Was the Irish famine a famine or genocide

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

Biggest load of nonsense I have read in a long time

ejmaztec wrote: »

I certainly wouldn't have trusted an Irish Catholic parliament to do right by the starving underclass. Christianity, whether it be Catholic or protestant, although preaching that everyone was equal in the eyes of God, certainly never practiced it, especially at the time of the famine. I don't think that any civilised country at the time had much in the way of "human rights" for those at the bottom of the social heap.

You've only to see what's happened in this "Catholic" state since 1922, with corruption, greed, rampant inequality, and looking after No 1. If my ancestors are anything to go by, there must have been a fair few people on the verge of starvation during the 1920s and 1930s in rural Ireland.

19th century Ireland wasn't going to be Utopia, no matter who was running the show.

Rev John Edgar D.D, LL.D (1798-1866)

In 1842 John Edgar wrote,
My highest and holiest ambition, my fervent wish and prayer for my two sons, is that they may faithfully and successfully preach in the Irish language to the Irish people.
He was born near Ballynahinch in 1798, son of the Rev. Samuel Edgar (1766-1826) and his wife Elizabeth McKee (1771-1839). He shone as a student at the Belfast Academical Institution where he carried off four silver medals. Edgar was noted for his humanity and his high ideals and renowned as the originator of the Temperance Movement, preceding by some years the work of the Rev. Fr Mathew (1838). His letter to the Belfast News Letter on 14 August 1829 was the first appeal on behalf of Temperance Societies that appeared in Europe.
A person of strong social conscience, he was involved in the early development of several of the public institutions in Belfast. Dr Orpen of Dublin, a fluent Irish-speaker, had founded the first establishment for deaf mutes in Ireland. Dr Edgar was instrumental in getting the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute in Belfast started. This was only one of his many charitable ventures. He was sensitive to his cultural environment and described in detail the custom of “keening” (from the Irish caoin, to cry or moan) for the deceased. He first heard in Co Down, but felt that the Connemara keen was much superior. His well-known tract A Cry from Connaught was a best seller with 26,000 copies being printed. It first appeared in the Missionary Herald of November 1846. He commented on the failure of the potato crop and how it was spreading panic. However, there was as yet no inkling of the devastating disaster still to strike. The work of the Irish schools was progressing very well and he described the successes in much detail:
In the district I visited there were 107 Irish Schools, which furnished for examination, last inspection, 2053 pupils, but not less than 5000 are under instruction..
He criticised the attitude of the Anglican Church and in a paper read at the 6th annual confferance of the British organisation of the Evangelical Alliance in August 1852 he said:
Is it at all surprising that the Reformation made small progress in Ireland when those in authority persisted in attempting to spread it by means of a language (English) which the people did not understand.
In 1840 he was a member of the Secession Synod and Minister of Alfred Street congregation. In 1842 he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly.
John Edgar resented the allegation that he was a proselytiser and that his objective was to turn Roman Catholics into Presbyterians. He pointed out that his sole aim was to give them living, saving, faith in the Son of God. Furthermore, the Home Mission, of which John Edgar was the Honorary secretary in 1847, could not be accused of using the Famine, which broke out in that year, as a means of getting a foothold in Connaught: they were already there. He died in 1866 aged 68.


http://edgarfamily.angelfire.com/ministers.htm

http://homepage.eircom.net/~archaeology/two/famine.htm

[SIZE=+1]Seán Stitt[/SIZE].
[SIZE=+1]Abstract[/SIZE]
[SIZE=+1] [/SIZE]
Around the 150th anniversary of the potato famine in Ireland in 1995, volumes of academic and populist sources have discussed, commented and analysed the calamity - however, some features of the event have attracted little or no attention. The most extensively-published author on the 'Great Famine' in 19th century Ireland is Christine Kinealy. In 2002, she remarked: 'The role of the various churches in Ireland throughout the famine, especially (the main) Protestant churches, has been largely untold.' 1 This paper is an attempt to fill that gap. Specifically, it aims to address the roles and attitudes of those Protestant groups and churches which endeavoured to manipulate the Famine for religious agendas. The author acknowledges that famine relief by most Protestants, both individually and collectively, was given in the spirit of humanity and benevolence. However, as far as the author is aware, this is the first paper dedicated solely to addressing the activities and beliefs of those Protestant organisations which sought to exploit the deaths and suffering of millions in Ireland in order to destroy the religious beliefs and practices of the indigenous Irish population (Catholicism) and to promote their own version of faith (Protestantism).
'We shall be equally blamed for keeping the Irish alive or letting them die and we have only to select between the Economists or the Philanthropists - which do you prefer?'
Lord Clarendon - August 1847 - House of Commons

Kinealy & MacAtasney 55 commented that a significant omission from the debate on the Great Famine has been an academic analysis of: (a) the impact of the Famine in Ulster and; (b) famine relief there. Although historical studies have, predominately, argued that Belfast, along with Dublin and Cork cities, were largely unaffected by the worst excesses of the potato failure, Kinealy & MacAtasney 56 point out that more contemporary evidence suggests that this was not the case. For example, in early 1847, soup kitchens in Belfast were feeding 3,000 people every day. Despite less than objective comments such as, 'there is no evidence that the Famine played any part in the history of Belfast' (DUP Councillor Sammy Wilson in February 1997, 57, there is, when actively looked for, 'vast amounts of historical records available' on widespread suffering in Belfast and the rest of Ulster. In July 1847, the Belfast Orange Lodge bemoaned that the Famine had 'thinned out our local population and removed many of our local brethren' 58. In the same year, the Society of Friends visited eastern Down - now the most prosperous area of Northern Ireland - and commented, 'It would be impossible to find more distressing cases, short of the horrors of Skibbereen' 59. Throughout the entire famine, however, the impact was, generally speaking, less severe in some districts of Ulster than the rest of the country. Nonetheless, even this fact was described in religious rationale. According to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in July 1847:
'We are grateful to Almighty God while we humbly regard it as an illustration of the industry and general comfort promoted by our beloved Church that, in Ulster, where our principles are most widely disseminated, the visitation has appeared in a much less aggravated form than in those provinces in which the Romish system still, unhappily, maintains its degrading and paralyzing ascendancy.' 60

Kinealy & MacAtasney 61 have pointed to the prevailing myth that only the Catholic majority were affected by the Great Hunger. Of course, data shows that Catholics did, indeed, make up the vast majority of those who died from starvation and related illness, and emigrated to escape from death. However, the authors indicate that the Protestant community, including those who lived in Ulster, suffered a great deal from the effects of the potato blight and subsequent poverty. Protestants regarded themselves as a 'plebeian aristocracy', socially superior to their Catholics counterparts, even though they experienced similar levels of deprivation. Consequently, when the potato famine surfaced upon Belfast, there followed, for many, an immoveable reluctance to acknowledge the problem and its impact upon Ulster. In April 1846, a leading Catholic newspaper pointed to this reluctance of the Protestant ascendancy to apply for the little support there was for famine relief because 'it is a disgrace to the province and [yet] wonder that persons will not be content to linger, sigh and die in silence, sooner than sully the credit of Ulster'.

Yahew wrote: »

An Irish Catholic parliament would have started to changed the nature of ownership of lands, as it did ( and to be fair previously Gladstone did) allowing people to own more of their land. It would have shut borders, and appealed to the States.

This is empirically the case, the last famine in India, in 1943, killed 3 million people a few years before Independence, and nobody has died since.

Yahew wrote: »

This is empirically the case, the last famine in India, in 1943, killed 3 million people a few years before Independence, and nobody has died since.

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

Yahew - you continue to make broad sweeping statements with absolutely no evidence to back it up - did you not read the moderators post on the last page


Two points here -

1. The 'land issue' was settled long before the establishment of the Free State

2. During the land agitation of the 1880s the Irish tenant farmers used the landless labourers as fodder for the campaign promising major improvements on the rights of labourers. Once the Irish tenant farmers got what they wanted, they turned on the labourers and refused to implement many measures passed. The settlement that came out of the land war ignored the plight of the agricultural labourer except for legislation allowing local authorities to build cottages (W. E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland, Oxford, 1994, p. 225). Under various Labourers Acts 1883-1906 a homeless labourer could insist on having land with a suitable cottage built there (Sir James O’Connor, History of Ireland 1798-1924, London, 1971, p. 102). However farmers, who had achieved security and reduced rents under the Land Act 1881, were reluctant to provide accommodation for labourers, even when required by the land courts to do so (Gribbon, ‘Economic and Social History’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, p. 277.). In order to avoid having to comply with judicial orders under the Labourers Cottages and Allotments Act 1882 farmers simply evicted the labourers (Donnelly, The Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork, p. 241). Farmers also refused to provide sites to the local Boards of Guardians for the construction of new dwellings despite being offered good compensation (Donnelly, The Land and People of Nineteenth-Century Cork, p. 242). Despite the changes that occurred in terms of legislation in the last part of the nineteenth century, the Royal Commission on Labour in 1893 still described labourers’ cottages as ‘utterly wretched cabins unfit for habitation’ (Gribbon, ‘Economic and Social History’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), A New History of Ireland, p. 276).

Furthermore - there is zero evidence that an Irish Catholic Parliament would have done anything differently. Certainly the Cumann na nGaedheal government used the entire state appartus to attack striking farm labourers in 1922-1924 (Emmet O'Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824-2000, 2011 and Syndicalism in Ireland 1917-1923, 1988) allowing farmers to ride roughshod over the rights and living standards of labourers. The CnanG government also allowed a situation whereby thousands of labourers and their families were forced to live in haybarns and pigsties, charged exhorbitant rents by local farmers, during the building of the Ardnacrusha power station in 1925-26 - while at the same time driving down the wages of labourers on a countrywide basis from 52s a week to 35s a week (Michael McCarthy, How the Shannon Scheme Workers Lived, Old Limerick Journal, Vol. 8, August 1981, p.5-11)

Yet you yourself claimed yesterday that there was ample food in the country - The price increased because Irish tenant farmers hoarded the food supplies and sold them to forestallers for export - pumping up prices for the local labourers and cottiers (and I have demonstrated this with evidence)

To start with - I argued that it was Irish tenant farmers with 30+ acres that were responsible.

These tenant farmers did not, in the main, pay rent with crops - but in cash - most had bank accounts. During the famine the landlords complained that the tenant farmers dumped labourers out of work expecting the Landlords and merchants to subsidise their food supplies by overpaying for food and then releasing it to the poor on a limited basis at a reduced price (Limerick Chamber of Commerce minutes 1846)

Again - read what was posted -
This does not and should not absolve the Irish tenant farmers and the Irish merchants from their responsibility of exploiting the famine and the despiration of the labourers and cottiers to hike up prices and rake in massive profits. It happened and it was the Irish tenant farmers exploiting the Irish poor to make a quick buck and then crying that it was all the landlords fault.

Once again - more sweeping statements with absolutely no evidence to back it up - you have produced absolutely nothing to contradict what has been posted in opposition to you and nothing to support your claims. If you are making statements of historical fact then the onus is on you to produce evidence (primary and secondary) to back it up - I have and so have others on this thread - you have not. Now if you want to be taken seriously in this debate, and not just someone engaged in a pro-Irish establishment, anti-British establishment rant, then produce the evidence to back up your claims.

75% of all the rent paid by the landless labourers and cottiers went to the irish tenant farmers. The tenant farmers typically quadrupled the rent they charged labourers on what they paid the landlord.