bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Are you aware VP that the navy turned back ships full of food? The reason was that Queen Victoria did not want to be embarrassed by the situation in Ireland
mass grave of 800 infants found at Galway 'fallen women' home
- Thread starter weepiper
- Start date
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
It's the same old story - nominal state control, but actual institutional control.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I'm well aware that the state worked fairly hard to discourage any acts of charity, not just from Britain, but from elsewhere, including blockading.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Governments can, and always will.
The problem with whistleblowing within a bureaucracy is that you're whistleblowing in a bureaucracy. Effectively, however hard you work to shed light on abuse, there will be strata of bureaucracy above and below you whose task will be to ensure the smooth running of the bureaucracy. That we actually see more effective whistleblowing nowadays is almost solely down to better access to information and communications.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
And yet you do take a particular line, don't you?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Yes, it was, and the opportunism was the very thing that refutes ld222's claim of genocide.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
People "knew" in the same way they knew about the famines in Raj Bengal, the same way they knew about "the final solution to the Jewish problem" in the Third Reich, etc.
That is, they heard about it, and read about it, but many didn't and/or couldn't comprehend it, which is, of course, a natural psychological defence against horror.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
And who was the state at the time?
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Sorry. That's bullshit. There were numerous countries within and outside of europe who were campaigning for famine relief. The mass deaths were being reported in US newspapers and over the world. The UK not only blockaded food donations from other countries, they controlled the media.
I'm not sure why you cant accept the fact that the British government of the time was fully cognisant of the famine and related deaths. There were written eye witness reports everywhere in europe and the US. English visitors to ireland were writing to the government about the extreme situation.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
And you don't?
You're persistent in saying the government were not fully aware. Why ?
When everyone who has read government documents of the day knows the full extent of discussions and debates held at the time.
8den
No I'm pretty sure that was 8ball...
And who gets access to these documents?
it's all very well saying X should have done something. But y'know that discharges duty from the fact that the nuns shouldnt have been doing this in the 1st place. The state gave them the resources without oversight to mis manage the homes, and yes the state has a degree of accountability in this. But the state wasn't in the corridors and in the homes denying the women pain medication during child birth, allowing the children to die from malnutrition and then dumping their bodies into a septic tank.
to use a analogy. While I am angry with the social worker who allowed baby P to die in tottenham and think the state failed the child, the family of the boy who were responsible for him are the ones who are ultimately culpable. In this instance the sisters who took charge of the mother and child are criminally responsible for their deaths.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Ld222
Active Member
The 'realpolitik' behind it for the 'British elite' was to leave was to leave Ireland ripe for bleeding dry, to gain control over the next generation of labour.
I have provided plenty of decent links, but thats of no odds till a troll such as yourself. At the end of the day, Westminster still held complete control over the social and economic fortunes of Ireland after the supposed handover in 1922. The only real difference after that date was the colour of the flag. The only difference now, in the the present day, is that Europe and Yanks have taken over the lions share. Look at the 'Delorean' fiasco in the early 80's, look how 'Google' and 'Amazon' etc siphon there profits through Ireland to avoid tax. It suits the 'powers that be' that Ireland remains a backwater, it always has. It has always been back door through 'Europe' and whether to avoid attacking Catholic armies after the reformation or to avoid taxation now, the powers that be be have had a vested interest in dominating Irish affairs.
Just like the 'Middle East', If the 'Powers that be' feel the need they will completely destroy a place and crush it's people, driving them into the cusp of religion. Taking them back to the dark ages, before you know it, woman are getting stoned to death. Look at Afghanistan prior to 1978, without the Mujahideen getting heavily funded, 'From you know who', it would have been a very different story to how it is now. Capitalism needs it religious fanatics, having one tribe fight against the other.
We are still in an age of barbarism, where some people still prioritise making profit over humanity, life itself or the survival of this planet. You one's with pseudo libertarian keyboard agenda
nit pick the fuck way and cry about links all the while this planet is nearing extinction, history keeps repeating itself getting more farcical with each revolution. Greeds laughing, running all to the bank, window dressers and bean counters and like, middle class boffins tidy the path of destruction, they would cut their own throats to spite their belly. 'Don't mourn, organise!!'
Ld222
Active Member
Are you claiming it was just good business VP, sounds like it.
How about I move into you house and charge you an extortionate rate of rent for the pleasure, you can live in the shed although you will have to pay extra for having glass windows etc, you can grow vegetables in the garden, I'll even help you sell them off to help pay for the rent, you can live on the surplus after you pay your rent. if you fix up your shed in any way I double your rent. If your crops fail or you can't pay your rent your evicted, hell you might just get evicted for the craic. Sure If you end up dying starvation or anything, sure don't worry or take it personally, you where just at the wrong end of opportunism. That sound fair.
Some people, including myself would count the bad decisions taken by 'Atos', that end up with the death of vulnerable person, 'murder'. Clearly, I take it you wouldn't.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Tim Pat Coogan has written some excellent books on irish history. His book "The Famine Plot" is worth a read.
http://www.timpatcoogan.com/books/famine_plot.htm
I will apologise in advance for posting so much below....I think a link to the analysis/review wont be accessed by many....but that some of the review may be read and spark a genuine open minded interest in getting to the truth of the great starvation in Ireland.
"During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson.""
Here's a synopsis. ....
"In the opening chapters, The Famine Plotoutlines the brewing of a catastrophic event. Religious oppression after Henry VIII's abdication from the Catholic Church, the outlawing of education for Catholics; English landlords that spent their rent profits in London; failed rebellions including that of 1798; and a tradition of English racism for the Celt as being a lazy, popish, tribal, and feckless people. By the year 1800, after hundreds of years of invasions and oppression from their English neighbors, Ireland was brought under the umbrella of the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Act of Union like Scotland and Wales. But as Coogan rightly specifies, even important English Parliamentarians on the eve of disaster admitted that Ireland was not governed like a kingdom, but instead was only occupied by colonial soldiers that protected English businesses to extract Ireland's natural resources. There was little governing of the people, especially outside of the Dublin Pale. In reality, the majority of Irish families, supposedly benefiting from the wealth of Great Britain's economy, were solely dependent on the harvest of one crop: the potato."
"However, Coogan saves his best argument for the most pertinent players during the Famine. Taking apart the philosophies of these royal English policymakers and their economic and religious treatises that prevail still today, he points directly to the heart of the matter. Breaking it up with the precision, with the gentle heart of an Irishman and putting it back together with the coolness of an historical analyst, he begins with providence. "
"Providence, the divine will, was declared to have a large bearing on the subject, as it generally does when the rich debate the poor, or the strong confront the weak. It was an era in which in America the indigenous Americans were going down before a similar doctrine: Manifest Destiny," he writes."
"In this religious invocation by English political economists, God divinely chooses who shall live and who shall die and governments are not to intervene against His will. That God rarely chose them for death and instead chooses the most vulnerable of the peoples was certainly convenient for the powerful. The effect of policymakers interpreting God's will and pointing it at the poor would, as we find out, be a large factor in causing Ireland to never again reach the population levels of the 1841 census."
"After providence, Coogan points to laissez-faire capitalism as affecting how English colonial rule could justify standing by while a famine raged next door. Years before the Famine, English economists decided that raising cattle in the Irish land would be much more fiscally productive than depending on the feckless Irish to pay rent on it. A plan was needed to exchange the Irish people for cattle. English policy during this time was smitten with the ideas of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and "moralist" who famously outlined the philosophy of capitalism in Wealth of Nations. The notion that "greed is good," as director Oliver Stone sarcastically underscored in the movie Wall Street, was the prevailing economic philosophy then, as it is now. As is documented, even Smith was shocked at the perversions that accompany power within capitalism when he witnessed his own countrymen rape the Virginia tobacco fields and garner outlandish profits on the backs of free labor from African slaves without government regulation. In Ireland, the perversions of an economic doctrine guiding morality would justify extermination."
"The interpretations of God's providence coupled with laissez-faire capitalism doesn't explain by itself how so many people could have been allowed to perish by hunger, and this is where Coogan takes his boldest step."
" As Coogan points out succinctly, a famine occurs when there is no food to be eaten, which was only true of the potato. But Ireland under Britain's colonial rule exported grain, corn, cattle, and many other foodstuffs on a regular basis. "Ireland had no shortage of food," Coogan writes. The London political economists of the time, however, termed these exports from Irish lands "cash crops," which effectively meant they were the lawful property of the business community and not to be allocated for relief. With evidence such as this, the debate in Coogan's book turns the description of the Great Hunger from "famine" to "extermination" and even "genocide.""
"Early on, in chapter three to be exact, Coogan outlines his thesis when he quotes the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One of those terms of genocide in particular rings with a great clarity here: "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.""
"Coogan's intent here is not to say that England caused the blight of the potato. That was a matter of nature, of course. Instead he points directly to allowing its people for which it was responsible within the terms of the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain, to be so vulnerable as to be completely dependent on one crop. Furthermore, the deliberate attempt to utilize a natural disaster to "inflict conditions that bring about its physical destruction" is another powerful and ringing interpretation of the United Nations charter."
"Here, Coogan levels his stare adroitly on the prevailing economic philosophy and the political economists in London at the time when he uses a famous quotation from the Irish Nationalist John Mitchel, who described the situation at the time as "God sent the blight, but the British sent the Famine." The Famine Plot then describes Trevelyan's followers in London as imposing an absurdity when they enforced, sometimes with soldiers and ships, the policy that "Ireland's property should pay for Ireland's poverty," therefore expunging responsibility from London's colonial lap with no more than a stroke of a pen and fatally placing care for the Famine in the metaphor of the economic market's cold "invisible hand.""
"To impose an illogical, calamitous condition such as Irish taxes needed to pay for Irish relief, Coogan states, is the perfect analogy to the idiom "extracting blood from a stone." The taxes levied on Anglo landlords in Ireland were high, but when the poor could not pay their rent, they were evicted. Often by force, these starving families were sent to the countryside while their homes were destroyed to make way for cattle grazing. The consequence of eviction was devastating, and the poor were often too weak to travel and so desperate that they tried eating the grass, like cattle. In enforcing this policy, Coogan declares, genocide can be interpreted."
"At the time, even some Englishmen agreed that "famine" could not be a truly intellectual description. As Coogan underscores, one English parliamentarian resigned in indignation feeling as though he is "an unfit agent of a policy which must be one of extermination."
"This policy of extermination went on to include the "work scheme," such as road building, which didn't pay a laborer enough even to fill his own belly, never mind the rest of his family. Also, the Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 that "effectively undid much of the benefits of the soup kitchens and brought an incalculable amount of suffering and death upon the starving." The Workhouse, which became only a place for the sick to die, at one point, only allowed "fit" people within its gated doors. This meant that those considered too weak, such as children, the elderly, and women, were turned away, often by force."
"All of this in the name of improving the economy and allowing God's divine will to take shape was well within Trevelyan and many of his peers' direct plans when he described the Famine as a "mechanism for reducing surplus population." Trevelyan is also quoted as saying, "The greatest evil... is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people." And finally, "The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.""
"There are many ways to describe what happened. Famine, genocide, and extermination are only a few. But Coogan does well in outlining the motivations and the actions of those responsible under the Act of Union. "
http://www.timpatcoogan.com/books/famine_plot.htm
I will apologise in advance for posting so much below....I think a link to the analysis/review wont be accessed by many....but that some of the review may be read and spark a genuine open minded interest in getting to the truth of the great starvation in Ireland.
"During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson.""
Here's a synopsis. ....
"In the opening chapters, The Famine Plotoutlines the brewing of a catastrophic event. Religious oppression after Henry VIII's abdication from the Catholic Church, the outlawing of education for Catholics; English landlords that spent their rent profits in London; failed rebellions including that of 1798; and a tradition of English racism for the Celt as being a lazy, popish, tribal, and feckless people. By the year 1800, after hundreds of years of invasions and oppression from their English neighbors, Ireland was brought under the umbrella of the Kingdom of Great Britain with the Act of Union like Scotland and Wales. But as Coogan rightly specifies, even important English Parliamentarians on the eve of disaster admitted that Ireland was not governed like a kingdom, but instead was only occupied by colonial soldiers that protected English businesses to extract Ireland's natural resources. There was little governing of the people, especially outside of the Dublin Pale. In reality, the majority of Irish families, supposedly benefiting from the wealth of Great Britain's economy, were solely dependent on the harvest of one crop: the potato."
"However, Coogan saves his best argument for the most pertinent players during the Famine. Taking apart the philosophies of these royal English policymakers and their economic and religious treatises that prevail still today, he points directly to the heart of the matter. Breaking it up with the precision, with the gentle heart of an Irishman and putting it back together with the coolness of an historical analyst, he begins with providence. "
"Providence, the divine will, was declared to have a large bearing on the subject, as it generally does when the rich debate the poor, or the strong confront the weak. It was an era in which in America the indigenous Americans were going down before a similar doctrine: Manifest Destiny," he writes."
"In this religious invocation by English political economists, God divinely chooses who shall live and who shall die and governments are not to intervene against His will. That God rarely chose them for death and instead chooses the most vulnerable of the peoples was certainly convenient for the powerful. The effect of policymakers interpreting God's will and pointing it at the poor would, as we find out, be a large factor in causing Ireland to never again reach the population levels of the 1841 census."
"After providence, Coogan points to laissez-faire capitalism as affecting how English colonial rule could justify standing by while a famine raged next door. Years before the Famine, English economists decided that raising cattle in the Irish land would be much more fiscally productive than depending on the feckless Irish to pay rent on it. A plan was needed to exchange the Irish people for cattle. English policy during this time was smitten with the ideas of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and "moralist" who famously outlined the philosophy of capitalism in Wealth of Nations. The notion that "greed is good," as director Oliver Stone sarcastically underscored in the movie Wall Street, was the prevailing economic philosophy then, as it is now. As is documented, even Smith was shocked at the perversions that accompany power within capitalism when he witnessed his own countrymen rape the Virginia tobacco fields and garner outlandish profits on the backs of free labor from African slaves without government regulation. In Ireland, the perversions of an economic doctrine guiding morality would justify extermination."
"The interpretations of God's providence coupled with laissez-faire capitalism doesn't explain by itself how so many people could have been allowed to perish by hunger, and this is where Coogan takes his boldest step."
" As Coogan points out succinctly, a famine occurs when there is no food to be eaten, which was only true of the potato. But Ireland under Britain's colonial rule exported grain, corn, cattle, and many other foodstuffs on a regular basis. "Ireland had no shortage of food," Coogan writes. The London political economists of the time, however, termed these exports from Irish lands "cash crops," which effectively meant they were the lawful property of the business community and not to be allocated for relief. With evidence such as this, the debate in Coogan's book turns the description of the Great Hunger from "famine" to "extermination" and even "genocide.""
"Early on, in chapter three to be exact, Coogan outlines his thesis when he quotes the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One of those terms of genocide in particular rings with a great clarity here: "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.""
"Coogan's intent here is not to say that England caused the blight of the potato. That was a matter of nature, of course. Instead he points directly to allowing its people for which it was responsible within the terms of the Act of Union, the Kingdom of Great Britain, to be so vulnerable as to be completely dependent on one crop. Furthermore, the deliberate attempt to utilize a natural disaster to "inflict conditions that bring about its physical destruction" is another powerful and ringing interpretation of the United Nations charter."
"Here, Coogan levels his stare adroitly on the prevailing economic philosophy and the political economists in London at the time when he uses a famous quotation from the Irish Nationalist John Mitchel, who described the situation at the time as "God sent the blight, but the British sent the Famine." The Famine Plot then describes Trevelyan's followers in London as imposing an absurdity when they enforced, sometimes with soldiers and ships, the policy that "Ireland's property should pay for Ireland's poverty," therefore expunging responsibility from London's colonial lap with no more than a stroke of a pen and fatally placing care for the Famine in the metaphor of the economic market's cold "invisible hand.""
"To impose an illogical, calamitous condition such as Irish taxes needed to pay for Irish relief, Coogan states, is the perfect analogy to the idiom "extracting blood from a stone." The taxes levied on Anglo landlords in Ireland were high, but when the poor could not pay their rent, they were evicted. Often by force, these starving families were sent to the countryside while their homes were destroyed to make way for cattle grazing. The consequence of eviction was devastating, and the poor were often too weak to travel and so desperate that they tried eating the grass, like cattle. In enforcing this policy, Coogan declares, genocide can be interpreted."
"At the time, even some Englishmen agreed that "famine" could not be a truly intellectual description. As Coogan underscores, one English parliamentarian resigned in indignation feeling as though he is "an unfit agent of a policy which must be one of extermination."
"This policy of extermination went on to include the "work scheme," such as road building, which didn't pay a laborer enough even to fill his own belly, never mind the rest of his family. Also, the Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 that "effectively undid much of the benefits of the soup kitchens and brought an incalculable amount of suffering and death upon the starving." The Workhouse, which became only a place for the sick to die, at one point, only allowed "fit" people within its gated doors. This meant that those considered too weak, such as children, the elderly, and women, were turned away, often by force."
"All of this in the name of improving the economy and allowing God's divine will to take shape was well within Trevelyan and many of his peers' direct plans when he described the Famine as a "mechanism for reducing surplus population." Trevelyan is also quoted as saying, "The greatest evil... is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people." And finally, "The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.""
"There are many ways to describe what happened. Famine, genocide, and extermination are only a few. But Coogan does well in outlining the motivations and the actions of those responsible under the Act of Union. "
Ld222
Active Member
England's ruling elite spent many year's legalising, through it's own courts, it's raping and pillaging of other land's. I'm sure there are many a regime has legitimised, invasion, clearing people of land, actually hunting people for sport, mass murder, etc.
Look how the Palestinians are treated, you got your apologists who defend that. It's hardy surprising that you still get Imperial Apologists.
Idaho
blah blah blah
While there are many truths in what you say, and in what these historians have written, it falls into the usual historical trap: to create a continuous and rationalised post hoc narrative of a sequence of events. At the time these events no doubt felt very chaotic. Justification of each particular reaction, inaction or intervention was likely localised and not a part of any wider orchestration.
The famine was a terrible human tragedy made much worse by a remote and uncaring elite who were happy to either benefit or not lose. But to see that elite as a united cabal who planned and executed a systematic programme to bring about or maximise the impact of the famine is a stretch.
The famine was a terrible human tragedy made much worse by a remote and uncaring elite who were happy to either benefit or not lose. But to see that elite as a united cabal who planned and executed a systematic programme to bring about or maximise the impact of the famine is a stretch.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
That'd be because you're a dick with a narrative, with a vivid imagination, and not much in the way of critical faculties.
Now, how about addressing what I wrote, rather than spieling your strange and awkward fantasies about me?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
The United Kingdom's ruling elite. Give credit where credit is due. Some of those architects of mayhem were Scottish, Irish or Welsh, not just English.
That's what states do. That's what the Irish state will do and has been doing with regard to abuses by the Catholic Church. States function to perpetuate the state.
Can the past be changed, then, by people beating their gums and *weeping about their victimhood? Nope. The only thing that can be changed is the future, so treat apologists as they deserve (but do try to make sure they're actually apologists beforehand).
*Sure and the Irish are the niggers of Europe, aren't they? I lost count of the amount of times I heard that lament as a kid.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
A unified narrative is easier to believe in, though, and facilitates the writing and singing of songs of ancestral hatred.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Blah de blah de fucking blah. Always with the "nothing is our fault, we're victims of circumstance" narrative.
Most people learn from their past, rather than wallowing in it. If ireland's elites conform to the will of foreign elites, then kill your elites. it's a better use of energy than constantly farming out blame, and bathing in historical mire.
Ld222
Active Member
In your words VP, the Catholic where purging Children,
but 'the ascendancy' was just making the most of an opportune moment
Rather duplicitous to say the least.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
More duplicitous than your selective quoting?
Ld222
Active Member
So are you denying that you said the Catholic where purging these Children?
spanglechick
High Empress of Dressing Up
Quite. I just said out loud to myself when I clicked in the thread: "why are you even bothering, this is shit."
Idaho
blah blah blah
I have a dream that one day, one golden day, there will be a discussion board where people discuss things intelligently and NO thread becomes a bun fight or an ego vehicle.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
It is shit... but it's also fact....and although to some it seems irrelevant, to many others whose ancestors died or had to emigrate, it is still relevant. The stories are left untold.
My aunt is 83. She has a brilliant memory and mind. She's a poet and author. I have listened to her tell what happened to her grandparents families during the starvation.
It is a huge and tragic part of Irelands history which has been sanitised and brushed under the carpet of time.
The people do have a right to the full truth...not the sanitised version just as we all want the truth about the magdalene laundries and the mother and baby homes.
I've been reading the experiences of mothers ans children in these horrible places and eyewitness accounts are genuinely harrowing but extremely necessary to getting the whole truth out.
I think the starvation of 1845 on is now too many generations ago and it may never be properly addressed....but I'll just post a link to a site that documents eyewitness accounts for the time period leading up to, including and after the starvation.
http://irishpotatofamine.net/potato-famine-eye-witness-accounts/
That ▲▲▲▲▲ sir is one of the most ignorant comments I have ever had the misfortune to read.
Tell me how a people learn from the starvation of 1,500,000 of their ancestors? How do we learn from 2,000,000 of our ancestors fleeing in starvation death ships?
I am at a loss to understand how intelligent people still fail to understand the enormity of the impact of the starvation on Ireland.
How dare you accuse people who significantly helped built the UK and greatly expanded it's wealth with the sweat and blood of their ancestors' toil to "learn from their past rather than wallow in it".
Peace and reconciliation should have examined the enormity of the devastation under british rule throughout the entirity of Ireland.
And yes...to some or maybe many it seems off topic but it is indicative of the sick mentality of powerful groups to cover up the truth....just as the Catholic church has done and is doing.....
Thankfully the victims of the church who are still alive can give their accounts publicly and hope to see justice done!
The victims of the past wont ever have that opportunity. ...so I for one will remember them and will not be told by anyone that I'm "wallowing" in my own past.
bubblesmcgrath
Well-Known Member
Oh right...my bad..
How could I have been so mistaken? 15 years wasting my time on dubious research...
Thanks for setting me right....
Phew....dodged an embarrassing bullet there eh? Eh?
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