Was the Irish famine a famine or genocide

Janedoe10 wrote: »

It's sad . http://www.irishholocaust.org

Just reading through this document of the OP, there are a lot of claims and allegations in it. It seems to sourced from an Irish-American person (which is fine).
I looked into one aspect; the page about Liverpool mentions a secret mass grave of Irish emigrants...

They may have also been used to dig the secret mass graves that have been unearthed in the city and recently came to light, the latest in 1973 containing 3,561 bodies stacked in order of presumed age that were secretly incinerated before tests could be carried out. This was on British Home Office orders which it now denies knowledge of. It is now known as the 'Mystery' Mass Grave, It took eight years before this mass grave was reported in the press and then only in the Catholic Pictorial (September 6,1981).

Here is a bit of local history from the area in question, Old Swan, which shows that the building work uncovered coffins carefully buried, over a number of years, in coffins, at a place marked on old maps as a burial ground. It is simply a case of the presbytery taking over a very normal old graveyard as a garden, and then a subsequent generation being ignorant of that fact, decided to build a school on "the garden".
The "secrecy" seems to be due to (a) a few red faces and (b) nobody wanted the school project to be abandoned, therefore the old coffins and their contents had to be "got rid of" somehow.

So with this allegation disproved, it does throw some doubt on the others.

Nevertheless, there are some claims made in this document which would be worth proving or disproving one way or the other, partly because they appear fairly regularly elsewhere.

1. That large numbers of extra British troops were garrisoned in the country during the famine, and used to guard food storehouses and food export convoys. And there is also the hint/subtext that they may have gathered up or requisitioned food from the countryside.

2. That fisherman were prevented from fishing the sea by British coastguard or naval vessels.

3. That there was a net export of food from Ireland during the famine years.

I would not be surprised if 3. was true, but happened because of the economic system and market forces. But are there any actual facts and figures for any of these?

Another few stories that appear now and again;
1. That yellow "indian meal" was imported but the people could not eat it because they did not know how to cook it.
2. That the people did not fish the sea because their currachs were unsuitable, their nets were locked up in the pawnbrokers shop, they could not even afford to buy a fishhook to stand on the rocks fishing etc...

These strike me as infantile arguments, even though they have been taught at times in Irish schools.

CDfm wrote: »

I often wonder what obligations the owners of serfs had for the welfare of their serfs or slaveowners in the US had for the welfare of their slaves as the Irish seemed to have no rights at all.

I think this is a good point. Numerous foreign visitors to Ireland commented on the extremely wretched living conditions of the very poor in Ireland. The landless farm labouring class seem to have been worse off here than in any other European country, even before the famine. Probably worse off than the people in the countries that are nowadays "the third world".
If they had been slaves or serfs, the landlords would have had more of a responsibility to ensure they had enough to eat. But being "free" and living in a capitalist society with no social welfare, those 2 million were simply surplus to an uncaring system's requirements, and nobody's responsibility.

On the question of why they just died, instead of going fishing or hunting.
I suppose it is just the boiled frog syndrome. Allegedly, a frog in a pot of cold water, and brought slowly to the boil, will make no attempt to escape.
A frog thrown into hot water will make vigorous attempts to get out.