There is also a wonderful version by Shillelagh Law, too.
Pinging you to some wonderful music...
This beats all of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntl9RngZvEE&list=RDNtl9RngZvEE#t=91
The Fields Of Athenry - Frank Patterson
In large part, reluctant though I am to admit it, the Irish famine was a product of classic free market economic liberalism.
The Whigs had just got into power after the Tories had been ousted over the question of the “Corn Laws”, ie the protectionist measures that kept British wheat prices high. The imposition of tariffs on cheap American wheat protected Tory landlords while putting up the price of bread for working men.
To the Whigs the market should be allowed to operate and government not intervene. Something I think we would all agree with but with the law of unintended consequences caused a disaster in Ireland.
When the potato crop collapsed the new Whig government couldn’t be seen to intervene and stop exports of other crops from Ireland to feed the starving or to intervene in the market and buy wheat to feed them.
All a reluctant chief secretary of the Treasury Trevelyan (cited in the song) would do was buy “Indian corn” from America, it was virtually inedible as there weren’t the right type of mills to grind it in Ireland and anyway it was too little and too late.
There is no doubt that the free-market Whigs (especially Trevelyan) thought that the market was doing it’s job efficiently, the Irish were lazy, they thought, too dependent on welfare, if the famine cleared the land of their impoverished small holdings and forced them to go to America so much the better.
In hindsight it was an appalling viewpoint but let’s face it, in many ways it is a viewpoint that many of us share today.