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To: agere_contra; Radl
What led to the Famine was the Irish system of land tenure plus one-crop agriculture.

And I agree, there was never any "genocide". Some wrong-headed government policies by people honestly trying to help, and some foolish nationalists who also honestly were trying to do the right thing. And a sprinkling of malicious people on both sides just to aggravate everyone. But no genocide.

10 posted on 07/03/2009 10:38:13 AM PDT by AnAmericanMother (Ministrix of ye Chasse, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment))
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To: AnAmericanMother

From http://www.allsands.com/history/events/irishgreatfami_bim_gn.htm

The British government and the British and Irish Protestant landowners still required the Irish peasants and laborers to pay their rent for the land they could not work due to the blight and the hunger upon them. In a lush island surrounded by water teaming with fish and land that fattened pig and cattle alike, how could one failed crop cause a Famine? According to British law, Irish Catholics could not apply for fishing or hunting licenses. Their pigs and cattle were sent to England to feed the British and to export for trade, while the landlords kept the fine cuts for themselves. Ireland was part of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world at that time - yet the British government stood by and did nothing to help their subjects overcome this hardship. In our time, an enforced famine such as this would be labeled genocide yet in the 1800s it was merely an unfortunate tragedy. As defined in the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1987 Genocide Convention Implementation Act, the legal definition of genocide is any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including by killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The British policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ireland from 1845 to 1850 constituted “genocide” against the Irish People as legally defined by the United Nations. A quote by John Mitchell (who published The United Irishman) states that “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”

Sounds like genocide to me. They didn’t even mention the blockades. They have blood on their hands.


14 posted on 07/03/2009 1:34:53 PM PDT by Radl (sai)
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