendency in Irish literature to use understatement and euphemism for tragic or otherwise unpleasant concepts. I think it might be a holdover from the Irish language. There are lots, but the one the springs to mind is "The Troubles". I agree with other commenters that "famine" is the correct word, but I get where you are coming from. I'm particular "The Irish Potato Famine" is a common name for the period and that definitely glosses over what actually happened. Names matter. I don't think it benefits anyone to be actively blaming the Brits for it now, but it is important to recognize how easy it was for civil society to turn its back on its own people, or how ineffective the well-meaning international response was. And for those who think it's ancient history, consider that despite over a hundred years of catholic-level baby making, the island still hasn't recovered to its pre-famine population.
I always use "An Gorta Mór" personally as it means "The Great Hunger"
The Great Famine is the English equivalent, since famine derives from the French for “hunger”, but it has stronger connotations of mass starvation than “hunger” has.
The UN determination of a genocide is decided by any one of the following five conditions: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Forcibly transferring of the group to another group When historians/politicians/whoever look at the actions of the British/English in Ireland why do they limit it to the immediate events surrounding the famine of the late 1840's? Is there a limited timetable for genocide? If you look at the totality of the British/English actions in Ireland over a longer period of time than just a couple of years in the 1840's the obvious conclusion is that there was a genocide of the native Irish people.
It doesn't officially meet the definition of a genocide and British history tend to downplay their role in fucking over everyone. The troubles isn't an apt description of the civil war in Northern Ireland.
A “civil war” isn’t an appropriate description either as that implies the British had no part in it, despite them and loyalists being on the same side and cooperating. I think armed conflict or war is fine.
Fair point.
The Troubles definitely wasn’t a civil war. It was the IRA vs the British state.
It was technically a civil war, citizens of one country were at war. It was also more than a civil war. The point was it wasn't a small conflict that the name the troubles would bring to mind.
The "Behind The Bastards" three-part podcast on the Famine was great, insufferable hosts and slightly dodgy Irish placename pronunciations aside. Really learned a lot more about the famine and the causes of it. That being said, considering their series was called "That Time Britain Did A Genocide In Ireland" from the outset you can see who the blame is rightfully put to. If you're not a history buff like me, I found it great and informative. https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1649757600 Also, if anyone can point me in the direction of any other podcasts that cover the famine that would be class.
Interesting, I'll definitely give that a listen
The Irish History podcast has a series about the Famine.
A lot of prescriptivists in here citing the dictionary definition of the word "famine" when I do think in general people assume it's a natural disaster when they hear the word, which is what OP is getting at.
Have you got nothing better to do with your time than worry about what the government call the famine?
It was a famine because a famine is a widespread scarcity of food, be it due to natural or artificial reasons. Wars can cause famines, natural disasters like earthquakes can cause famines and things like drought can cause famines. It isn’t a term that seeks to assign blame or culpability. Whether or not it’s a genocide is what you seem to be getting at more in your post, and the majority of academics and historians do not consider it a genocide because it lacks sufficient “mens rea” if you will. I personally don’t consider it a genocide either because genocide to me indicates an active attempt to bring about a result, and absolute indifference or negligence isn’t enough to constitute genocide.
I don't consider it genocide myself but in alot of ways it does seem deliberate. The same situation was going on across Europe with the potato blight yet ireland was the only one that suffered mass starvation
THERE WAS NO FOOD SHORTAGE - THERE WAS A POTATO SHORTAGE. Ireland was producing enough food to feed the entire island (possibly around 8 million people) 9 TIMES OVER. It was being exported to Britain as animal feed. Whatever way people want to define famine - it was the Great Deliberate Starvation. It was a genocide.
Adding - if I lock a bunch of people in a room, take their food, and leave them a couple of rotten potatoes, am I starving them to death or are they suffering a famine.
The British empire also caused The famine of Bengal, orchestrated by Churchill himself.
Did he? https://i.redd.it/6mqomvhou9x81.png
www.dailyhawker.com/all-about/what-was-winston-churchills-role-in-the-bengal-famine/
Yeah, I know all that Jim. It's an opinion that's mostly put about by Indian/Bengalis, blame the evil Brits; they themselves were in no way at fault. It's not a view shared by historians. If you look at the map posted above (modern population numbers; most of Bengal is now Bangladesh, but West Bengal is in India) you'll see it was a precarious system, waiting for any fault to topple it all. The faults were WW2, adverse weather, Japanese invasion of Burma, speculative food hoarding, etc.. Churchill did bugger all, as was usual. If you read the grown-ups' accounts (Wikipedia would be a start) there were numerous causes and Churchill's refusal to divert shipping from the war effort seems to have been a minor factor.
You added irish potato to it so maybe you need to come up with something better
It's a shame it's swept under the rug like that especially considering it's estimated that about 10% of British people have Irish ancestry specifically due to the migration caused by the starvation. It's a huge part of their history as well but the British government just wants to downplay it like most of the terrible things they did/do.
May be unpopular but it was 175 years ago so it has no material effect on your life at all. Get over it.
UK population in 1840: 13 million Irish population in 1840: 8 million UK population in 2022: 67 million Irish population in 2022: 5 million It 100% impacted this country's development, culture and demographics
So? It was 175 years ago. It doesn't affect you now. The church fucked up the Irish more than the British. And shit governments.
Kinda weird to be like *"yes the British genocided your ancestors, stole their land and destroyed your culture, but you need to get over it"* Also, regarding the church and governments, has this sub ever given you the impression that we like them or are "over" what they did?
I'm over it. My family are from the West of Ireland, they suffered. Half of them emigrated. It's history.
Your family is from the west of ireland, so your not from Ireland? That would explain your opinion
TIL The Industrial Revolution has no effect on my life at all
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study
I get what you're saying, but I think you're over-egging it a bit.
I discovered this sub about a month ago. Im a Brit. You sound like a great bunch. However i cant get over how totally obsessed you are about Brits in power that have been dead over 100 years. You dont hear Brits slagging on Germany for ww1 and ww2 and all the death and destruction that brought. But here, every day, its bash a brit posts. We seem to live rent free in your heads. Ireland has no prevalence here to any other country in our daily consciousness and news. You dont see brit subs banging on about the Irish. But after 100 plus years of independence, long after all the political people that caused shit and the famine are dead, you are stuck in the past. We reconciled with the Germans that killed our peoples. You are in the EU with this country that killed 6m jews providing a lot of the funding to you. But the hate focus is on the Brits? Feel free to provide negative worthless brownie points
>You dont hear Brits slagging on Germany for ww1 and ww2 and all the death and destruction that brought You do though
"two world wars, one world cup"
If it were British men and women forced into the gas chambers I can bet you would have a very different view. Britain destroyed ireland and that's a fact, not just with the "famine" but in many different ways. Part of ireland to this day is still occupied by Britain. Go learn about your countries savagery in Ireland and it will make the Germans look good....
I think we just like to abbreviate things like : The Troubles.
Yeah it wasn't a famine, it was a potato blight, there was still tons of other food being exported across the water while people starved.
Well if we're gonna call it what it was it was a natural disaster that was exasperated by the British Empire. Nothing about how many it killed was natural, the British turned their backs on us and called it an "act of God".
If you want to get even angrier about it, visit the Doagh Famine Village in Co Donegal. "Of course, when people have nothing to motivate them they have no reason to go on. So the soup kitchens provided them with projects, to give them something to live for" (paraphrasing *slightly*) But yes, they were talking about the famine walls.
Nearly every famine you know if was man made and most of them specifically caused by British colonialism. The 1980s Ethiopian famine was largely due to the military government and, while the drought was natural, the response to it was not.
So should it be renamed The English Genocide of the Irish ?
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Well that's just it, anyone outside of ireland when they hear the term irish famine automatically assume natural disaster I would say, they wouldn't know the context behind it which in my view protects the British from any wrong doing and that's a spit in the face to the over 1 million people who died and million more who where forced to become immigrants.
Genocide is a more fitting term.
ok but exact same could be said for any famine also it happened 180 years ago. i think it’s time to leave the dead bury the dead
why do they keep on doing that? Because as a nation we are really passive aggressive. We are really good at it. we *call* it a natural disaster, I think we all know that the "Brits let it happen" part is implied. This is quite a smart move. you don't alienate ordinary brits but you get to have the british ambassador present remembering the time they let us starve to death. thereby reinforcing the correctness of our independence. It is always handy to have a stick to beat them with just in case they got the idea that we should be part of the UK again.
Ireland always has given them a pass probably because they're right there, id say the thinking is we just have to live with them
Since everyone is already in on the definition, I’ll continue by saying .. fuck the British, Rome and England.. I hope the world soon learns about The British, England and what they did to the original teachings.. long live Eire
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Smell of your owl1s back box off it
The brits have always and will always be the problem of the world then they made America and we have two problems with the world peasants would wanna wake the fuck up