i always had the 8m in the head and to be honest have only read my 1st book on the famine. read this yesterday so it just got me thinking bud http://www.irishholocaust.org/tollofholocaust
I visited the Famine exhibition currently on display in Skibbereen yesterday ā¦ Fascinating and harrowing at the same timeā¦ Weāve never really faced up to the real horror (and emotion) of this genocide on any levelā¦ I suppose the political situation on the island in the 20th century didnt help.
My Granny whoās in her 90ās has a mortal fear of anyone going to bed hungry. Sheād lie awake at night thinking about who ate what during the day and will only go to sleep if everyone is full.
Youād ate like a king in her house, even if you didnāt want to.
Many scientists also believe such trauma is passed on genetically to a quite a few generations ā¦ Your grand motherās grand parents were probably around during the famine or not long after it - thereās a direct link to the trauma of it.
how do you face up to something like that though? I think weāve done what Irish people do and buried it deep and moved on. What else can you do but drive on like? We commemorate it, wrote songs about it and remember it.
I remember reading under the Hawthorn tree and it had a big effect on me at the time. I looked into it
I suppose history classes and time have dulled the effects of it for this generation. You never really get the full picture of the horror of it until you look for it, then you wish you hadnāt
A few years ago my Mam got a book out of Monaghan library called āGreat Irish Reportingā or something like that. It was a compilation of English language news reports about Ireland going back hundreds of years. I havenāt been able to find the book since.
Anyhow there was a report from the famine era, Tuam, Galway, about a young family of kids whose parents had died and supposedly the young boys had been found in the cottage eating their parents bodies, weeks after theyād died.
I often thought about that story during the Tuam babies scandal, that these were the stories of horror that those young nuns grew up with in rural Galway, and how terrified those nuns must have been of poverty and how their concept of horror was on a complete different level to ours. Weāre about as far away from the 1920s/30s and the Tuam baby scandal now as people in the 1920s/30s were far away from the famine.
Correct, itās due to epigenetics which is one of the more fascinating areas of research in genetic studies. There is even some evidence that these type of environmental effects may cause permanent DNA mutations, which might explain why some aspects of evolution progress so quickly.
1994 - yeah i remember listening to reports from Kigali on 5 Live - Srebenica then was 16 months later
did you ever watch the film Shooting Dogs @Fagan_ODowd?
its very good
I didnāt. Iām afraid. The genocide in Rwanda was about the worst thing to happen in my lifetime. The turnaround in the countryās fortunes has been remarkable. Paul Kagame is one of the most extraordinary leaders in the world.