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Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor F
by h0l0cube 2y ago
Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor
FTA (for anyone's benefit):
> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
- DrillShopper 2y agoIt would be darkly poetic if Brexit brought these same conditions to the UK as a whole if they had crop failures one year. (To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)