It's grim up North

Sidney honestly think you’re here winding up Labane,and would say anything to get a rise.

What mandate had the British to be here up to 1916?

Absolutely none

Who in Ireland voted for that mate?

The few Prods who had a vote wanted it badly

In fairness some Catholics had the vote since 1793…
but could only vote for Prods :joy:

From 1800 onwards it became obvious that the English regarded the growth in the Catholic Irish population (or the peasant savages as they regarded them) as a huge problem. The famine was a very handy occurrence to solve the problem for them.

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Good edit to include “some” Catholics!

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Wheres Sidney to put a cat among ye?

You are hoist with your own petard. Ignorance is a crackling taper.

Note that the Union was between “Great Britain” and “Ireland”, not between ‘Great Britain’, ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Rest of Ireland’. This point has yet to be drawn adequately in Irish historiography. The interchangeable nature of the island as a physical unit and as a political unit, via said Act of Union, got decisively underlined in constitutional terms. The tendentious claim that there existed a six county proto state in North East Ulster from time immemorial – a bromide common to MW Heslinga’s The Irish Border as a Cultural Divide (1962), Ian Adamson’s The Cruithin (1974) and the wilder shores of Loyalism – ends up null and void as of 1801. What could be more sovereign for a British subject than a founding Act of Parliament?

Therefore: the island of Ireland was franked, constitutionally, as a political unit long before Easter 1916. Partition in the 1920s can only be viewed as the desperate act of sectarian majoritarian supremacists. The Unionists certainly could not be deemed democrats.

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That’s quite easy to answer. Deliberately killing somebody is murder.

You’ve imposed your own arbitrary moral justification there.

Therefore anybody else can claim their own arbitrary moral justification for killing anybody for a “cause”.

One could just as easily say that it wasn’t just the British, but capitalism which was to blame for the “famine” (it was), and therefore there was a moral justification to remove all capitalists from Ireland by any means necessary, including murder.

Killing someone in a justified war is not murder. Was killing Nazi leaders in WWII murder?

The straw man regarding capitalism is possibly your weakest argument ever on here, the British government of the time are solely responsible for the deaths in the Irish famine, more correctly called the Irish genocide. Capitalism was also in place in the rest of the UK at the time, and not a single person died from starvation in the period. Utter nonsense that only a socialist could come up with. If capitalism was the cause of the famine, why did nobody die on the mainland when the potato crop was destroyed there as well, as it was in much of Europe?

You know the answer, but it would offend your Anglophile nature to admit it.

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Who in Ireland voted for an independent Irish state before 1918?

Given that you’re all over the 1918 election as a justification of the War of Independence, your own argument automatically implies that the Rising was not justified.

My argument as to why armed insurrection was justified is based on the famine. A genocide inflicted on a people is enough justification for armed insurrection don’t you think?

It was, but there are certain circumstances where murder can be justified. Murdering Nazis is just a bit more justifiable than murdering the two chaps at Soloheadbeg.

Em, numerous times on this forum you have stated that socialist policies were responsible for famines.

Yet when the flip side of that is pointed out to you, you shriek like a little girl that somebody might have the sheer gall to point out a home truth to you that demolishes your child like belief in the utter infallibility of capitalism.

Capitalist policies, carried out on behalf of the British state, were squarely responsible for the deaths of a million people.

The British state had access to more than enough food to prevent anybody dying of starvation.

Your argument that armed insurrection was justified in 1916 is based on something that happened in the 1840s?

Well, I presume you’d have no problems if Japanese groups started planting bombs in San Francisco now in revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or if Indian nationalists bombed the British embassy in Delhi in revenge for the 1940s famine there.

Why did the British state feed the inhabitants on the mainland but let the inhabitants in Ireland starve to death? Was that due to capitalism? Strange, irrational argument. It was due to racism, plain and simple, just admit it.

Your million dead is a very low estimate, the population of Ireland decreased from 8.2 million in 1851 to 5.2 million in 1881. Two million didn’t leave on ships.

Pursuing socialist economics did however lead to mass starvation in the USSR and China, no question about that either. Happening in Venezuela today.

What an oddball argument.

It was down to racism and capitalism. The infliction of capitalism on those considered inferior.

Bear in mind, now, given the definition of racism that you have offered numerous time on this forum, that by your own argument (not mine), it could not have been racism.

It’s the argument you’re making, not me.