Posted on 09/16/2008 1:02:30 AM PDT by Stoat
Sep 16 2008 By Paul Drury
AN IRISH diplomat has raised a complaint with the Scottish government over a song sung by Rangers fans at an Old Firm game.
They were heard singing "The Famine Song" during the match at Ibrox a fortnight ago.
It includes the line: "The famine is over, why don't you go home?", and refers to the Irish potato famine of 1845-49, in which more than a million people died.
A Celtic fan protested to the Irish Embassy in London and Consul General Cliona Manahan raised the issue with Holyrood.
Last night, a Rangers FC spokesman said they had asked fans to stop singing the song.
He said the club had also approached the police, asking them to issue a statement saying anyone caught singing it would be arrested.
The spokesman said: "The club were made aware that a substantial number of complaints had been made regarding the singing of the chorus of a song known as The Famine Song by our supporters at this match.
"Rangers FC approached Strathclyde Police for guidance on this matter, with a view to issuing a joint statement indicating that persons singing this song in future may face the possibility of arrest.
"Strathclyde Police were not able to commit to this until they had carried out further investigation."
He said the club had a long-established policy of encouraging sporting behaviour and discouraging songs other fans find offensive.
He added: "Clearly, The Famine Song has provoked such a response in certain quarters.
"It is the club's view that the interest of our supporters and the club will be best served by supporters refraining from singing The Famine Song."
The government confirmed they had been advised of the fan's complaint by Ireland's consul general in Edinburgh.
They declined to comment on the discussions but said initiatives against bigotry were beginning to show results.
A spokesman added: "The Scottish government is totally committed to combating sectarianism and bigotry, which is why we have expanded on the work of the previous administration."
The famine is over why dont they go home? If they are so proud to be Irish they should go home, I take it you have never heard the songs the Celtic support come out with in support of the IRA or the Rangers fans in support of the UDA/UVF? I would just like to state I don’t like either Rangers or Celtic and hate it when their fans come and pollute my city with their bigotry for the record I’m a Hibernian supporter a club that was set up in 1875 to help Irish immigrants but who have moved forward and now we pick our players on talent alone not what religion they are. Glory Glory to the Hibees!
I am well aware of that...it was awful, horrendous and pathetic all at once and yes it launched a great immigration for which we are thankful. I think thats my bona fides....which should go without saying at all.
However, trying to have people arrested for singing a line in a song, launching “official” protests is ridiculous in the extreme. Its over...move on.
ALL speech is free or no speech is free.
[And I feel the same way about folks who get their panties in a bunch here over songs like “Dixie”.]
I just explained to you that in Ireland there was no free market in land. Perhaps you are unaware of this fact: land is an important factor in agriculture.
I also just explained to you that there was no free market in grain, but a strong protectionist policy.
In an environment where grain is artifically expensive and land is artificially expensive due to market intervention, the irish unskilled laborer was forced to rent land and then grow on that land the most efficient crop he could: highly caloric potatoes which required less soil and less maintenance.
had there been a free market in land and a free market in grain, ireland would have had a diversified economy.
Ireland was a very densely populated country by the standards of the day, and should have been as urbanised as England was.
Population density in Ireland in 1800 was 140 per sq mi. In England it was 165.
There is no reason that Ireland "should have been" as urbanized as England, given the fact that it was kept as a rural fiefdom for exploitation by England as a matter of policy.
However, with the act of Union in 1801, Irish industry was forced to compete with the far more efficient industry of England. It couldn’t do this, because for various reasons (not least the fact that Ireland did not have large deposits of coal) Irish industry could not compete with English industry on an equal footing.
You speak as if if in 1800 Irish and England were equally industrialized nations with separate economies, and that the Act of Union combined the economies for the first time and caused the collapse of a thriving Irish industrial base.
That's ridiculous.
From 1690 to 1800 the Irish were an entirely subject people - burdened with Penal Laws that kept 80-90% of the Irish population from receiving higher education, from voting, from practicing certain trades, from forming trade organizations and commercial societies, from purchasing land, from serving as commissioned officers in the military, etc.
Ireland's economy was similarly subject to England's.
Ireland's poverty was not the result of the operation of a free market, but the calculated result of a consciously interventionist economic policy.
Which meant that the Irish could no longer depend on worker’s wages fulfil their needs, and instead had to grow potatos to subsist on.
Again, you speak as if there was a thriving Irish middle class in 1800 comprised of successful artisans, factory workers and yeoman farmers. A select few Protestants lived that way - but 80-90% of the Irish population were subsistence tenant farmers in 1800 and in 1846.
The overwhelming majority of the Irish had never "depended on worker's wages" - they depended on how many potatoes they could pry out of their tiny rented plot.
The Act Of Union had no effect on Ireland except in these particulars: the Protestant landed gentry were stripped of their disproportional power in the government of the Empire, the UK took over direct control of military matters in Ireland, and customs on some goods were phased out.
Without subsidies, intervention and protectionism. Over-populated Ireland, so dependent on the potato, was heading for disaster
Direct and punishing intervention in the land and grain markets created the crisis in the first place. Piling more chains on the Irish economy would have created no relief.
Trevelyan’s insistance on applying the principles of the free market to solve the problems of the famine
Trevelyan did not insist on applying "free market principles" to the famine at all! At this point you are just inventing stuff out of whole cloth.
Trevelyan was not an advocate of free markets and was the administrator of a state-owned famine relief bureaucracy - a bureaucracy which quite famously failed to stop a brutal famine through its interventionist efforts.
ignoring the fact that even IF non-intervention and repealing the corn laws would drive food prices down, the Irish labouring classes had no spare income to buy food anyway, being almost totally dependent on potatos they had grown themselves on the land available, and therefore it didn’t matter HOW cheap food was, they still couldn’t afford it...
Because of the famine people sold family heirlooms, slaughtered horses and milk cows, and bartered their possessions and their homes in exchange for soup and bread.
Approximately two million people survived hand-to-mouth in this way, while one million died and another million fled the country (and it cost money to travel from Ireland to America and Australia).
If grain prices had been twice the price of potatoes instead of almost ten times the price, there would have been much hardship but not much starvation the first year of the famine.
In the second year, with tax incentives for growing grain, there would have been no famine and less hardship than the year previous.
There would not have been three years of unrelenting famine while fields lay fallow because potatoes couldn't grow and grain was still protected.
To sum up:
The Catholic population of Ireland in 1846 had spent 150 years under a regime of strict government regulation that prohibited them from participating in the market for land and prohibited them from most areas of the labor market - leaving them, effectively, only the fields of tenant agriculture and domestic service.
In addition to this, the government intervened directly in the agricultural market to dictate the prices of grains - leaving the Catholic Irish with the potato as the only crop that matched their meager rented plots and their caloric needs adequately.
When the crop failed, the government considered removing its strict intervention in the agricultural market and decided to only do it piecemeal. As a countermeasure to this maintenance of its interventionist policy on grain prices, the government intervened by means of a Famine Relief Board that would distribute food and clothing according to the dictates of a government bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, like most bureaucracies, was very inefficient.
As a result, 25% of the population died and 25% of the population fled.
The Irish who best survived this 150 year unbroken history of systematic government intervention in their economy did so by fleeing to America - a much less economically interventionist country, where there was plenty to eat and a wide range of jobs.
Some 'good-hearted' protestants in Ireland took to offering the starving Catholics food for renouncing their faith and converting to the protestant flavor du jour.
What an opportunistic plot to vanquish the native papists, they must have thought, after centuries of failure that wave after wave of soldiers, landlords, UK decrees, etc. couldn't accomplish.
Those good for nothing Irish!
Charles Trevelyan was a fierce advocate of laissaiz faire economics.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/hunger.htm
The reason that so many food ships were leaving Ireland laiden with food was that, in the absence of any attempt by the government to purchase this food (thus horror of horrors, intervening in the precious free market) it was far more profitable to sell it on the overseas market than distribute it amongst starving Irish labourers.
Trevalyan advocated a free-market solution to the crisis that involved as little intervention as possible and hoping beyond hope that charity would be enough to cover the shortfall. He, and all the other free-market fanatics, were catastrophically wrong and people died as a result.
Just out of curiousity, if you were Trevelyan, how would you, presumably a firm believer yourself in free-market economics as the British Whig government of the 1840s and 50s were, have solved the crisis? More libertarianism, or by decisive government intervention?
LOL!
Let's consult your source:
"As a devout advocate of laissez-faire, Trevelyan also claimed that aiding the Irish brought 'the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise.' Thus he ruled out providing any more government food, despite early reports the potato blight had already been spotted amid the next harvest in the west of Ireland. Trevelyan believed Peel's policy of providing cheap Indian corn meal to the Irish had been a mistake because it undercut market prices and had discouraged private food dealers from importing the needed food."
So this is the scenario:
John Peel temporarily revoked the protectionist tariffs that kept cheap Indian grain from being made available to the Irish market.
Trevelyan was worried that the inflow of all this cheap Indian grain in Ireland would hurt the ability of the landed grain growers of the UK to keep their prices artificially high.
So Trevelyan moved to put back the protectionist barriers in order to keep cheap Indian grain off the market, so that UK grain prices could remain artificially high.
You and the author of your source clearly do not understand what "laissez-faire" means.
A true laissez-faire policy would have been to allow grain merchants from any nation to sell their wares in Ireland at any price they wanted, whether or not it hurt the profit margins of protected English land barons.
You and your source have inadvertently confirmed that intervention slaughtered the Irish, when free markets could have saved them.
The Corn Peel arranged to purchase was government bought, and was paid for because it was not a foodstuff that was in any previous demand, so would not, the theory went, interfere with existing markets.
To Trevelyan of course, government expenditure was government expenditure, and thus he opposed even this inadequate intervention by the state.
Trevelyan wasn’t advocating tarrifs, he was advocating as little government intervention as possible, and hoping that under free market conditions, the food would be cheap enough to stave off the famine....
By the way, the Tory PM was called Sir Robert Peel, not John Peel. Was that an elementary mistake, or a typo on your part?
You're making a lot of assumptions there.
The government purchased it because - according to the protectionist laws of the British Empire - private citizens of Ireland were not allowed to purchase grain from India.
Neither Peel nor Trevelyan wanted to go with the obvious free market solution: i.e. open the Irish market to Indian farmers. Peel wanted to buck the protectionist laws temporarily and in a controlled manner. Trevelyan wanted to maintain the protectionist laws unchanged.
To Trevelyan of course, government expenditure was government expenditure, and thus he opposed even this inadequate intervention by the state.
Trevelyan was a protectionist, as his policy clearly indicates. He may have felt that tariff revenue shouldn't be wasted on the Irish, but he was strongly opposed to ending protectionist intervention in the economy.
Completely false. He never suggested ending the tariffs in the slightest. And his own comments, as revealed by your source, indicate that he was worried that cheap Indian grain would undercut the high prices that the tariffs provided to English grain growers.
Again, if Trevelyan was an advocate of free markets he would have called for an immediate end to all government intervention in the grain market. But, as the record shows, he opposed even Peel's modest plan to effectively suspend tariffs temporarily.
I’m a big fan of DJ John Peel.
The corn laws were NOT temporary, they were abolished completely in 1846 and never came back. Please tell me were Trevelyan supported the return of the corn laws. Given his ideological inclinations, it is highly unlikely he supported this. The only people who supported them tended to be Tory landed gentry and yeoman farmers who had a vested interest in keeping food prices artificially high. Whigs like Trevelyan were fundamentally ideologically opposed to the tarriffs.....
They were abolished in 1846 - but the dismantling was gradual and not instantaneous.
Please tell me were Trevelyan supported the return of the corn laws.
His comments about his worry that an even broader market for grain would damage domestic producers tells us that he was sorry to see the Corn Laws go and did not want to rush their passing.
Given his ideological inclinations, it is highly unlikely he supported this. The only people who supported them tended to be Tory landed gentry and yeoman farmers who had a vested interest in keeping food prices artificially high. Whigs like Trevelyan were fundamentally ideologically opposed to the tarriffs.....
Trevelyan was born to a noble family. His grandfather was a baronet and a landowner. Both Tories and Whigs had large landowners in their ranks and the controversy over the Corn laws was not split strictly across partisan lines - probably because British parties had not yet hardened into ideological camps, but were more like clubs connected by patrons and marriage.
Trevelyan's "ideological inclinations" were for the preservation of the British Empire and the Protestant Ascendancy.
Those were the principles taht dictated his economic policies.
Well, isn’t that special!?!
I remember reading an article about the rivaly in Sports Illustrated around 1966 or so. Of course at that time most Americans not only knew little about football/soccer, they knew little about the religious problems affecting the Isles. I was generally surprised at the animosities revealed in the article as most of my close friends were Protestants and I was a Catholic. I might still have that magazine issue gathering dust in my basement.
The British considered the Irish as talking monkeys and their literature and cartoons of the time reflect this.
I am descended from the earlier migration of the religious wars. I don't excuse what the British Government did.
In the lesser famine of 1782-83, the government ordered the closure of the ports in order to prevent the export of foodstuffs in order to deal with the famine.
However, by the 1840s and 50s, free-market ideology and lassez-faire economics had become the dominant ideology of the British government, especially under the Whigs, and they truly believed that the solution to almost every ill was the application of lassez-fair capitalism and non-interventionism was the best way to solve this kind of problem.
Trevelyan was not an interventionist, he did not support tarrifs, and I find it ludicrous, given his antipathy towards state intervention and lassez faire economics, that he would have supported the corn laws or tarriffs.
As I said before, the British government wasn’t exporting food out of Ireland, Irish merchants were doing that because in a free-trade enviroment were the gov’t refused to put restrictions on trade as they had done in the past under such circumstances, it was simply more profitable to these food merchants to sell their products on the world market.
What the British government should have done is what they did in previous famines. Shut the ports and forced the merchants to dispose of their food on the Irish market for the duration of the crisis. They did not do so because they were ideologically committed to free trade and the notion that free-market conditions would make food the cheapest it could be and therefore solve the problem of the famine, but they were wrong. Their ideology blinded them to the reality of the fact that massive state intervention was required to alleviate the crisis....
Please explain this, comrade:
If the British government were committed to the free market, why did it not permit a free market in land and why did it not permit a free market in labor?
More to the point, why did it not allow cheap Indian grain to be sold on the open market in Ireland?
Why would a government allegedly committed to free markets restrict market activity in land and labor and grain?
By the time of the famine, there was a free market in labour and land. The Catholics were emancipated in 1827.
There was no restriction on the importation of Indian corn, other than the fact there was little demand for it, because it was a horrible, cheap and nasty foodstuff that only the most desperate and starved would wish to purchase, and even they couldn’t afford it, because they subsisted on potatoes and any money or goods they had to spend or barter with had to be spent on rent and could not be used to buy food. In order to make it into the country at all, it had to be bought on government contract.
For the last time, a Free-Market solution the famine crisis was completely wrong headed because the afflicted had absolutely no money whatsoever with which to purchase an adequate amount of food once they had spent money on rent. They relied almost totally on potatoes for sustinence and could not eat unless it was provided for by charity (inadequate) or given to them by the government as a handout (evil marxism! Boo!!) The British government didn’t much like marxism either. Even though it didn’t really have a name at that time. (Although the blight which affected Europe and led to food riots all over the continent did as it happens, lead to the unrest in which Marx wrote his manifesto in 1848)....
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