Should companies originated in the slave trade be thrown out of Ireland?

El Tarangu

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118262082#Comment_118262082

Indeed.

Or any device using technology developed by IBM.

Good chat, but I have to throw away my smart phone, siya.

WrenBoy

haha good one OP..

Zebra3

Boycott businesses involved in the slave trade centuries ago while Irish people give their business (christenings, weddings, etc) to the paedos in the RC cult who much more recently used Irish kids as their sex slaves?

Maybe start closer to current times?

mariaalice

Hugo Boss

The J Stands for Jay

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118261150#Comment_118261150

All Irish people are a bit sus. How'd our ancestors get through the famine?

whisky_galore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118268057#Comment_118268057

Boycott charities that have their roots in or are currently in the control of religious orders. Esp. Ruhama, the Laundries rebrand and relaunch.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118261025#Comment_118261025

How about rolling the clock back to 1786 when Thomas McCabe stopped the formation of a slave trading company in Belfast ?

the_pen_turner

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118272672#Comment_118272672

what that see as a bad thing at the time

neenam

There were plenty of Irish people complicit in the Atlantic Slave Trade, and those who owned plantations in the Americas.

MORE than 90 people in Ireland were listed as slave owners in 1834, controlling approximately 15,000 Caribbean slaves, according to new research.

When slavery was abolished across the British empire in the 1830s, owners of plantations in countries such as Jamaica were reimbursed for the loss of their “property”. It has emerged that Irish slave owners benefited by £375,405 — the equivalent of €60.7m in today’s money.

The research was compiled by Liam Hogan, a librarian at Limerick City Library, using data provided by University College London. He found that, while ownership of plantations was relatively low in Ireland, the revenue from them provided a significant support to the Irish economy and is an under-reported aspect of Ireland’s history.

Every group in Ireland produced merchants who benefited from the slave trade and the expanding slave colonies.

The importance of enslaved Africans in furnishing these Irish gains is vividly illustrated in a commemorative print of 1780 entitled ‘Hibernia attended by her Brave Volunteers, exhibiting her commercial freedom’. The free trade banner she is carrying is a reference to the campaign that led to the British Act of 1800 which allowed Ireland to trade with British colonies in America, West Indies and Africa on equal terms with Great Britain. A banner is illustrated under this image with the words "Vincit Amor Patriae" ["Love of Country Conquers"].

We complain how history is taught re their impact on the Irish in the UK, yet Irish history's narrative is taught in a similar way here - John Mitchel has been taught to students as a nationalist hero in Junior Cert history, but his views on pro-slavery, black people and the Confederate army in the US Civil War have been ignored. Maybe the history curriculum has changed to acknowledge the ugly side of Irish history.

It's true that the Irish were victims of colonial oppression, but it’s also true that we were perpetrators of colonial aggression elsewhere. We need to disentangle ourselves from victimology and recognise that we have a history like any other nation.

Strumms

No

but companies who treat their staff poorly/illegally now should be.

Capt'n Midnight

‘Hibernia attended by her Brave Volunteers, exhibiting her commercial freedom’.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118272735#Comment_118272735

No one signed up. First and last attempt to setup such a company on this island.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118276817#Comment_118276817

‘Hibernia attended by her Brave Volunteers, exhibiting her commercial freedom’.

Which volunteers ? the United Irishmen "an equal representation of all the people" were very anti-slavery.

neenam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118277101#Comment_118277101

The volunteers are the 2 soldiers shown in the background of the lithograph image (with the 3 kneeling people in the foreground representing Europe, Africa and America). I'm assuming that these are the volunteers that were formed in 1778. I'm basing this on this line from an article in History Ireland (The Irish and the Atlantic slave trade) :

In 1779 the Dublin parliament and the Volunteers successfully worked together to make Britain’s American difficulty Ireland’s opportunity, demanding that Westminster repeal mercantile regulations to allow ‘a free trade for Ireland'.

I got the image and the information about it from "Consumption, Gender, and the Politics of "Free Trade" in Eighteenth-Century Ireland".

Galwayguy35

This sounds like something that looper Brid Smith would come out with.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118277845#Comment_118277845

Trading with foreigners is not the same as enslaving them.

neenam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118278047#Comment_118278047

The restrictions being lifted from the Irish meant that they could trade with british colonies and enter slave trade directly in the Americas. Before that Irish traders operated from Liverpool, Bristol and Nantes. There are accounts of Irish immigrants who were trading slaves in the Caribbean. Apparently there's links of Irish merchants, plantation owners and indentured servant ancestry among the people living in the Leewards Islands, there's a youtube video of a Montserratian speaking with a obvious Irish accent.

You don't have to take my word for it, there are plenty of sources that backup what I've said. Liam Hogan goes into more detail on this.

https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/1288257033544835079

There's also a map and a database where you can see where people who engaged in the business resided in Ireland, a merchant and a british plantation owner lived in my home town 😮 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/maps/britain as well as a list of people who got (or didn't get) compensations for losing their slaves in the aftermath of abolition, which includes Irish people (as if they needed the money after all the profits they made 🤦)

Peregrinus

Oh, sure, there were certainly Irish people involved in the slave trade and the slavery economy at various levels.

But, overall, the contribution of Irish people to the slave trade was pretty minor. This is not because of any superior virtue on our part but because (a) as already pointed out, legal restrictions designed to advantage Great Britain impeded Irish involvement in trade of all kinds, including the slave trade and the slavery economy; and (b) what Great Britain brought to the slave trade/slave economy was capital (to buy slaves) and manufactured goods (to trade for slaves), while Ireland was chronically undercapitalised and produced few manufactured goods. Thus we just weren't that well-positioned to be involved, and such involvement as there was was fairly minor.

As neenam points out, when slavery was abolished in British possession in the 1830s and slaveowners were compensated, about 90 people in Ireland received compensation of an aggregate amount of £375,000. To put this in context, about 2,900 people in the Great Britain received compensation of an aggregate amount of about £10 million. As a rough-and-ready indicator of the relative involvement of Ireland and Great Britain with the slave economy, that's probably not far off the mark.

(Trivial fact of the day: the database of slaveowner compensation exists today because it was compiled to answer a parliamentary question asked by Daniel O'Connell, who was staunchly anti-slavery.)

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118281579#Comment_118281579

Not so fun fact : The loan taken to pay the compensation was paid off in 2015

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Only Amazon (are they even in Ireland?)

BeerWolf

Stop using anything you have made in China OP. Don't watch the world Cup next year in Qatar, or anything else hosted in those countries, etc etc etc.

Or are you going to selective pick your virtue signalling while turning a blind eye to others, and call it a woke'ish day?

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118281664#Comment_118281664

I think they're in Cork, or used to be.

There was talk of building a mega-facility in Dublin but haven't heard anything lately.

I liked what one analyst said about Amazon - that they're like deniable government contractors (a reference to all the tax advantages they got from the US gov).

neenam

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118281579#Comment_118281579

I know, I know it's a long overdue reply. Had forgotten about it until now.

While I agree with the points made, I wouldn't like to play down or frame their complicity as insignificant, even as a small minority of people from this country. Some would go as far as saying that it was mostly the Anglo-Irish landed gentry and not the "Irish" themselves who were involved...though there was still a minority of rich Catholics, big farmers and merchants.

These were the same class of people involved in the transatlantic slave trade who presided over the misery over the exploitation and misery that occurred in the horrors of the mass starvation and disease during the famine.

Due to cognitive dissonance, Irish and Irish-American history hasn't shown us how readily Irish people committed morally wrong things at the expense of other people to achieve things, and we continue to see this occurring in modern Ireland. Though this could be said for all amoral people, regardless of nationality - but imo one-sided interpretations or distortions of historical events can lead to discrimination of minorities, xenophobia, etc. hence the importance of showing the bad as well as the good side of Irish history.

Wibbs

The same cognitive dissonance applies to Africans whose ancestors were complicit in and profited from the same slave trade and for longer and after it was outlawed in Europe and the New World. It was going on in Nigeria into the 1940's.

mikethecop

if you want a world of smug niceties and unblemished history its just gona be them two twats from the happy pear left .....