@bythelee

5 months ago

This is a painfully difficult topic to breach. The wounds are still raw, despite all of the time that has passed. Because the sweeping changes that began in 1845 are STILL being felt to this very day. It felt like the usual Thoughty2 humour level was toned down, but thankfully still present. And an extremely decent attempt to cover what can only be described as callous brutality by a British government. To clarify some points: - the coffin ships were a complete lottery. The Dunbrody is now a floating museum in New Ross, and had a decent captain that kept a doctor in his crew. He did not lose a single passenger on his voyages. Meanwhile, two of the four ships that carried 1500 people from Strokestown fared far worse. 1/3 never reached foreign shores. The best ships lost 30% of their passangers, the two worst lost around 56% en route. ALL arriving passengers were quarantined, riddled with disease, when they docked in Canada. One ship had but 3 crewmen left, the captain and all officers having perished on the single voyage. They wanted to sink the ship, fearing the "contamination that has seeped into the timbers". - the teaching of English in schools post-famine was compulsory, because "emigration is inevitable". From that peak of 8.5 million, Ireland lost around 3 million to death, disease, and emigration in the famine decade. But the population continued to dwindle, dropping as low as 2.5 million by 1920. That's over 60 years that another 3 million Irish drained away from their homeland. Also, now you start to see why ships like Titannic had such large steerage class accommodation. Not solely for the Irish by that time, but even Titannic had stopped at Cobh (pronounced Cove) to pick up Irish emigrees, some of whom had walked the length of the island to get to the embarkation point. - local English landlords, who owned much of the land that was then rented back to the peasants, lived lavish lifestyles that were far beyond their means. Rents were too high for the peasants to pay, but a major exascerbating factor was that there was no money to respond to the emergency. The "lord of the Manor" at Strokestown in Roscommon was about £30,000 in debt - that's about £6million in today's money. He tried harder than you might expect to help his tenants, but he couldn't even maintain his own lifestyle, never mind find the funds to run a soup kitchen. It was a perfect storm of a crisis needing huge sums to pay the daylight robbery rates for grains and other foods available in the markets, right at a time when everyone was in debt up to the hilt. - even when there was charity, and a soup kitchen to at least feed the starving, there were conditions attached... Wealthier Protestants running soup kitchens demanded that the Catholic Irish receiving a bowl of soup renounce their faith and become Protestant. Forced to choose between faith and starvation, it was impossible. Not least because of peer pressure. "Taking the soup" became a label of traitordom - that you had abandoned your faith and sold your soul for that soup. It remains an obscure insult to this day, but declaring that someone has "taken the soup" is to say they have betrayed their principles and sold out. - in contrast to the handouts requested in today's famines and disasters, ALL of the "petition letters" written by peasant consortiums, priests, etc appealing for help did NOT ask for free food, nor even free money. They ALL requested WORK. That they might earn a wage, to buy the extortionately priced food in the market. That alone is a huge contrasting shock to today's "give me" culture. Given all they have had to endure, I think today's Irish can be extremely proud of the survival and independent nature of their country. Never mind the referendum that approved gay marriage, despite an overwhelmingly Catholic majority, it is little known that the charters reaching for Irish independence from the UK back in 1916-1922, called upon Irish men AND WOMEN to jointly rise up and claim their heritage. And that upon independence in 1922, men and women were given equal voting rights immediately. It took until 1928 for the UK and USA to manage that milestone. Today we are so caught up in the belief that "one person, one vote" is so universal, we forget that Western Democracies have had universal suffrage for less than 100 years. Oh, and don't forget that the Greeks (who developed the concept of democracy) NEVER had universal suffrage. Only the wealthy got to vote, about 50k people out of several million...

49 |