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To: MIT-Elephant

What would you suggest they do? Curing the blight was beyond the technology of the time.


14 posted on 03/20/2008 1:13:00 AM PDT by Vanders9
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To: Vanders9

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.)


30 posted on 03/20/2008 3:46:05 AM PDT by MIT-Elephant ("Armed with what? Spitballs?")
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To: Vanders9

>> 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.


34 posted on 03/20/2008 4:12:46 AM PDT by dangus
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To: Vanders9

My admittedly shallow understanding of the history is that the response of the ruling and propertied class to the catastrophic loss of crops was to take it out of the hides of those who had nothing, kicking them off the land and leaving them to starve to death. It was a callous, brutal attitude that yielded nothing to the landowners, and left a legacy of bitterness that will last a long, long time, and has a lot to do with the deeply felt Socialist sympathies of many of the Irish. The bastards who treated people this way deserve to rot in Hell. The very worst side of the capitalist system that I believe very deeply in.


42 posted on 03/20/2008 5:10:06 AM PDT by Humble Servant ( Keep it simple - do what's right.)
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