I am Catholic by conversion and mostly English in ancestry, without a drop of Irish blood.
One of the most shocking places I have ever visited is the Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin - in my ignorance I thought it was the Catholic cathedral until I was charged admission, and saw all the triumphalist and martial tributes to the conquerors of the Irish and Papistry.
Why did the Irish live in filthy and deplorable conditions, and count themselves fortunate if they had a pig to bring inside a one-room hut? Well, if a man made improvements on the land he rented, a bigger house, better drainage and so forth, he would not receive any compensation for those improvements from the landowner, were he evicted - and those very improvements could well be the incentive to evict him and his family in order to receive a higher rent.
Ireland exported food during the famine - wheat, sheep, beef. The starving were kept from that food at gunpoint. I think that genocide would be an accurate word.
When we were in Kerry and Cork I thought the people warm and happy - the famine 150 years behind them. But in the North, still in the Catholic towns, there was a sharpness and a bitterness to them, the strife there far more recent.
>> But in the North, still in the Catholic towns, there was a sharpness and a bitterness to them
How far North, British territory?