Posted on 03/19/2008 11:33:47 PM PDT by neverdem
THE feast of Ireland’s patron saint has always been an occasion for saluting the beautiful land “where the praties grow,” but it’s also a time to look again at the disaster that established around the world the Irish communities that today celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6. In its wake, the Irish left the old country, with more than half a million settling in United States. The famine and the migrations changed Irish and American history, of course, but they drastically changed Britain too.
Americans may think of the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops, late blight, as a European phenomenon, but its devastations actually started with them. The origin of the fungal organism responsible, Phytophthora infestans, has been traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico, and the first recorded instances of the disease are in the United States, with the sudden and mysterious destruction of potato crops around Philadelphia and New York in early 1843. Within months, winds spread the rapidly reproducing airborne spores of the disease, and by 1845 it had destroyed potato crops from Illinois east to Nova Scotia, and from Virginia north to Ontario.
It then crossed the Atlantic with a shipment of seed potatoes ordered by Belgian farmers. They had been hoping that fresh stock would improve their yields. Unhappily, it brought the seeds of devastation.
The warm damp spring of 1845 enabled late blight to become an epidemic. By mid-July, the disease had spread throughout Belgium and into the Netherlands. It went on to infect an area from northern Spain to the southern tips of Norway and Sweden, and east to Northern Italy. It moved inexorably through the British Isles and reached Connemara, on Ireland’s west coast, in mid-October. The ruin of Europe’s potato crops was complete...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
bttt
That’s a load, dude. They live in a place where the best they can do is grow sheep (here I’m talking history) and brew a bit other than that it was pretty damn stark.
Meanwhile, they were sitting next door to the British, (you know, the benevolent British, we loved them so very much we positively fell at their feet)...
Go here and read about the famine. And before I end my smack down, I want to express my opinion that your comment is just as racist as if I said all black Americans were niggers. (which they are most certainly not, and I beg their forgiveness)
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/coffin.htm
Oh to be sure. Ireland is an expanding power now...their economy is absolutely booming. Partly the result of a high birth rate, partly the result of low costs, partly generous European grants (they do SOME good) and partly a burgeoning enterprise spirit. So yes, I would agree, things are getting much better out there.
... potatoes ??? I thought the article was to be about muslims...
Worse than that. during the whole period of thefamine, Ireland was a net exporter of oats and other grains.
The British couldhave relieved the famine, but were indifferent to the plight of the Irish who many considered little better than talking monkeys.
This is why even today in Ireland, Queen Victoria is known as "The Famine Queen".
And the British, despotic rulers of the Emerald Isle, did nothing.
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Actually the potato blight in Ireland wasn’t as severe as in other countries.. The English increased their purchases going foreward from Ireland and instead of cancelling or reducing the contracted amounts the Irish fulfilled their quota for shipment to England while their own people starved.
“And the British, despotic rulers of the Emerald Isle, did nothing.
So what were the British supposed to have done?
Don’t forget tax breaks...BIG ones to foreign tech businesses that have taken root. What’s that, the free market working? The EU would never admit it.
“It’s much more complicated than that.”
Yes it is. But the Irish simplify it down to “Britain = always bad”, so I see no reason why they cant get the same treatment themselves.
“We tend to forget that the British Empire was not a benign affair committed to the spread of human rights and democracy (sure it was better than the French).”
I dont forget it. The Empire was simply a very large, very successful trading cartel. Individual Britons were very interested in the spread of democracy and human rights, but the Empire was smart enough to realise that you can take the donkey to water, but its a bad idea to force it to drink. That’s what American foreign policy (espec under FDR) gets wrong time and time again. If people want to live in a particular way...thats their prerogative. You may think they are wrong, and stupid, and even self-destructive...but its their choice. You are promoting individual freedom, after all?
“The Irish have a long and bloody history under British rule. There was the Potato famine and the Irish War of Independence (1919 - 1921).”
That is not the point I am making. Oppression, slavery, blood and injustice are a fact of Human history. Tragic, and stupid, but a fact. Over the years the Irish have had their fair share of it. Let me be generous...more than their fair share. The problem is that while other peoples have a vague folk memory of past wrongs, the Irish drill stories into their children from knee-high. Whereas other peoples put a dignified little monument at an old battlefield, the Irish raise a massive museum on it. Whereas other peoples have a commemorative plaque on the site of a massacre, the Irish make a shrine on it. They never forget the past, consequently they never forgive the past, and therefore they are forever shackled by the past. I’ve been to Ireland. I’ve seen all this. It’s a disgusting sight - an entire nation with a martyr complex. Well, I am NOT buying into it. I am not, I WILL not feel guilty for the alleged misdeeds (and these stories lose nothing in the telling) of folk who might have been my ancestors.
“Let us not forget that it was the Americans that forced the British and French to promote human rights and democracy outside their home countries (they didn’t do it willingly).”
What do you mean? Like slavery for example? Americans would have been happily shipping slaves in the early nineteenth century if the Royal Navy hadnt stopped the practice. Or are you referring to the dismantling of the empire after WW2? Yeah that worked well...many of the new countries are real standard bearers for human rights and democracy right up to this day.
Food subsidy, expansion of migrant work, prioritization of Irish survival over colonial export economy, an injunction against eviction and other predatory landowner operations.
The single-crop ways of Ireland might not have happened without the British policy of forcing Irish land to be split among children, splitting the native power base and leading eventually to the forced sharecropping that caused the Irish to grow the energy-dense potato in the first place. (This practice was ended by the Parliament after the Great Famine.)
If you don’t care to see the truth about British colonialism in Ireland exposed, you are free to counterargue, but why don’t you take your anti-Irish racism somewhere else?
“That’s a load, dude. They live in a place where the best they can do is grow sheep (here I’m talking history) and brew a bit other than that it was pretty damn stark.”
My statement was “That’s because Irish nationalism is inward looking, backward looking, and very very selfish.” unquote. How is what you just said and what I said incompatible?
“Meanwhile, they were sitting next door to the British, (you know, the benevolent British, we loved them so very much we positively fell at their feet)...”
They try it on and they certainly will fall at our feet.
“Go here and read about the famine.”
I know all about the famine thank you very much. I know it was a great and horrid tragedy. However, the truth of that does not affect the truth in my statement “That’s because Irish nationalism is inward looking, backward looking, and very very selfish.”
“And before I end my smack down, I want to express my opinion that your comment is just as racist as if I said all black Americans were niggers. (which they are most certainly not, and I beg their forgiveness)”
If you think that “That’s because Irish nationalism is inward looking, backward looking, and very very selfish.” is a RACIST statement, I suggest you go and join the democrat party, where your victim mentatility will fit very well with Messr Sharpton, Jackson et al. That is a statement on a political theory prevalent in Ireland, not a slander on Irish people.
“Food subsidy, expansion of migrant work, prioritization of Irish survival over colonial export economy, an injunction against eviction and other predatory landowner operations.”
Oh, you mean government subsidies? Priorization of Irish survival over the nasty non-white people in the colonies?
“The single-crop ways of Ireland might not have happened without the British policy of forcing Irish land to be split among children...”
Thats not British policy. Dividing land between children is a Celtic holdover from the clan system. British are into primogeniture.
>> What would you suggest they do? Curing the blight was beyond the technology of the time. <<
Do a little historical research and find why the Irish, in particular, were so dependent on a single crop.
Someone posted that the Irish didn’t like the Brits.
You replied that it was because of nationalism and backward politics.
The first statement was political. Yours was far more general.
Where the hell could the Irish look, except for inward?
To the French or Spanish that would have immediately caused mass slaughter by the incoming British?
Britain is (or at least was) the center of modern law in the modern age. And as many times as we watch Braveheart, Edward the First had alot to do with it.
When you investigate a bit about what actually happened when Britain moved into Scotland, you will learn that the stream of infantry and calvary went North, something like six abreast, for over thirty hours.
That’s what they did to Scotland.
So do you blame Ireland?
save
It's still not to late to build a fence
A similar fungus conquered America.
In the early 20th century, the fungus that is known as Chestnut Blight attacked the eastern climax forests and killed off the American Chestnut tree.
The chestnut Castenea dentata is still alive in forests but barely there and certainly not well. The blight trees kill the main stem and the tree dies back to regrow froom from massive root stocks. The blight is still around and after 8 or 10 years, attacks and kills the regrowth.
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