I for one think she is a very brave woman for doing what she is doing. Diarmuid Ferriter fired the first shots highlighting how her great great great grandfather said “no Irish must die” and they did and condemned the famine as Gods punishment on the Irish people. We Irish are good at crawling around looking for crumbs of strategic and moral superiority over the English and it’s happening again to what should be taken as an attempt to open up and atone and heal the scars of the past for once and for all.
My views on it are complex and multi-faceted. There is no doubt the damage free market caused to the lives of Irish people at that time and there has to be limits set on it as such, but clinging to ring fenced protectionism and socialism will in the end cause wide spread poverty to a nation and do the opposite to what it purports to do which is prevent poverty. Any ideology taken out of the centre ground and to its extremes will cause harm.
Then there is the time in which all these events occurred. We were a Catholic nation but the calling on deliverance from above ends in these sorts of outcomes. Let me elaborate. Strict andherence to Catholic doctrine realises its end goal of personal destruction if we are to imitate the life of Jesus Christ. That seems to me to be the end goal. Even to this day the Irish nation is renowned for calling on deliverance from above which manifests in the north. It happened in WW1 and WW2 when the Nazis went wild and it provided an opening for our independence. But what was the widespread collateral damage outside of Ireland to these longings for deliverance and power? The destruction of the world as we know it.
Nowadays the republicans align themselves foreign policy wise with Russia. In those days it was Germany and still is in some respects. Denial of the Israeli state, alliances with the Palestinians, anti-European and anti-internationalist sentiments, condemning the US for its policies of interaction and contribution the African nations in business. Alignment with the FARC in Colombia in some cases acting as political consultants for them in bringing arms into Colombia and profiting tens of millions from it and the drug trade there.
Then with scorn going to luncheons and business dinners in the States and raising funds there while thumbing their nose at WW2 and the Unites States foreign policies. Its hypcricy and cretinism at the highest order. Worse, it’s criminal and the support of criminality and opposition to the current world order and the west.
Back in the times of the famine, there was much literature which gave rise to the destiny of nations and the direction in which they moved. For Ireland it was God and calling on Him for deliverance but these things should also be looked on in the context of the times in which they existed. Tolstoy wrote about resurrection in 1899 and seventeen years later the Irish Republic had a rising on Easter Sunday? These things aren’t coincidences, they are an amalgamation of ideas from the wrong sources and brought to fruition by anti-west sentiments.
Trevelyan had a part to pay in that he condemned the Irish to their fate as the will of God. John Mitchell’s Jail Journal advocated for slavery and the purpose of the Irish nation as an advocate of it because it is white. If our republican leaders are pro-slavery how can they condemn the famine at the hands of the British? They can’t.
As for Trevelyan, he condemned the famine as the punishment of God but the times were shrouded in the literature of Tolstoy and extreme Catholicism in the wake of the enlightenment. People called on this destruction from the north and it manifested. It turned out to be personal destruction initially in the image of Christianity. It was also shaped around the famines of Russia and the extremism of their thought. It came about and has given the Irish people the moral high ground over England for the rest of history.
But to say the Irish through their extremism and in some cases savagery (Mitchell) didn’t have a part to play in bringing it on themselves is wrong. Not the blight but the conditions of withholding food thereafter. We were and still are shrouded in religious extremism and in some ways savagery. I for one won’t be taking the moral high ground over Laura Trevelyan and will see things from both sides. There was much upheaval on the planet at the time and the famine was a terrible human tragedy but not a genocide.
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