It stunted your growth kid.
2 Likes
Employers prefer famine descendants as their inherited DNA means they’re able to work without having lunch.
Charming
Kevin is a fantastic historian.
But Who does he think he is saying famines lead to generational problems done by famines?
He’s talking through his hole surely.
Do we have higher levels of some types of illness or more people who die young than Wales or Belgium or anywhere that didn’t have a famine?
The psychological effects of it or maybe the fondness for drink would sound more plausible
Kevin Whelan: ''No professional historian would back the genocide argument"
Seems to me there’s a surprising overlap between those who insist against facts that the Irish famine was a genocide and those who deny what Israel is doing to Gaza is genocide.
Well, certainly if the evidence of this forum is anything to go by where the prominent “the famine was a genocide” posters are very strongly correlated with right wing headbanger beliefs.
I think where you get people believing fake history from which no facts and no context and no truth can persuade them to abandon the kool-aid, there always lies a base nationalist savagery. A monster lurking in that person, if you like.
You see it with the Israelis and you see it in some Irish people too. You see it pretty much everywhere around the world. People for whom real historical grievances are never enough, or people who invent victimhood in order to oppress. It’s through the “minds” of such pea brains that genocide is actually carried out.
Claiming the Irish famine was a genocide is the same thing as Israel cooking up lies about beheaded babies and mass rape on October 7th. The truth is already awful, but for some people it’s not awful enough, they have to lie, they have to trump it up to foment that anger in order that that anger will serve as fodder to oppress and destroy others in the future.
They walk among us here.
That’s a good piece. He says the point of remembering the famine is “not to claim victimhood”, which is what I was angling at earlier. He also specifically uses the word genocide in relation to native Americans, but not in relation to the famine.
The famine was a horrific event. It was bad enough in itself without having to make believe it was something else. That it wasn’t a genocide doesn’t make it any less bad, just different. What’s worse, a dozen killed in a genocide or a million killed in a famine. The other Irish related headbanger warping of history is that “the irish were slaves too”.
Martin McGuinness died of a thing called amyloidosis which seems to be a genetic thing peculiar to a small part of Donegal and descendants of people from there.
I’ve no idea what the causal origin of it is.
In terms of the way we form meaning, being a genocide would indeed make it worse. That’s why some people try to claim it was a genocide, because they have ulterior motives to fabricate lies in order to try and fabricate a consensus which will have real effects in the contemporary or future environments.
One reason to fabricate such a lie might be to try and stir up hatred against Unionists with a view to a future genocide of them, or at the very least a future scenario where Unionists become the untermensch and have Irish Catholic ethnic supremacy shoved right down their throats in the same way Protestant Unionism shoved their supremacy down Irish Catholic throats since time immemorial.
Genocide is a 20th century term and modern terms probably shouldn’t be used for historical events.
I wouldn’t use it to describe the Irish famine.
However, your starting point when discussing famine has to be from the vantage that they are political events and not acts of god.
In the context of Ireland the political conditions that paved the way for famine began roughly 300 years prior- the Tudor conquest of Ireland. It’s from this period we begin to see the Irish regularly referred to as barbaric, backwards or unintelligent. The dehumanising of a people is standard when you want to conquer them but by the 19th C the tans had been weaving this narrative for 300 hundred years to the extent that we were truly regarded as subhuman… this culminated in the infamous Punch magazine drawings.
Of course you had all kinds of laws trying to eradicate Gaelic culture and Catholic religion up to the Penal laws. Plantations and land confiscation and a horrid landlord system… and on we can go.
300 years trying to destroy a people by running them into the ground so that by the time the famine came it was just the spark needed to set off what ensued.
The tans didn’t sit around and conspire a famine but centuries of mismanaged created it and they certainly used it to clear some of the mess they created. By mess i mean million people dependent on the potato.
So no, i don’t think genocide is the right term. That’s something else. But there was a continued policy over centuries to eradicate the Irish way of life and to assimilate the population to be tans. In such conditions famines can and have thrived.
I agree somewhat on the victimhood jibber jabber of some people regarding the famine… but i think collectively we probably haven’t done enough to fully absorb and commemorate what happened. I’ve been reading some contemporary reports from newspapers during the famine lately… a book may or may not be in the offing… but the absolute horror of them is unimaginable. And while it’s somewhat unfair to judge the tan response to events through a modern lense, the cunts did a whole pile of nothing. Problem solved.
12 Likes
Spot on.
1 Like
The last British soldier to be executed for a war-time offence was Galway-born James Daly, whose death came about due to his making a stand for Ireland.
Born in 1899 in Ballymoe, Co. Galway, Daly and his family later moved to the town of Tyrellspass, Co. Westmeath.
Daly enlisted in the Connaught Rangers regiment in 1919.
By June 1920, he was stationed at Solon in Punjab, India.
By this stage, the War of Independence was raging, something which the Irish soldiers were becoming increasingly aware of.
One of them, Joe Hawes of Co. Clare, was stationed at Jalandhar, a few miles from Solon.
He had been home in the previous weeks on leave and was aware of how desperate the situation in Ireland was.
On 27 June 1920, Hawes was speaking to four of his Irish colleagues in the army canteen.
He told them what he had seen in Ireland and stated:
‘We are out here in India doing the very same as the British are doing in Ireland suppressing the Irish people. We are suppressing the Indian people.’
The four men agreed and after some discussion, decided to lock themselves into the barracks for the night.
Their plan was that the following morning they would walk to the guardroom and tell the officers that they refused to serve the British Army until such a time as the Black and Tans were removed from Ireland.
The colonel was horrified and met the men the following day.
In tears, he told them that their acts were disgracing the good name of the Connaught Rangers who had given loyal service to the British Army for decades.
Hawes stepped forward and said that this service had been done for Britain and not for Ireland and that they would no longer follow his instructions.
Thirty men joined him in his protest. Word was then send to Solon of the protest.
The Connaught Rangers here quickly joined in, and led by James Daly, they gave up their weapons, lowered the Union flag and raised a tricolour that they had asked a local tailor to sew.
Hawes later said that the aim was a peaceful protest. The men wore ‘Sinn Fein’ rosettes on their uniform and sang rebel songs.
Even The London Times reporting stated: ‘The men appear to have been respectful and intimated that they will give up their arms to any British troops sent to relieve them.’
Several attempts were made to force the mutineers to obey their commanders and returned to their posts.
At Jalandhar, extra loyal troops were drafted in and violent tactics were used to end the stand off, causing many men to agree to give up their protest.
False rumours that several mutineers had been shot at Jalandhar reached the men at Solon. They quickly went to retrieve their rifles that they had earlier given up freely.
Armed only with bayonets, two Irish soldier, Private Patrick Smythe and Private Peter Sears, were shot dead in the ensuing confrontation.
Within days, the protestors were overpowered and all those found to have taken part were arrested.
Fourteen of those considered to be the leaders were sentenced to death.
All but one had their sentence commuted to terms of imprisonment.
21-year-old James Daly was considered a ringleader and it was decided that mercy would not be shown in his case.
He went before a firing squad in Dagshai Prison on 2 November 1920
In his last letter to his mother he had said ‘it is all for Ireland and I am not afraid to die,’ but he gave some indication of regret also, stating ‘I wish to the Lord that I had not started on getting into this trouble at all.’
The Indian Mutiny was probably the biggest engagement of the War of Independence that did not take place on Irish soil and the men who took part paid dearly.
Several were imprisoned until 1923 and lost their army pensions, many returning to a newly-independent but impoverished Ireland with little more than the clothes on their back.
It was not until 1936 that the mutineers were recognised as having struck a blow for Irish freedom and were granted entitlements to Irish pensions.
In 1970, 50 years after the event, the remains of Patrick Smythe, Peter Seers and James Daly were returned to Ireland where they were re-interned in their family plots.
6,000 followed the hearse at Daly’s funeral as it made its way through Tyrellspass before he was finally laid to rest in his native land.
12 Likes
I was heretofore unaware of that. Fascinating.
Mutiny on foreign soil will never be tolerated by any army, not least those shower of bastards, especially to the Irish. Them men knew what was coming. Unbelievable sacrifice.
2 Likes
Thanks for that. God be good to them
1 Like
You’d not heard the song the Connaught Rangers? The Wolfe Tones used do a version of it.
“Arise, arise, young Daly cried
Come join along with me,
We’ll strike a blow for liberty,
Our regiment will mutiny
And support our friends at home”
2 Likes
Tbf the tones sing an awful lot of dirge