Surviving the Famine

CrazyPJ

brianthebard wrote:

That's fair enough, but this happened after the Famine, when people could see how much devastation had been caused. There had been several famines in Ireland down through the decades, it wasn't something new. As for your information on the export of food: the claim that Britain was taking food from the starving mouths of Irishmen is wholly inaccurate. More food was imported than exported. Also your source is a no go as far as historical accuracy and trustworthyness goes. I suggest you find a reputable source before telling only half the story.

So, where are your sources that Britain was not taking food from the starving Irish?? YOU ? Your post is lame and only shows you trying to consolidate your own world view by dismissing the above evidence and pompously lecturing me about sources which I have already given.

All the data given above is accurate as concluded by Kineally in her book which were taken from original shipping records made at the time. Here is a link for you to the book if you are interested in finding out the truth. If you are not able to face truth then carry on in your denial. Its no skin off of my nose.

Chttp://www.amazon.com/Death-Dealing-Famine-Great-Hunger-Ireland/dp/0745310745hristine

brianthebard

I feel no need to provide a source since it is common knowledge that more food was imported into the country than exported. Your tone is unwelcome and I don't feel I need to prove myself to you so you can find the truth yourself when you move away from denial...

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

So, where are your sources that Britain was not taking food from the starving Irish?? YOU ? Your post is lame and only shows you trying to consolidate your own world view by dismissing the above evidence and pompously lecturing me about sources which I have already given.

All the data given above is accurate as concluded by Kineally in her book which were taken from original shipping records made at the time. Here is a link for you to the book if you are interested in finding out the truth. If you are not able to face truth then carry on in your denial. Its no skin off of my nose.

Chttp://www.amazon.com/Death-Dealing-Famine-Great-Hunger-Ireland/dp/0745310745hristine

Britain taking food from the Starving Irish, or the irish choosing to sell their food to the English because they cared more about profit than their own starving people?

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Sir Winston Churchill

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations"

Sir Winston Churchill.

CrazyPJ

Fratton Fred wrote:

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations"

Sir Winston Churchill.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Sir Winston Churchill.

So suckers like you will read it and consider it education.

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Sir Winston Churchill.

So suckers like you will read it and consider it education.

yeah, why not just make it up, much more fun:rolleyes:

nollaig

I read a fictional book before, "Famine" by Liam O'Flaherty, and in that, there was simply not enough fish left in the local river / lake.

Dont know if thats what happened really but the river was fished dry

boneless

Fratton Fred wrote:

someones been reading communist weekly:rolleyes:

Ah yes... if it's researched and well presented it has to be a Red plot. :rolleyes:

It happens to be true too but who really cares about that when a political point is to be scored...

Fratton Fred

boneless wrote:

Ah yes... if it's researched and well presented it has to be a Red plot. :rolleyes:

It happens to be true too but who really cares about that when a political point is to be scored...

I have no doubt it is true. After all Guinness is a well known instrument of English oppression, the 278,000 gallons of Guinness drunk by Englishmen no doubt played a major part in the famine.

no? :rolleyes:

for the facts to be well presented, then they should include all the facts, not just the ones that suit an arguement. Has the researcher got the figures on imports into Ireland? or who was doing the exporting?

No?:rolleyes:

CrazyPJ

Fratton Fred wrote:

I have no doubt it is true. After all Guinness is a well known instrument of English oppression, the 278,000 gallons of Guinness drunk by Englishmen no doubt played a major part in the famine
:rolleyes:

Glad you find the atrocious deaths that were suffered by the countless thousands that were starved, striken by disease and left writhing in agony to die, their children laying dead around them as thousands of tons of food was shipped out under military escort during the famine are amusing. Maybe you could develop it into a stand-up and tour Ireland, Im sure it'd go down a bomb.

PJ

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

Glad you find the atrocious deaths that were suffered by the countless thousands that were starved, striken by disease and left writhing in agony to die, their children laying dead around them as thousands of tons of food was shipped out under military escort during the famine are amusing. Maybe you could develop it into a stand-up and tour Ireland, Im sure it'd go down a bomb.

PJ

Thanks for the graphic account. I don't find it amusing. I do however find someone quoting the export of Guinness as an example of the British attempts as genocide as laughable.

CrazyPJ

Fratton Fred wrote:

Thanks for the graphic account. I don't find it amusing. I do however find someone quoting the export of Guinness as an example of the British attempts as genocide as laughable.

Thats probably because you have a racist sterotype view of the Irish being drunkards.

CrazyPJ

Barley is a cereal grain, which serves as a major animal feed crop but maybe you thought guiness flowed down the LIffey.

silverharp

silverharp wrote:

Just curious if anyone is well read on the famine if they have come across anything about people coming up with inventive ways of surviving the famine.

I remember hearing stories years ago about how the blood was stripped from an animal (usually a cow/horse) and then cooked making 'blood cake'.

SpitfireIV

Myth wrote:

I remember hearing stories years ago about how the blood was stripped from an animal (usually a cow/horse) and then cooked making 'blood cake'.

Ughhhhh......blood cake! :eek: You'd want to be pretty desperate to eat the likes of that.

CrazyPJ

Recognising our friends the Choctaw Nation...Irish Repay Choctaw Famine Gift:
March Traces Trail of Tears in Trek for Somalian Relief
By Mike Ward
American-Stateman Capitol Staff, 1992

Nearly 150 years after the Great Potato Famine, a group of Irish people is retracing the "Trail of Tears" from Oklahoma to Mississippi to repay a longstanding debt to the Choctaw Indian tribe.

Eight people from Ireland began the 500-mile trek from Broken Bow, Okla., to Nanih Waiya, Miss. -- roughly retracing, in reverse, the government-forced relocation of the tribe in 1831 from its homeland to what was then Indian Territory wilderness. Tens of thousands were moved. Nearly half died.

The Irish connection: In 1847, midway through the Irish famine, a group of Choctaws collected $710 and sent it to help starving Irish men, women and children.

Hagar

CroppyBoy1798 wrote:

Ughhhhh......blood cake! :eek: You'd want to be pretty desperate to eat the likes of that.

You have eaten black pudding haven't you?

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

Thats probably because you have a racist sterotype view of the Irish being drunkards.

sorry, but what the **** are you on about?

Hagar

Don't mind CrazyPJ. The clue is in the "crazy".

SpitfireIV

Hagar wrote:

You have eaten black pudding haven't you?

No...not after I found out what it was made of

PHB

Lads, let's try avoid personal insults It normally just makes your argument look weak.

jhegarty

brianthebard wrote:

I feel no need to provide a source since it is common knowledge that more food was imported into the country than exported. Your tone is unwelcome and I don't feel I need to prove myself to you so you can find the truth yourself when you move away from denial...

Can you quote a source for this please ?


I may be "common knowledge" but I was always under the impression Ireland did export more than import during the famine.... but I am open to be corrected pending a source...

brianthebard

I'll have a look I've come across it in text books before don't know about the net.

Fratton Fred

This is an article on the BBC website, it mentions the import of grain. Quite a good article I think. Written by Jim Donnelly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_02.shtml

CrazyPJ

Fratton Fred wrote:

sorry, but what the **** are you on about?[/QUOTE

Come on Fred, you conveinently ignored all the other items on the list and hit on the guiness bit as laughable. I imagine you are an english guy (?) and feel a need to defend your governments appalling actions during the "famine". I know too that the english working classes had no power or vote and were treated with as much contempt as their Irish counterparts.

PJ

CrazyPJ

Hagar wrote:

Don't mind CrazyPJ. The clue is in the "crazy".

For hagars info...http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055079005

CrAzY Pj

Hagar

Nicely written.

CrazyPJ

A boyhood hero of mine Muhammed Ali understood the for the black man to be finally free from his shakles he had to break with the conventions of white political thought. Hence he forsook all that he had learned and embraced Islam. More and more hip young black people are discovering this fact for themselves and facing the full truth about their past and not the palliative one as taught to him by their former masters.

Irish people have been indoctrinated by the media and education system for generations by a government who toadies up and emulates its former oppressor. When I was going to school it was only mentioned almost in passing as a natural disaster. One thing I have discovered that you cant believe everyhing you read especially if its written by British historians or Irish ones for that matter. To get at the truth of things, one must read as much as possible about any given subject and then interpret it and deduce for yourself what the truth might be. As I got older I began to understand the darkness that lies in the heart of man and the nature of Machiavellian political thought.

"The ends justify the means, also known as Consequentialism, is a moral philosophy often attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli in his 1513 book The Prince. This moral philosophy has evolved to encompass ideas from Marxism and Fascism, that the head of state carries out the moral philosophy on a societal or social level. It is a phrase encompassing two beliefs: (1) that morally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve morally right outcomes, and (2) that actions can only be considered morally right or wrong by virtue of the morality of the outcome."

Viewed through such a prism and from the utterances of the great and powerful at the time, I believe as many do that the potato failure was an oppotrunity for the British government to at least, cull the troublesome Irish population. Darwinism as interpreted by the British was the assumption of their own intellectual superiority to sub-humans like the irish and the negro. Check out the Punch magazine cartoons. (this belief is still held by some in the uk)

I spent many saturday afternoons in the National Archives in Hendon reading papers from the time. It made for disturbing reading. For example a Times editorial in 1847 urged the Irish to broaden their diet. Indeed! The most powerful nation on earth at the time with all the resourses it had could not prevent what happened in Ireland? You must decide. The real documented truth lies in some dusty vault in Whitehall that we must never see.

Even if its true that more food was imported than exported why did they make the people work in meaningless jobs before they were given food. Take a trip around the Mamturks in Galway and you will see canal like structures and stone walls going up to the top that serve no useful purpose that the locals were made to work on while they were starving and emaciated.

PJ

Fratton Fred

CrazyPJ wrote:

Fratton Fred wrote:

sorry, but what the **** are you on about?[/QUOTE

Come on Fred, you conveinently ignored all the other items on the list and hit on the guiness bit as laughable. I imagine you are an english guy (?) and feel a need to defend your governments appalling actions during the "famine". I know too that the english working classes had no power or vote and were treated with as much contempt as their Irish counterparts.

PJ

You have finally made a correct assumption about me.

I am not trying to defend the actions of an upper class bigotted government who thought the famine was some sort of devine intervention. It is, however, wrong to assume it was a form of genocide.

The reason I used the Guinness example is to show that it was not just the British exporting out of Ireland, the Irish were at it too.

CrazyPJ

Fratton Fred wrote:

It is, however, wrong to assume it was a form of genocide.

Its got to be a possibility given their record. Queen Victoria's economist, Nassau Senior, expressed his fear that existing policies "will not kill more than one million Irish in 1848 and that will scarcely be enough to do much good."

PJ