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It'd be one thing if they just didn't help more, but they actively exacerbated it. There was food in Ireland, it just wasn't for the Irish. From the article: >

It'd be one thing if they just didn't help more, but they actively exacerbated it. There was food in Ireland, it just wasn't for the Irish. From the article: > The problem was not that the land was barren.... But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. ... In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland “rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce.”

sgt101 2y ago
So, when you say "they" you mean the Protestant Irish ruling class?
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
- deleted 2y ago
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- tga_d 2y ago
  I want to set aside for the moment the fact that the land-owning class was English (and not Irish) -speaking and usually lived in England, because while that's the easier point to make, there's a more fundamental issue here that I think is important, and would be true regardless of whether the ruling class was Irish or English: What was the mechanism that allowed the ruling class to do this? They clearly didn't have the support of the Irish people; absolutely everyone who starved would have obviously preferred a system where they could eat the food they were growing, so why didn't they just do that? Where was the monopoly on violence, which prevented these farmers from eating, based out of? The framing of "the British didn't cause it, they just didn't do anything to help" ignores the glaring fact that "not doing anything" would have meant "not enforcing their colonial power", when they most certainly did actively maintain their control, and it was precisely that control that enabled this to both happen and to continue. Were they trying to kill the Irish? No, but if you could solve a problem like a famine by simply ceasing to enforce a certain set of laws, but you continue to do so anyway, you are very obviously still responsible. If a school bully threatens violence to make sure his lackeys can sell your lunch, and he says "The lackeys are in charge, you should have brought more if you wanted to keep some," that doesn't mean he's not the one making you go hungry.

sgt101 2y ago

So, when you say "they" you mean the Protestant Irish ruling class?

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. A snippet from the snippet you apparently neglected to read.
deleted 2y ago
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tga_d 2y ago
I want to set aside for the moment the fact that the land-owning class was English (and not Irish) -speaking and usually lived in England, because while that's the easier point to make, there's a more fundamental issue here that I think is important, and would be true regardless of whether the ruling class was Irish or English: What was the mechanism that allowed the ruling class to do this? They clearly didn't have the support of the Irish people; absolutely everyone who starved would have obviously preferred a system where they could eat the food they were growing, so why didn't they just do that? Where was the monopoly on violence, which prevented these farmers from eating, based out of? The framing of "the British didn't cause it, they just didn't do anything to help" ignores the glaring fact that "not doing anything" would have meant "not enforcing their colonial power", when they most certainly did actively maintain their control, and it was precisely that control that enabled this to both happen and to continue. Were they trying to kill the Irish? No, but if you could solve a problem like a famine by simply ceasing to enforce a certain set of laws, but you continue to do so anyway, you are very obviously still responsible. If a school bully threatens violence to make sure his lackeys can sell your lunch, and he says "The lackeys are in charge, you should have brought more if you wanted to keep some," that doesn't mean he's not the one making you go hungry.