Was The Irish Famine Genocide?

Some people claim that the Great Famine was an act of genocide committed by the British Empire against the Irish people. This theory is most popular among Irish-Americans (who strangely enough are more nationalist than people from Ireland) and on the internet, though it has little if any credence in Ireland. It has been booted out of conspiracy theory land after one of the most respected Irish historians; Tim Pat Coogan supported the allegation in his new book, The Famine Plot.

An eviction - loss of house and land resulted in emigration or death
An eviction – loss of house and land resulted in emigration or death

The Great Famine (or Great Hunger as it is also known) was the most cataclysmic event in Irish history. Sparked by the failure of the potato crop (due to blight) it led to roughly one million deaths and roughly another million people to emigrate. Considering the pre-famine population was 8 million it was proportionally one of the worst famines in modern times. The population of Ireland has never reached that level again, making us one of the few (if not only) countries to have the same population that we did in 1820. It was the largest factor in the destruction of the Irish language and culture. It began a process of mass emigration that would drain the country of all vitality for the next 150 years as the best and brightest left.

The argument is that this famine was not a natural disaster but rather deliberate plan by the British authorities to destroy the Irish people. The famous 19th century Irish revolutionary John Mitchell famously said “God sent the blight, but the English sent the Famine.” What he meant was that despite the failure of the potato crop there was still enough food in the country to feed the population. Instead the cruel and greedy English exported the food leaving the Irish to starve. Reference is made to disgusting bigotry and anti-Irish prejudice in Britain at the time, particularly of the infamous Punch cartoons which compared the Irish to apes. The allegation is that the British deliberatively neglected the starving Irish in order to destroy them and clear the land.

The Famine Plot has reignited the claim that the Famine was an act of genocide by the British

The most controversial issue in Anglo-Irish affairs is the allegation that food was exported during the Famine. This was first claimed by Irish nationalists as a reason to end British rule and the Famine certainly put an end to the idea that Ireland would be a part of the United Kingdom for good. However, it is extraordinarily difficult to prove the claim true or false, and to my knowledge no one has. Records of exports simply weren’t kept or have since been lost. It is certainly true that some food was exported, but there is no way of knowing how much or if it would have prevented the Famine. Food was also imported, though again, it is unknown where this outweighed the food that was exported. The starving Irish had little money so merchants naturally (in their mind) sold it abroad where they could get a better price. Had a ban on exports been put in place, lives would have been saved, but how many is unknown.

Let’s take a moment to reflect on what genocide actually means. According to the United Nations Genocide Convention:


The crucial question in whether or not it is genocide comes down to intent. Did the English government intend to destroy the Irish people? The answer is no. They were heartlessly negligent, but neglect is not the same as murder. There was never any plan to wipe out the Irish nor any actions that could be viewed as such. The government didn’t directly kill anyone nor did they deliberatively destroy any food. In fact the relief aid, pathetic as it was, does damage the genocide argument. After all, why would the government set up soup kitchens if it wanted the Irish to die?

It was not murder or genocide that killed so many, but neglect. The government believed in laissez-faire economics or what would now be called free market fundamentalism (I have a post on the issue here). They believed that the government should not interfere with the market or it would only make the situation worse. They believed (like many today) that aid to the Irish would only make them lazy and dependent on handouts. They believed Ireland was over-populated and welcomed emigration to America. There was certainly a lot of racism, but I believe the larger motivator was aristocratic disgust for the poor. The government didn’t believe that poor people should be helped no matter how desperate their situation or what their nationality was. This, and not some genocidal master plan, was why so little was done during the Famine.

(It is worth pointing out that historians have criticised Coogan’s book. Having read it, I must agree that it lacks thoroughness and fails to back up its claim that the Famine was genocide. Little evidence is given and there are surprisingly few sources used.)

The Famine was the greatest calamity in Irish history. People needlessly died due to cold-hearted indifference and the elevation of the market above the lives of people. Nowhere near enough aid was given as prejudice won out over compassion. Laissez faire turned into Leave them to die. But this was a crime of neglect, not genocide. There never was intent to destroy the Irish. Had the government really wanted to exterminate the Irish, they would have done more than let natural disasters run their course. The claims by Coogan and others, while passionate, simply do not have enough evidence to support themselves.

(The comment section on this blog is a complete and utter mess. With over 800 comments it is the most commented post on my blog. Unfortunately, most of these comments come from fanatics and a Holocaust denier who has unleashed a deluge of anti-Semitic rants. I’ve basically given up on it and let the crazies take over.)

999 thoughts on “Was The Irish Famine Genocide?”

  1. Laissez-mourir.

    Excellent post. Embarrassingly, I was first exposed to some of these issues by listening to the band, Black 47, at Paddy Reilly’s Music Bar on 2nd Avenue in New York. Unfortunately, I remember all too well the nationalistic Irish Americans raising money for the IRA (not at Paddy Reilly’s itself, to be clear). In fact, that’s why in a reply to another post I mentioned that I wasn’t Irish American. I liked the music, liked the populist part of the message, but I’m not keen on romanticizing violence.

    Next that I really heard about it was when I was living in Quebec. It seems the only ethnic group that has ever intermarried with the Quebecois in large numbers was the Irish. Interestingly, the French Canadians have their own history of bad treatment at the hands of the English.

    I think the emphasis on intent is really the clincher when talking about genocide. However, murderous indifference has its own horror as well, and shouldn’t be downplayed just because it doesn’t fit the definition of genocide. I know that because of your interest in economics you want to emphasize the role of laissez-faire ideology, but I do think racism, or ethnic prejudice, played a role.

    By the way, I followed your link to your other post and the link to mises.org. I have to say that I regard followers of Mises in much the same light as I do UFO sightings. I read about half of it, but you’re quite right that it isn’t worth refuting. If anything, it doesn’t say anything about modern democratic governments intervening in the economy. It just says that Imperialism, Colonialism and feudalism result in unjust policies.

    Interesting posts. Between the two I learned quite a bit.

    1. The Irish-Americans did unfortunately fund the IRA and the extreme wing in particular. The Famine was certainly horrific but not genocide. Coogan’s book does a good job of describing the horror (though not genocide). Racism was absolutely a major influence, but I feel it is overplayed.

      Glad you like the other post too, Mises.org is a pretty ridiculous organisation. Its in its own world of absurdity.

      1. I am Irish American and I did not fund the IRA. To my knowledge, neither did any of my hundreds of Irish-American relatives scattered across the country who generally restrict their Irishness to sentimental storytelling over dinner about life in the “old country.” Let’s be careful about overgeneralizing when it comes to support for violent extremist groups. The actions of a few should not color our judgment of the many. The people who speak the loudest often do not speak for the majority.

        1. Of course not. All Irish-Americans aren’t supporters of the IRA just as all Irish people aren’t supporters of the IRA. But it is true that the IRA raised a lot of funding through NORAID

          1. Right. Some Irish-Americans donated a lot of money to the IRA, just as some Muslims donate a lot of money to Al Qaeda and some Indians donate a lot of money to Lashkar-E-Taiba. That doesn’t mean we should begin to claim that Irish Americans in general supported the IRA, or that Muslims support Al Qaeda or that Indians support Lashkar-E-Taiba. In fact, the opposite is probably closer to the truth.

            1. Al Qaeda is not a Muslim organisation it was set-up by the CIA in Afghanistan to fight the Russians. The IRA resurfaced to protect Catholics whom were seeking their Civil Rights, whom were brutally attacked while marching. The UDF and other loyalist groups were funded by and worked with the B Specials. There is no shame in giving to the IRA. Almost twice as many Catholics as Protestants were killed in the troubles. As for the Famine, Mr Nielsen claims that there is no sign of intent in the acts of the British, perhaps he could explain what form the famine took, there has been no severe drought recorded in Eire, so was it just a total refusal of pigs and cows and chicken etc to live? Did they all just die? The facts are not lost or difficult to find, the ships logs with lists of the tons of food which was exported from Eire still exist. take a look at Christopher Fogarty http://www.theirishholocaust.org Mr Nielsen is intent on proving the reality of the so-called holocaust against the Jews, while ignoring the sixty-five million Christians whom were slaughtered by Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia and indeed several million Bengali’s whom were deliberately starved by Churchill in order to give their food to British Troops, whom did not eventually need it. Further more ten million Germans were starved, raped and shot after the end of the war in Europe by the allies. One million or more in open air US concentration camps where they were denied even water to drink, which was carried out under the orders of Eisenhower whom was a Jew as was Churchill as was Stalin. It would appear that you can hardly avoid bumping into genocide s, wherever you look and all of them would appear to be deniable, apart from the one allegedly carried out by Hitler, whom certainly does not have the solid history of genocidal activities as do the Jews.

              1. You’re right. Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization–not a Muslim organization. That was pretty much my point. I’m generally opposed to terrorism–it’s bad for nearly much everyone. I’m also opposed to genocide. That seems to work out badly for everyone as well.

                1. 1. Available data suggests Al Qaueda is an organization engaged in global terrorism and it is made up of Muslims who believe in a particular hard core form of Islam.
                  2. I think one should categorically oppose terrorism in all forms and shapes. Too bad if it means naming and shaming people belonging to any specific religion or region. Truth must prevail. The pressure should also be on the good people to stop the bad one’s from giving the religion a bad name.
                  3. Natural disasters e.g. famine, cyclones, crop failures, lack of agricultural production or inventories can only be a one of the factors, but not the sole factor for triggering a famine. Famines are caused by men (or woman e.g. in the case of Britain where Queen should take the ultimate responsibility for the cruel British actions towards its colonies) and in that sense they should be considered as genocide.

                  I hope you people remember that a cyclone destroyed much of the rice crop in Bengal, Indian in 1942 and the following year over 1.5 million died. It was not a natural disaster, the real cause of this holocaust was human greed and apathy of British Empire towards its colonies.

                  Read more at Suite101: Causes of the Great Bengal Famine 1943 | Suite101 http://suite101.com/article/causes-of-the-great-bengal-famine-1943-a270016#ixzz2MwacWdHm
                  Follow us: @suite101 on Twitter | Suite101 on Facebook

                  1. Available data suggests Americans are an organization engaged in global terrorism made up of “Neocons” who collaborate in a particular nasty form of Zionism, while trying to remap the middle east.
                    Were Irish Americans involved in the ethnic cleansing of the native Americans? I bet there are a lot of Irish Americans killing people in the middle east and believing everything they are told by the warmongering neocons “Nothing changes” In the old John Wayne Movies we always used to see Victor Mclaglen fighting Indians and using a stage Irish accent, even though his father was a Protestant Priest from Cumberland, You just can’t believe anything they tell you anymore, but maybe it all comes down to what you want to believe?

              2. “There is no shame in giving to the IRA” – enochered
                Yes there is. Why would you fund the people who committed such atrocities like Kingsmills, Enniskillen, Le Mons, Omagh, Bloody Friday etc. Everyone who ever supported or defended those murders should be ashamed. There is a big difference between protecting Catholics and killing innocent civilians. By the way, a large proportion of the IRA’s victims were Catholics and two-thirds of all victims of the Troubles were killed by the IRA. They are the ones with the most blood on their hands.

                You are trying to be sarcastic when you say there was no drought, but you only come across as ignorant. There was the potato blight. Sure there were other crops and sources of food, which is why not everyone died. The website you linked only contains unsourced examples of single days, they do not show annual figures or mention the level of imports.

                Your paranoid delusions sees Jews and genocide everywhere except there it really happened. I linked you as an example of a conspiracy theory and you have lived up to expectation.

                1. You learn something new every day. About ignorance. Not that anyone’s religion should be a point of contention, but it appears that Ike, from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, had been a member of the River Brethren Church, then … “In later years … was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian church in a single ceremony on February 1, 1953 … in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. ” So among “mr.” enochered’s wild and weird assertions that Eisenhower, Stalin, Churchill were Jewish is… sarcastic? crazy? or, well, just plain ignorant. I’m amazed that I read that far, but unfortunately others will, and possibly believe it all.

                  I guess you can just write down anything you want; it doesn’t have to have an ounce of truth to it.

                2. Thank you. Your response is very kind–especially to someone who(m) hasn’t looked at both sides of this discussion and made a truly informed observation.

                3. Frankly… that’s what hundreds of years of oppression by a tyrannical, imperialistic crown will do…. I can’t justify murder, but at some point there are no other options than to take up arms against your oppressor. And like in the American revolution, guerrilla tactics are sometimes the only option against a wealthier and better gunned opponent.

                  1. If the MI5/6, infiltrated the IRA, how would you know when atrocities occur, unless you are a double agent Graham, or triple or whatever how would you know whether the agent created a act of terrorism to control public opinion? such as yours, or destroy the morale of the group?

                    1. Spend the day or whatever time you have to research. To say government agencies (CIA-MI5) didn’t have a part to play in the IRA terrorist attacks, or any terrorist attacks is niave to say the least. The British government along with the American and Israel governments are the most sadistic deceitful and propaganda pushing psychopaths the earth has know. Between false flags to agent provocateur cover ups and so forth. Please I’m not trying to make anybody believe me just trying to get people make up the own mind with the information that is available. Peace.

                    2. To restate or not, I mean, if the IRA, was infiltrated by British security forces, as it would certainly have been, this outcome of the British agents would instigate violence to discredit the IRA, I will not add more to what I say as this may become more confusing than enlightening, I think it is plain to understand the meaning of what I have written, as the interpretation of what I had wrote on the prior blog was not the meaning I wished to convey.

                4. According to CAIN, only 36% of those killed by the IRA were civilian. In comparison, 51% killed by the British security services were civilians, and 86% killed by loyalists were civilians. This, of course is not mentioning the billions of people throughout the world murdered by the British Empire you idolise over the years.

              3. On both sides of the Atlantic, church groups, academics and unions are leading fraudulent and often anti-Semitic embargo crusades demonizing what they call the Jewish “apartheid” State. Israel is a democratic state unlike apartheid South Africa or apartheid England against Ireland,. The 20% Arab minority enjoys all the political, commercial and spiritual rights and liberties of citizenship, including choosing members of government of their choice to the Parliament. Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have standing before Israel’s Supreme Court. In contrast, no Jew may own property in Jordan, no Christian or Jew can visit Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia. Yes you’re so right …. there were many Jews amongst the Bolshevik forces but never as many Christians ….so what is the gripe. Just like you want freedom from discrimination so did the down trodden Jews. As far as the Germans were concerned it seems to me that you’ve been locked up somewhere for far too long. They are a very methodic people, the Huns, and that is exactly what backfired in their faces…. They wrote down everything they did … and just to put you in the picture the Germans are responsible for the mass murder of more than 11000000 people …do the math … that means 5000000 were not Jews … go tell them that their loved ones who disappeared was a trumped up charge. It amuses me that there are still so many sadistic two faced ignorant potatoe munching apes still running around bare feet wearing furs. I had every intent; on standing up for that genocide thing … because I do not agree that it inevitably was ….but as far as I’m concerned you can go drown in your own verbal vomit. … And as far as you are concerned, Robert Nielsen , I think you are obliged ethically to cut off deceitful postings that have no contribution of intellectual argument!!!

                  1. Fogarty … understandably you lack in intellectual drive not having any need to investigate further than the end of your nose. Your pomposity exudes ignorance and verbal dribble characteristic of the trend of the spoon fed masses of today. You give no thought further than you have to, and that is pathetic seeing that information is at your fingertips on the world web. The Universe today is in turmoil and yet you insist on relating to fabricated ideas of anthropological farces re. Palestinians… That being tantamount to stating that the Protestant are the original inhabitants of Ireland …. The Catholics being occupiers of a land not theirs. And just for your information, after hundreds of years of back stabbing by Gentiles the last thing I would think of doing was to ally with Nielson .

                    1. So it’s right for the Palestinians to fight for freedom, but wrong when the Irish do it?

                1. I do not believe that I have ever read such a catalogue of crap as that which you have posted on this site. You are rude and ignorant and you are presenting the Jewish history of the world which was long ago discredited. Your argument no longer has any relevance. You have no place in Palestine, you are an uninvited scum who arrived with guns blazing and Irgun in charge of the murder, as you did in Russia and recently in Ukraine where you paid the Goy to do your dirty work. I personally believe that you and your filthy ilk are also responsible for what happened to the Irish. You are constantly displaying you deep seated hatred of the German people who are superior to you and your kind, you are now trying to destroy Russia where you conducted a genocide of 100,000,000 Christians out of your deep seated hatred of Russians, who like Hitler drove you out of Russia because of your meddling, just as every country in Europe has tried to rid themselves of you at one time or another.
                  You can also proudly boast, that despite your claims against Germany, you are the only people in Europe who had more people left alive after the war than were there before the war. JEWISH FIGURES. Now why don’t you just piss off. The owner of this site will not be happy when finds out that you have woken me up with your bullshit and bile.

                    1. Not at all Robert I know this character well.
                      It’s called replying in kind. I abuse everybody in equal measure. I have no favourites, however the only group whichever picks me up are Khazar, non-Semitic, murderers who are actually responsible for the war which they claim caused them so much grief, but which has filled their pockets with shekel.
                      You, as an atheist, are perfectly entitled to accept the Shoa as your form of religious belief and I in my turn am entitled to my own atheism without the bile with which I have been deluged on this site.

              4. Its easy to write bullshit and get people to believe it. I’m Irish and the british killed 1.5 million Irish. If they didn’t die by starvation, they died by the sword. So shut the fuck about who wrote a bullshit book.

              5. I am angry at the British too, and please stop acting like you care, when all you really want to do is deny the Holocaust, there have been genocides throughout history, and the Holocaust was one of the worst ones!

                1. I also believe it was genocide, but please stop denying other genocides! This genocide among others are being ignored, but that doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen!

              6. Completely agree with this poster.
                Of course it was genocide.
                This had nothing to do with potato blight and everything to do with depopulating the highly fertile land for agricultural production.
                I am Irish and I guarantee the average Irish person understands that the famine was systematic extermination as sure as night follows day.
                You try to intellectualise your article and hide the obvious… you cannot defend the indefensible.

            2. Hmm, interesting Ashana M. I didn’t know that about the Indian donations. With the parallels you raise, our attitudes need a re-visit.

              1. I am making a bit of an assumption there. Lashkar-e-Taiba is an terrorist group very active in India. It would be difficult to imagine it thriving without local Indian support–at least in contested Kashmir–but I don’t know any details. It does probably get more support from Pakistani nationals.

        2. We would not have a republic without the bold Fenian men and the IRA. Washington, Gandhi, Begin, Connolly, all terrorists.

          1. The problem here Sean I think is that people are confusing the IRA which were a long standing organisation involved in the Uprising, Tan Wars and the Civil War and the opening chapter of the period referred to as the Troubles … and a ”criminal terrorist” organisation called the Provisional IRA. The British Army were originally deployed to Ulster to protect the Catholic Community from the Loyalist terror gangs and were welcomed as such by the Catholic Community … then it all went tits up as we say (or said at the time) and the rest is a rather sad and largely unnecessary history which advanced the Nationalist cause not one iota … and like the Treaty of 1920 … the Good Friday Agreement has led to a compromise as was probably inevitable.

        3. It was not the English government that were responsible for the atrocity against the Irish peasant it was the British Government .Surely a learned individual like yourself could have at least get that one correct before you continued on with your nonsense.

      2. Please read Chris Fogarty on the ‘Irish Holocaust’. Your education has been too limited on the subject.

        1. hello again mlm I will attempt to reply to your comment. I have a jittery connection which constantly cuts out. The object of this site is to deny any genocide other that the one which is alleged to have happened to the Jews, for which there is absolutely no evidence. They demand irrefutable evidence for the Irish Genocide, which any Irishman will tell you has been going on since the days of Oliver Cromwell. The first slaves in the West Indies were Irishmen, The English have decimated the population of Ireland. .

          1. Absolutely no evidence except for the consensus of every proper historian. Also this site (which is run by just me, so there’s no “they) is not dedicated to genocide studies or conspiracy theories as you are so disappointed to find out. I’m am well aware of other genocides than the Holocaust so you are wrong to claim otherwise.

            As I am an Irishman I can tell you that hardly any Irish people believe the famine was genocide so you are wrong on that count too.

            1. I have 14,000 Irish and Diaspora who follow the history posted every day on my site. I am Irish and many Irish do support the British gov actions against the irish as a Holocaust/Genocide.

              1. To suggest that you could ask any Irishman (presumably just the men, not any women) and they would tell you that the Famine was genocide is completely wrong. Not even most Republicans would support that view. Its a tiny conspiracy theory not taken seriously. And I doubt 14,000 of your followers would disagree.

                1. It is apparent that you have not read my site. Are you being glib or sexist with your ‘presumably just men’ comment – Dont answer – Dont care. Your brilliance exists only in your own mind.

                  1. Well seeing as you haven’t provided a link, no I haven’t read your site. If you read the comments you would see I was responding to the ridiculous claims of enochered who claimed you could ask any “Irishman” and they would tell you the famine was genocide. I found it strange he only referred to men so you should take up your complaint with him.

                    1. https://www.facebook.com/No.Famine
                      Please join the site and learn the truth of our ancestors. The loss of one crop does not produce a famine. The removal of all food stuffs does produce a genocide. A tactic the British government has used to rid other countries of their population.

            2. No evidence! I thought while reading Cormac O’Grady work from a few years ago you’ll know it I’m sure. The evidence he lists could justifably have been used to draw a differant conclusion. A case of the duck dilemma. It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but lets call it a swan because everyone else does. But anyway I dont say it was a genocide, the jury’s still out, in my opinion. I dont agree with you either on the naivety of irish american. Bye

            3. While you claim to be Irish, you display all of the prejudices of the English. When I made remark about the there being no shame in helping the IRA you’re in like Flint, asking why support men who plant bombs kill to innocent people etc.More Catholics died than did Protestants,in ‘The Troubles’ why do you not ask who was funding the numerous Protestant terror gangs? Why are you always on the side of the oppressor? Where is your evidence that it was the IRA planting all of these bombs. Most of the Catholic whom were convicted, turned out to be innocent. You’re a strange fish you are forever asking for the kind of proof which you never provide for your own statements.

              1. Evidence? You have absolutely nothing supporting your outrageous claims yet you want everyone else to provide evidence? Ok how about the Secret History Of The IRA by Ed Moloney or the Troubles by Tim Pat Coogan, both of which (along with pretty much every other historian) show that two thirds of the casualties of the Troubles were killed by Republicans. They will also tell you that yes, the IRA did plant those bombs and the vast majority of those convicted were guilty, not innocent and you claim. There were only a handful of miscarriages out of the thousands of convictions.

                I find it offensive that you conflate being Irish with supporting murder gangs like the IRA. Being Irish does not mean you cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, and the vast majority of Irish people know that what the IRA did was wrong.

                Alright, strange fish, time to provide your evidence to support your claims.

                1. As to terrorism in Ireland see my http://www.terrorismireland.org. It lists ALL of the children murdered post-1968 by all sides. Child-murder for political purposes is the very essence of terrorism. Of the 173 murders, all but 20 were by British forces. But that doesn’t exculpate Irish republicans for their murder of those twenty innocents.

                    1. You do know, don’t you, that the British army led the various Loyalist murder gangs? One great Englishman, army Capt. Fred Holroyd refused to condone murder and paid the price for his integrity. He was accused of molesting his own children and drummed out of the army (after which he was released back to his loving wife and children).

                    2. We are into the same old game of exonerating the British of all blame because it’s not the British “people.” an excuse which does not work for the Germans for example, whom were bombed into oblivion, long before the excuse of the Holocaust had been discovered. The Irish and the IRA in particular are treated in the same fashion. It is permissible to blame them for any explosion in the night without fear, however to point the finger at the “British” is a waste of time. The Birmingham Six were locked up for sixteen years, to cover-up an SAS bombing, which is why no investigation was carried out after the Six were pardoned.

                  1. “You do know, don’t you, that the British army led the various Loyalist murder gangs?”
                    What is your source? Where is the evidence? Why do historians not agree with you, or are they part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth?

                    1. Ask ex-British army Capt. Fred Holroyd about British State terrorism. He lives in England, a man of astounding integrity. He led a group of Loyalists who assassinated Irish men, women and children, but when he refused to condone their murders. he was charged with molesting his own children, was incarcerated, and drummed out of the military. Once out he was released to his loving wife and children; but was made destitute like John Stalker. Stalker was the third-ranked constable in Britain when he was sent to Ireland to investigate Britain’s assassination policy in Occupied Ireland. He shocked everyone by conducting a bona fide investigation; but the night before he was scheduled to deliver his findings he, himself, was arrested. HIs Belfast office was burned to the ground; but duplicates of his work were elsewhere. Back at home he managed to pay his house mortgage by donations from news reporters stationed on his lawn for weeks at that time. Regarding what he investigated, he said; “I[‘m a hard-nosed cop, but I draw the line at murder.”
                      If you need them I can get you the names and ranks of other British soldiers who publicly opposed Britain’s policy of assassination of noncombatants. Also, see my http://www.terrorismireland.org.

                    2. Unlike “historians” I access primary sources. You’d better ask “historians” why they choose to cover up for those who can have them fired. The otherwise magnificently dedicated teacher, Marist Brother Enda, who taught for 50 years in Castlerea, Co. Roscommon, asked how he could say that my Mass Graves of Ireland: 1845-1850 pamphlet (now irishholocaust.org) is accurate when it contradicts everything he taught about the famine, he replied, tragically for himself, Ireland, and truth itself; “I had no choice. I had to teach the curriculum as provided to me by the government.”
                      I walked past two Holocaust mass graves going to and from school; but had I mentioned them in any exam on “famine” history I’d have gotten a failing grade. Professors of Irish history are specifically those who regurgitated back onto examination papers whatever lies they were told.
                      On the 1997 “famine” walk from Doolough to Louisburgh, the eminent human rights advocate, John Pilger was asked; “When are you going to write the book we are all waiting for?” he replied; “It’s too soon. The Anglo-American publishing establishment will still kill any book that tells the truth about the starvation of Ireland.”

                    3. Robert Neilsen you are such a fool. You actually believe the history recorded in Westminster. You are just a pathetic Borderer.
                      And for those Americans who are not aware of the term borderer; these were the Lowland Scots and Northern English who arrived with the Gothic invasions and killed and stole as a way of life. They were shipped to Ireland by James I/VI (Mary Queen of Scots’ son James Sixth of Scotland and First of England) in order to get rid of them. And the real Irish are still having to put up with them. I find their ignorance astounding.

                    4. Well Robert 100 people were blown up and many more injured in one day the Dublin/Monaghan Bombings and the British Government refused to release files in connection with these events. What were they covering up?

            4. Genocide is an “umbrella term” where in, short or long term actions, a group destroys another. It is quite clear that the independence of the Irish people has been ignored for centuries by the world and specifically the conquerors. If we accept the fact that there was no international intervention, especially at that time, we see the perfect situation for sowing seeds of genocide. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) or Mau Tse Tung did not put in motion the killing machines at their disposal immediately, but did so step by methodic deadly step. The first faze was always gaining national consensus and once it became national policy the way to destruction and annihilation was now open. If we understand this tactic one can accept the fact that “government instigated indifference” towards the plight of a group drowning in a predicament can and eventually lead to tragedy. So whether we walk in to a populated area and physically wipe out the inhabitants either by death or transfer to another area , or turn our backs and they decide it better to disappear , all points to GENOCIDE . When we understand that poverty begets deficiency and that when a staple diet of a people is infested the affect is devastating. Scored on the clammy walls of human history we find endless recordings of starvation deprivation and famine forcing entire populations to move to better pastures. Why shouldn’t government policy be blamed too?

            5. Well, if you are an Irishman you are of Germani stock; those genocidal maniacs called the Goths. You were planted because you had nothing in the lowlands and you stole from the Irish. Now you are acting so ‘knowingly’ about the history of Ireland, according to Westminster . . . what a laugh.

          2. It is an absolute disgrace that you use the irish famine genocide/debate, which is in itself a legitimate debate, to promote or attempt to lend credibility to holocost denial. (a genocide for which there is sadly all to much evidence) Abolsutely vile. You should also note that a number of Irish Catholics were among the most notorious of slave owning landowners in the West Indias. I write this as a long time republican activist.

            1. So it’s a disgrace is it. Tell me why have you not called it a disgrace that there are folk on here questioning the Irish Holocaust The opening statement of the author of this post; presented his view that it did not happen in the way that Pat Coogan suggested. He went on to refer to those whom presented the English as some sort of benefactors of the Irish attempting to’ improve them’ This is condescension of the highest degree and not a word of objection from the likes of you. But mention the Jews and the world falls in. Well tell me why are you so convinced about that one? Why do you thik it is that people are gaoled for talking about that one in the way the author of this site talks about the Irish Holocaust? More people died in the Irish Holocaust despite the fact that this author tries to use the lowest claims, than did in any similar thing which may have happened to the Jews, for which the highest claims are always used. Should you choose to reply to this, I can present you with some very interesting links, to numerous researchers who can cast doubt on everything which you think you know but which you would, as a supporter of the opposite, deny.

              1. Because the Holocaust occurred and is almost universally recognised, whereas there is almost no evidence or support for the alleged Irish genocide. One is fact and the other is conspiracy theory.

                1. Got your toe a bit across the line there Robert…

                  According to the definition of genocide presented earlier, of the alleged coiner of the word, I can see where many instances fit. The English and the Irish; the (ex-English) Americans and the indigenous peoples of North America; the Celts and Picts; the Nazi’s; those not Roma and the Roma; those not Kurds and the Kurds; the people of the Torah and those whom their God wanted to use as examples of bad behavior… all examples of one cultural entity looking to completely eliminate another, now called genocide. It isn’t just intent, it’s result.

                  To me (and Thanks to all, for this discussion has broadened my understanding) it’s obvious that the Irish question started as wars always do, for land and resources; that the victors possessed racial and ethnic hate towards the vanquished; that the victors used means to not only dispossess the vanquished of their land, but to extinguish their lives and cultural identity as well. The laws on this are well documented, such as the one banning the language. (and It is not at all hard for me to imagine someone getting shot for breaking a racial law imposed by a military police force that hates those they are policing… I live in the South of the US.)

                  One asked “Why did they stop” if it was genocide. One answer is that they succeeded in taking whatever they wanted and had decimated the population enough to remove the threat…it was simply no longer worth the effort; My answer is “they failed.” They came after the island and ultimately won only 6 counties. After generations, the children of both the victors and the vanquished become the same, and soon wonder why they keep killing their friends and families for a centuries old insult that seems not to apply anymore except to a few who won’t let go.

                  Not letting go can be a terrible thing. Almost as bad as denying one groups’ misfortune at being targeted for elimination.

                  1. A difference must be made between war and genocide. In all wars, there is great hatred and civilian deaths, even massacres. That war crimes occurred in Irish history is not in doubt. However, what has to be determined is whether this constituted genocide. According the UN declaration on genocide the crucial element is intent to destroy. So did the British intend to eliminate the Irish and their culture?

                    The problem is that we must take account the relaxation of British rule and repeal of many repressive laws. Likewise people were free to practice the Gaelic culture in 19 century Ireland. Even after the Famine Ireland was an overwhelmingly Catholic and Gaelic country. The might of the British empire could have crushed Ireland far more effectively had it intended to eliminate us. To say they only got the 6 counties makes them sound like attempted thieves who didn’t get the whole swag. In 1921 Britain had one of the most powerful armies in the world. If it could defeat Germany, it could defeat Ireland. The only thing lacking was the will to do so.

                    1. The will that was lacking was perhaps a will that was not prepared to risk both american approbation and domestic resistence ( 2500000 demonstrators at a pro -ireland rally in Hyde park for instance) .Wars are not only matters of military capability. I’m not sure on the number attending but I’ll risk it.

                    2. A difference between war and genocide, yes. The war ends when one side is unable or unwilling to continue. The killing stops when the war ends. It doesn’t when there’s a grander agenda like the extinction of the indigenous peoples.

                      I don’t think one can remove the famine from the bigger picture of conquest and ethnic disrespect. The fact that there were repressive laws to be repealed in the first place says it all. As for intent, the judge ruled in Guatemala that standing by knowingly and doing nothing constituted guilt, so General Montt was convicted of… genocide against the natives.

                      So to this jury I present the fact that there was once an island of conquered people; their Conquerers forbade their lanquage and culture and religion in an attempt to transform the conquered people; after several hundred years a famine occurred and many of the conquered starved to death while the victors living there did not; the victors knew full well of the famine and starvation and abetted it’s effects by exporting food from the island; millions of the conquered died. The Victors did not cause the famine, but enhanced it’s deadly effects…perhaps with malice aforethought, perhaps just out of disrespect for the humanity of the conquered. It matters not, as both are unacceptable.

                      As for beating the Germans in the big one, the way I learned it was you were in a big stalemate until help arrived… 😉

                      That being said, it’s much easier to fight a conventional war on someone else’s turf than it is to fight against guerrillas in their own neighborhoods. How can a ragtag non- army beat the largest force in the world? Ask the Viet-Cong or the Mujahadeen. They both did it.

                      From one side, you have to understand that the Troubles are a continuation of the Conquest, finished or not. Some who have been branded criminals were in fact guerrilla’s fighting for what they perceived to be their liberty. Yes, civilians were targeted, as they are in all wars, guerrilla variety or not. War is hell. Yes, it should have been over long ago, but it wasn’t. It is important to realize that the actions of the Victors in the above example created the on-going resentment and failure of the culture to be assimilated.War is hell, and the wages of sin against humanity is prolonged death and suffering back at ya, a lesson we still haven’t learned as a species.

                      Yes, we need to recognize the root causes to stop it all from happening again, because War really is hell.

                    3. Time to retire Nielsen, already indoctrinated and awarded with a handshake for your educational diploma trained groomed by the Establishment on how it all is, “The British Won WW1, tut tut, go back and re-educate yourself, you increasingly write like a right wing snob, full of your own assumptions and prejudices, the British Establishment wants to hear from you, attempting to be a diplomat at Whitehall? maybe?

                    4. Let’s clear up one fact here, the British were hiding in their subways until the United States joined World War 2 and beat the Germans.

                  2. “their Conquerers forbade their lanquage and culture and religion in an attempt to transform the conquered people;”
                    Technically no. The Irish language was discouraged but never outlawed. It was legal for the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th century to operate. Likewise being Catholic was never outlawed though it was heavily discouraged. However there were not forced conversions on the scale of other countries were the religion of the victor was imposed on the conquered.

                    Interesting comparison with Guatemala where the victims were physically murdered. Neglect or under provision of necessary services was not considered genocide even though it did cause people to die.

                    “by exporting food from the island”
                    This is the most controversial point. Did exports exceed imports? The answer is that we do not know for the records were not kept. Food was certainly exported but it was also imported. It is unclear which outweighs which.

                    Thus I propose that the jury acquits on the charge of genocide.

                    1. From Wikipedia:
                      In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.[81] The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.[82]

                    2. As a quick reply to “Hearn” – on the matter of Christine Kinealy. This is what Robert Nielsen was talking about as her figures have been disputed:

                      From the available materials food imports was must larger than exports, but overall the data is far from perfect. If Kinealy’s figures however are accepted, it’s clear that imports still outweighed exports. However, it wouldn’t be as much of a difference as claimed by Cormac Ó Gráda or James S Donnelly – who rely on Austin Bourke’s old calculations.

                2. This is not true. There is no conclusive proof either way. And if the Jewish holocaust had been ignored by scholars for the best part of 150 years there would be little evidence for it either. Nor are there sufficient records existing to establish with any accuracy food imports/exports etc for the period. And please don’t tell me it has been properly researched when even the location of most of the mass burial sites are unknown. Let me remind you of Trevelyan’s opinion of famine ”a mechanism to reduce surplus population”

                3. That is why 1845-1850 Ireland is called The “Perfect” Holocaust, precisely BECAUSE it has been so carefully covered-up. To learn which British regiment starved which Irish district see my http://www.irishholocaust.org and click on its map to enlarge it. Blame the Anti-Britishness of its data on those nasty curators in Britain’s National Archives in Kew, Surrey for so carefully maintaining the original, hand-written “Disposition of the Army” records of those years.

                  1. So what kept you? I’ve been fighting yours and Coogans corner against an avalanche of rubbish from all sides. When you finally get here you start off by suggesting that there is evidence of the Jewish business when in fact there is not a shred of evidence to support it. Yet that one cannot be questioned in any way on this site. Some of the remarks made will make your toes curl up .

                    1. Perhaps I’m late due to not knowing about this blog war. Is this a bona fide blog? Why are my comments of last night removed? They ended all of this “famine” and “British negligence” gabble by providing some badly needed primary-sourced data that proved deliberate genocide. Is that why my comments have been removed?

                    2. My part in this came about because on another post by the same author, I made a comment which he chose to interpret as anti-semitic and therefore I was a Holocausr Denier. I responded by saying that I was no such thing as for example I believed in the Irish Holocaust.He denied the truth of the Irish Holocaust, claiming that there was no intent involved. I responde”d by suggesting that it was he who was in fact a Hoilocaust Denier. This was some time ago, since when he has come across Coogan’s book, which he is using to demonstrate that there is no validity to the claims which Coogan made. I sent him a link to your site, to which he replied that you did not produce enough evidence to support your claims. I then

                    3. INHO Coogan did not make the case for genocide. He cites letters written by Trevelyan and other controllers of events, in which their murderous hatred is blatant. But Coogan fails by omitting the at-gunpoint food removal. His claim of genocide based only upon those letters is like trying to prove Shoah by citing Mein Kampf alone.

                    4. The glaring difference between the two accounts is neither here nor there, the idea that an untold number of people in Ireland died of starvation, while the British admitted to taking the food out of the country to England, is an abomination in itself. Where do the folk whom are commenting on this subject, which they have probably never considered in their lives, think all of those starving and dying people were? There was a huge hole in the population of Ireland when the “potatoes” finally came back, Heaven forbid that there is any excuse for the British, who were in fact putting dying people on to boats and sending them off to Canada and other places, because it was cheaper than feeding them. So let’s just call it cold-blooded murder.. I have very strong feelings about the Shoa, I want it to be true, because if it is not, what has been done to the German people is monstrous, just as what is being done to Muslims right now, they have all been demonised in one way or another without complaint from any quarter of the mainstream, but criticism of Khazar Jews is simply not allowed. I detest this anxious search for excuses for the real villains at the expense of the real victims, I firmly believe that the threat of Islamic Terrorism is a lie, and I will present my objections in the same manner as I object to the British presenting the Irish as Golliwogs. By the way my comments often cut off in mid sentence, the computer seems to decide I have said enough and publishes.

                    5. Given the fact of the at-gunpoint removal of all other foods, the potato blight becomes moot. It is the food removal that proves genocide; not, as Coogan contends, the hatred expressed in letters by Trevelyan et al. You have fought the good fight but the only proof of genocide is the army-perpetrated Food Removal resulting in millions dying from starvation and related diseases. Case closed. Once Kinealy et al could no longer label as “myth” the export of thousands of shiploads of Irish crops while the people starved, she (and the other cover-up artists) fabricated a fall-back lie; that food did leave Ireland while the people starved, but it was “the rich Irish starving the poor Irish.” Proof that the genocidal landlords were not Irish but English is a key part of my book now being readied for the printer (and to be sold at cost of printing plus postage to encourage readers to install memorials over the many hundreds of Holocaust mass graves in Ireland).

                  2. “It is the food removal that proves genocide”
                    But you have failed to prove the extent of this. Food was exported, but food was also imported. Which outweighed which? Would there have been no famine had exports been banned? Finally, the food was not forcibly stolen by the army but rather the military protected merchants who wished to sell abroad. The army did not force the sale, but merely facilitated it.

                    1. The British army wasn’t in Ireland to enforce food importation. Why live in such ignorance? For starters read an honest Englishman’s observations in his “Cobbett in Ireland; a Warning to England.” At the time William Cobbett was a member of parliament and also a farmer in Oldham for which he paid his farm laborer and paid rent to his landlord. He pointed out the recipients of Ireland’s food; the Loyalists who had fled the US to New Brunswick, Canada where he had been a soldier, the British army everywhere, the English slaveholders of the Caribbean, and much of western England. Britain’s newspapers of record are available. They report the names and cargoes of ships departing and landing at English and Irish ports during 1845-1850. I’d have recorded one carrying food to Ireland but never found one among the thousands departing Ireland and landing in England and Scotland. Such might exist; I didn’t check the entire record. .
                      Britain’s claim on Ireland’s production at the time was based upon the notion that essentially all of Ireland was owned by English landlords, and everything grown on that land, though cultivated and harvested by the Irish, was English property, thus removable at British army gunpoint. The British government bought out those landlords and repatriated them to England, nearly all between 1900 and 1920. Ireland was redistributed to its cultivators in typically 28-acre holdings; grantees were forced to amortize what had been paid to the landlords. My father and all of his Co. Roscommon neighbors were still paying that “rent” into the 1970s. Only then did Ireland’s centuries of dire poverty end.

                4. When Cromwell came to Ireland there was circa 1.7 million people there. When he was finished murdering , starving and transporting them there was, including new Planters, 800,000 left

              2. Re holocaust denial: You say ”But mention the Jews (ie be a holocaust denier, my brackets) and the world falls in. ” Well no it doesnt actually. Or not anyway hard enough on your head.

            2. Name a single Irish Catholic slave-owner in the West Indies. I lived there for a few years. Though Montserrat has the most Irish place-names of any island, the Irish shipped to the West Indies did not survive excepting a small enclave of alienated descendants of Irish slaves outside of Bridgetown, Barbadoes.

          3. If there was a genocide in Ireland it was perpetrated by Cromwell’s campaign of the late 1640s/early 1650s. At the start of this episode there was 1.7 million people in Ireland and this was reduced to about .9 million including new settlers by the end of this little tiff

          4. Sigh, I don’t deny that the British did deliberately commit genocide, but the Holocaust actually happened! There is more than enough proof, for example the pictures, the camps, and the survivors, I met survivors! Are they liars?! And what about the camps, did they ONLY build them to keep up with the masquerade, if they did, then how were there graves?!

            1. There was a potato blight in Ireland, England. The food was exported from Ireland to feed the Germans and the English and the poor Irish Gaels were left to starve. There are countless reports of mounted English soldiers, rifles drawn, guarding the food that was being exported from Ireland. One English journalist wrote of the tremendous amount of animals being exported. He wrote of the care and feeding the animals received. He also noted the terrible condition of the men who cared for these animals and he was horrified to find out that those same men dared not eat any of the animal feed. I could go on with facts of the startling evidence of the genocide of ‘The Great Starvation’
              but I will not because the problem goes deeper than this.
              One wonders why the Irish did not do more for their own people, but we are confronted with the fact that half of the Irish people were, and are, descendants of the various planters, and were only too glad to be rid of these ‘real’ Irish who really owned the land.
              For instance: When Cromwell invaded Ireland he received his funding from a group of business men, many of whom were Jewish. they asked that their reimbursement should be in the land of Ireland, not money. And land they took, a lot. But the worst part was that many also took the names of the previous owners of that land, as subterfuge. Of course many of the new owners remained in England and simply issued orders for the collection of rent. They even charged twice the amount as the rent of the land in England.
              Irish people know this as do some people in England, but few are willing to speak of it because of ‘The Holocaust’. The main media outlets make sure of this.
              The Jewish Holocaust came about because of WWI and the land grab in the Middle East as per The Balfour Declaration. Balfour was a Scottish lord, whose Jewish secretary drew up the agreement. But many of the weak-minded British lords sold out to the Jewish bankers, many of whom took their money out of Germany and gave it to the British Union. Astor (an American) and Rothschild being two of the largest contributors. WWI was a holocaust of European men, but who cared? As long as a few were able to secure Palestine and secure the oil of the Middle East.
              I have noted a great deal of animosity of the Jews towards the Irish, simply because they dare to speak up for the Palestinians. However there is never a mention of the role the Jews played in the destruction of the Irish people.
              I would like to think that the Irish Americans could put a TV network together to express the truth of their own history, rather than that of Hollywood.

              1. Above post should read: There was a potato blight in Ireland, England and Germany. The food was exported from Ireland to feed the Germans and the English, but the poor Irish Gaels were left to starve.

            2. Your ability to form opinion of fact based on pictures is baseless. Did the pictures show people being gassed? No. The camps did exist but not to kill anyone. There is proof of camps where they worked, ate, slept, read, heard music, etc. As far as the survivors, they can only be survivors of having been Jewish. Only after the war started and Germany was being bombed and the roads and train tracks destroyed was the camp stifled by food, medicines and supplies no longer being able to ship into the camps did any starvation occur. Did you know that the plan was to send the Jews to another point on the earth – to REMOVE them from the German sphere of influence forever? Common sense tells us that no nation would round up a people first, supply them with shelter, clothing and food, make them work in order to kill them. They would have killed them long being put into a camp. No mass graves have ever been found. People died of typhus and that is a fact. Also persons who get typhus become delirious as a common ailment thus the bizarre stories that emanated from the camps. Thus, no they aren’t liars but they fully believe in stories or perceptions that NEVER happened.

              1. Indeed, you are correct and most people are ignorant of that fact of delusion with Typhus. With Jews, being a jittery group, once a rumor was let loose like lampshades made with Jewish skin, it traveled like wildfire with no fact behind any of the rumors.

      3. So were the men and women back in 1916 were they wrong, I bet your a loyalist well you have to be with a name like that.Please reply and tell us because I know your a loyalist . you condemn the IRA but you never condemn the british for what they done in Ireland.But to a loyalist like yourself you dont give two f..ks what your masters done to Ireland.

        1. What makes you think I think the men of 1916 were wrong? Your comment is in reply to a comment of mine pointing out the well known fact that the IRA received funding from America. I have no idea how that makes me a loyalist or how my (Danish) makes me one either.

          Your comment is a jumble of ill-thought out ideas and quickly degenerates into random insults. What are you talking about?

          1. Robert Nielsen: Speaking of random insults, I have noted yours. But I was gratified to see that I was right on the mark when I spoke of your being of Goth ancestry. I am just glad that one of my ancestors taught them a needed lesson. But where did the Robert come from? The Scots stole that name you know.

            1. What are you talking about? I am not of Goth ancestry nor do I see how my heritage is relevant. I’m Irish and don’t care where you’re from or why you keep mentioning the Scots in your comments.

              1. To Nielsen: Of course you do not know. I can tell by your writing. Your name is Nielsen and you said you were Danish. Just who do you think the Danes and Saxons were? They were the Germani Goths, those illiterate barbarians.

                1. Why does it matter? The Goths lived a thousand years, what impact do they have today? Should I look up your genealogy so I can insult your ancestors? They were probably illiterate too.

      4. In one breath you assert that the English intentions are not known, and in the next three breaths you assert that it was not genocide. It seems that you are attempting a a form of wish fulfillment. Shame on you for being so assertive about something that you can not possibly know, when it concerns the deaths of over a million humans

          1. Donwreford, you are found of using words you do not understand in an attempt to make yourself sound smarter than you really are. I suggest you find out what adverse really means so that you can use properly next time. I also suggest you learn how to spell my name and to make it easy for you, I wrote in giant letters on the top of the page. Finally, I have let you post as many incoherent garbled comments as you want on this post so to claim I don’t allow other comments is daft.

        1. I’m sorry but I have no idea what you are talking about. Nowhere in my comment do I claim the intentions of the English are unknown nor do I say it was not genocide in that comment. You must be seeing things.

      5. The great hunger was genocide, the undisputed fact that the English parliament passed laws , curfews affecting the dispossessed / evicted , and condemning them to hard labour, incarceration and forced transportation to foreign lands fits the criterion for genocide.

        The failure of the potato crop only affected irish people, they starved because all other foodstuffs were taken away from them under the guns of the English army , this food was exported to England, it’s not disputed that Ireland throughout its history fed England, then the starving irish with no crops to pay their rent were evicted and falling under the English laws requiring them to be housed ,passed at the time of the potato crop failure, and the mass evictions, make them equivalent to the Nuremberg laws in that they only affected irish people, fell under state control for being homeless and could be jailed where they died, put in workhouses where they died and put on work schemes on soup scheme starvation diets where they were slowly worked to death.
        These laws also had a tax which ensured eviction and helped the death cycle.
        Forced deportation, it’s also called emigration now but it was carried out on coffin ships where the death rate was very high.
        The irish had to pay very often to get on a coffin ship and very often they were put on them against their will.
        This is what actually happened to real people and if you consider case by case you would see it Is genocide.
        When you talk about deaths by starvation in a militarily occupied country that was forcibly exporting food and enacting laws against a people , taxing them in a time of desperation, imposing curfews, automatically imposing sentences of hard labour and deportation giving them a diet below the subsistence level and expecting them to work for it.
        It was genocide.

      6. Mr. Nielsen, I am confused as to why you have reached such a conclusion. The famine was merely the largest of a series of genocidal acts committed by the English. Having lived in Ireland I can assure you that at the time of the famine, arable land was available, foodstuffs were available and were exported. This was partly due to the fact that the potato famine also affected England and Scotland. Mention of relief aid is somewhat of a joke, since was largely distributed by Quakers and not part of any significant English governmental effort. Whether you want to call the loss of at least 1 million people via starvation an act of omission or an act of commission, it was nonetheless another in the series of English acts to rid the country of its Catholic inhabitants. Whitewashing of history is a propagation of ignorance and a request for clemency for those that do not deserve it. Shameful.

      7. The big school yard bully keeps dodging bullets. What they tried to do to the Irish was not much different than what the nazis tried to do to the Jews. I hope the muslims destroy that country cause that’s exactly what karma is about.

    2. I think the role of the indifferent English was not racist or ethnic but was centred upon the belief that the poor of any Nation ( including England) are beneath consideration. The fact that many landords were absentee and had no real idea of what was going on didn’t help.but there was no real animosity towards the Irish themselves.

        1. I would like to butt in please: Yes, to not provide support, and to blithely stand by as the people dwelling on the land died, was a capitalist crime of those violent gangsters calling themselves aristocrats and “land-owners”.

          Remember that the people of the island of Great Britain also suffered, under Feudalism, the Industrial Revolution, and Domestic Service, like all people under the heel of the upper class. 1945 saw us free at last. But freedom has to be defended.

          How do the people now fight against the resurgent vileness of unregulated capitalism? Who will now defeat the evil financial service industry crooks? They cannot be dismissed as just toffs following in historical footsteps. They are genetic types of the greedy & callous type, from ALL levels.

          They have to be controlled by laws. Forget about guarding the guardians; who will be the first lot of guardians to start with? When Thatcher and gang swept away Regulation, and the Blair/Brown gang trod the same vile path, benign and creative capitalism was lost…

          I am glad to be old. Good luck kids!

        2. So what …they killed them by neglect like you say. Killing this way to you is not an issue but being an IRA member fighting back against the occupation of your country is an atrocity.
          The USA was formed by the need to disengage from Anglo parasites.

          1. Neglect is not murder. If it was the whole Western world would be accomplices for neglecting the famines in Africa.

            The IRA murdered innocent people. They planted bombs in crowded streets and pubs. That was not fighting an occupation. It was murder. It was a horrendous atrocity that is indefensible.

              1. Don’t waste your breath mlm, I introduced them to Chris Hogarty a long time ago. This site is not interested in truth. In a recent response he

            1. I’m talking about what Michael Collins et al did to get the English out and form the Irish Republic. The English government had the Irish in a position where they were subject to laws that were MEANT to kill them in the famine. Laws like this are the ONLY way to cause widespead death like they did. In Germany the Nazis were killing the Jews by way of law and government policy. Denying people enough food to survive and saying it’s because of laissez faire (sp?) economics is just stupid as an excuse for millions of people dying. They had the population subdued with force of arms while they allowed them to starve in their own country.

              1. “they were subject to laws that were MEANT to kill them in the famine.”
                Wrong. There were no laws passed that denied Irish people food or confiscated it from them. Any comparison with the Nazis is completely wrong. There were no laws comparable to the Nuremberg Laws and there were no gas chambers.

                1. The at-gunpoint removal of Ireland’s abundant food crops took more than half of Britain’s then-empire army to execute; more troops than had conquered the Indian sub-continent earlier. Why prattle your vicious ignorance when you can do as I – visit Britain’s National Archives in Kew, Surrey and have a look at The Deployment of the Army records for 1845 through 1850. To learn the volumes of Irish food landing daily in English ports read, among others, The (London) Times of those years.

                  1. Actually as I don’t live in England I can’t visit Surrey nor do I have time to delve through historical records. The fact you don’t specify your sources makes me inclined to think they don’t say what you claim they do.

                    1. Nor do I live in England, but I’ve visited Britain’s Public Record Office (now National Archives) many times. Thus I avoid the lies of BritIrish academia and, instead, rely upon primary source material.

                      I already informed you of the source of the “smoking gun” evidence of British genocide; but did err in its name; which is the original, hand-written The Disposition of the Army records (1845 through 1850).

                      LIke you, I had no idea that it was anything but a famine due to potato blight, until researching for my grandfather’s bio (Kieran Fogarty 1839-1924). There I learned that the British army regiment he joined in Abbeyleix in 1857 had starved south Co. Galway when he was a child. That info caused me to dig a little deeper and, upon completion of my grandfather’s bio I made the map on my which shows which regiment starved which Irish district.

                      Inadvertently or not, you have been steadily disinforming people and covering-up one of history’s greatest crimes. It was Lord Clarendon himself who wrote at the time; “But for the onerous duty of escorting of provisions (barreled meat, but often applied to any food-stuff) the army in Ireland would have little to do.”

                      BTW: The first enforcers of the food removal were the constabulary. Upon meeting too much resistance the county militia were summoned, and only when both met resistance was the nearest British army regiment or detachment summoned. They always prevailed.

                      You probably know that the British gov’t bought out Ireland’s landlords and repatriated them to England, nearly all between 1900 and 1920.


                      What an incredible gaslighting argument.

                      In the first sentence, you admit that there are historical records you don’t have time to delve through. In the second sentence, you then proceed to accuse Chris Fogarty of not specifying his sources, even though in the first sentence you admit the existence of historical records.

                      I scroll up, and I read Chris Fogarty writing,

                      So Chris Fogarty absolutely did cite his sources. You basically admit it in the first sentence when you mention the “historical records” that you “don’t have time to delve through”. Then you turn right around and accuse him of not citing his sources, the very next sentence after you effectively admitted that he did!

                      There is a word for people who tell such obvious, blatant lies: GASLIGHTER.

                      You are a raging, gaslighting genocide denier.

                      Since the reason you give for being inclined to think the sources don’t say what Chris Fogarty says they do is an obvious lie, we must look at the first sentence for a more likely reason, where you admit that “nor do I have time to delve through historical records”. So in other words, by your own admission, you don’t have time to do your own research, but do have sufficient disrespect for truth and honesty to go around gaslighting people who actually did do that research.

                      If you truly don’t have time to delve through historical records, and are not inclined to take people who do have that time at their word, then the only type of comment you would be making about the Irish genocide, IF you actually cared about truth and honesty, is, “I am not qualified to comment about whether the mass death event occurring from Ireland from 1845 to 1850 was genocide or not.” Admitting that you aren’t qualified to comment about something you, by your own admission, don’t have time to research properly, especially when you aren’t inclined to take people who actually did do the research at their word, would be perfectly honest. But instead of honesty you choose lies so blatantly obvious, they rise to the level of gaslighting.

                      Of course, admitting you aren’t qualified to comment about whether the mass death event in question was genocide or not, would not be a necessary way to show that you repent of your gaslighting ways (assuming you ever have the goal of repenting your gaslighting ways, which I suppose is a dubious assumption) if you’d been silent on the topic to begin with.

                      Luther Standing Bear spoke wisely when he said, “Silence is the mother of truth, for the silent man is ever to be trusted, while the man ever ready with speech was never taken seriously.”

                      And regarding Lakota conversational customs, Luther Standing Bear said, “Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, “thought comes before speech.”

                    3. I was quite surprised to receive notification of your comment in my mailbox. Years ago along with Chris Fogarty, with who I was in contact quite recently, he is still well and still carrying the flag of justice for those forgotten Irish. But don’t waste your time with this character, every single one of his claims were blown out of the water years ago.

                    4. To: enochered

                      I am glad to hear that Chris Fogarty is still fighting the good fight.

                      It is truly astonishing to read Robert Nielsen admit to not having time to do proper research, but still feeling entitled to claim to know what the documents say better than those who actually read them.

                      Decolonize Ireland!

                    5. The tragedy of Ireland goes all the way back to the reign of the first Elizabeth and John Dee and continued apace when the “Bankers” man Cromwell was sent over the water to continue the suppression of the Irish an aim which was accelerated when the all conquering “Fake British” Empire had need of overseas slaves including the “Navvies” and labourers to construct the Railroads in England. Tales tellers, like this author, which exclude all mention of these are pure nonsense

                    6. To: enochered

                      That is very interesting and tragic.

                      I remember also reading about how the railroads in the Congo were built with slave labor. A historian named Jules Marchal apparently documented that extensively. And in the United States, much of the coal for building railroads was mined using a post-Civil War system of slavery known as “convict leasing”, in which people, usually black people, were arrested for ridiculous so-called “crimes”, such as “using abusive language in the presence of a white woman”, “selling cotton after sunset”, “changing employers without permission”, and even “not given” were sentenced to work in a variety of forms of forced labor, including in coal mines. You can read more about that in “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon

                      To hear that the Irish were also enslaved for building railroads really makes me wonder, on a global level, how frequently railroads have either been built with slave labor and/or made with slave-produced materials. Do you happen to have something I can read to learn more about the enslavement of Irish on railroads, and cite in discussions with others?

                    7. The simple fact of the matter is, there were more White Irish slaves in America than there were Black ones. The Irish were referred to as Indentured Servants. All Slaves whether Black or White all had the possibility of buying their freedom. All of this is well known. Even in the West Indies the Irish and Scottish slaves were in the majority which is why all the local landmarks have Irish or Scottish names. All this talk of slavery is concentrated on those poor ol’ Joes when in fact there were millions and millions of long forgotten Whites slaves, like the “Slavs” from Eastern Europe. TheBlacks are being used to suit the latest aims of the “Slave Masters” which is why all the Black “leaders” are self-seeking Millionaires and traitors of their Black brothers.

                    8. To: enochered

                      According to the latest estimate I’ve heard of, between 12 million and 12.8 million black people were shipped across the Atlantic into slavery. And those are just the ones who survived the journey: an even greater number were shipped out of Africa. Most of those went to the sugar regions, not to the United States, where comparatively little sugar was grown, because in the sugar regions, enslaved people died so fast that the systems of slavery in those places could only be sustained by continued importation of more enslaved people. 12 million would be a hard number to top, and it doesn’t include all the black people born into slavery in the Americas, only those kidnapped from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic.

                      Even if it could be proven that the number of Irish taken across the Atlantic into slavery somehow managed to top 12 million, I don’t think Oppression Olympics are helpful. (According to a quick Google search, “Oppression Olympics is a term used when two or more groups compete to prove themselves more oppressed than each other.”) So far as I can tell, enslaved Irish (and other people who might be considered white using modern day terminology) and enslaved blacks, when enslaved side by side, were more interested in solidarity and shared resistance, than in arguing over who was more oppressed.

                      I think the possibility of buying freedom, while it may have been technically permitted in the law in many places (though the laws apparently sometimes had conditions, e.g. the person to be freed had to leave the area), was, in practice, unobtainable for many enslaved people, especially blacks. It does not appear that most enslavers offered enslaved people the opportunity to earn money, save it, and buy freedom, even if laws technically allowed this. Plus, so many died, or saw their loves ones died, and those who are dead can never again be free in life. In “The Poverty of Slavery: How Unfree Labor Pollutes the Economy”, Robert E. Wright quotes one person who said, “What use will freedom be to me? Can it give me back my children, or make me what I used to be?” (I believe that was Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing a novel based on a true memoir of another person.) The possibility to gain freedom, by whatever means (various forms of emancipation, rebellion, escape, etc), doesn’t undo the permanent damage caused by even brief periods of enslavement, nor does it mean that all enslaved people have a reasonable chance of even achieving eventual freedom.

                      As for individual members of an oppressed people who manage to join the ruling class, and themselves become oppressors — this happens with many sorts of oppressed people. It is not individual blacks only who do this. It is part of the divide and conquer tactics of oppressors — to select certain individual members of the oppressed, specific individuals who lack enough honor to just say no — and make them part of the ruling class. Lumumba was assassinated by the Belgians (with the help of the CIA, who first removed him from power and had him thrown in a military prison) precisely because he was too honorable to help them oppress the Congolese people. (“The Assassination of Lumumba” by Ludo de Witte goes into great detail about Lumumba’s assassination.) After several years of struggle in the Congo, he was replaced with Mobutu, a dictator who ruled for about 30 years with CIA assistance, and was more compliant with CIA wishes. So far as I know, people who work for the oppressive CIA include men and women from a variety of racial and cultural groups.

                    9. So why are you asking for my opinion? You seem to know everything. My last word, nobody mentioned 12 million that is your exaggerated figure. 400 thousand Blacks were exported to America along with 600 thousand Irish . Throughout history, the bulk of the slaves were White. Get over it!

                    10. To: enochered

                      I was asking you where I could learn more about the Irish forced to build railways, since I hadn’t come across that particular detail in my historical research.

                      If you saw an estimate for 400,000 black people forcibly shipped to “America” somewhere, that estimate was most likely only counting black people forcibly shipped to the United States specifically, not the Americas / transatlantic slave trade as a whole. The estimate for the transatlantic slave trade as a whole is 12,521,337, and as I understand it, that’s only counting people who arrived at their destinations, not ones who died en route.

                      This chart might help:

                      I doubt there’s enough data to talk about statistics for the “bulk of history”. So many cultures have had slavery, and so many have simply been forgotten.

                  2. You have provided no “smoking gun” but merely the obvious fact that British troops were stationed in Ireland as they were all over the Empire. That is not evidence of genocide or forced Famine. In fact, it proves nothing. Get some real evidence before you make such grand accusations.

                    1. Precisely 69 of Britain’s then 137 regiment-total army were in Ireland in 1845-1850 removing, at gunpoint, scores of shiploads of Ireland’s food crops per day to its ports for export while its producers starved. The nearest army garrison or detachment was summoned only when the combined forces of constabulary and militia were being bested by the people. Lord Clarendon wrote at the time, “But for the onerous duty of escorting of provisions (barrels of cured meat, but sometimes applied to all foods) the army in Ireland would have little to do.” The hundreds of mass graves of those years were dug and filled due to the overwhelming violence of those army regiments.
                      What don’t you believe? The existence of those hundreds of mass graves? Lord Clarendon’s statement? The existence and deeds of those regiments in Ireland in those years?
                      If you accept the fact of those regiments in Ireland during those years, are you contending that they had nothing to do with the food removal; that the food was available but the people chose to NOT consume from it; that they committed mass suicide?
                      Having read the above, please let me know If there remains some specific aspect of that genocide you fail to grasp.

                    2. Still gabbling on about “Real Evidence,” are you Neilsen? Where is your own. Not just thin on the ground, non-existent, I would suggest. But of course not necessary, because there is so much evidence of this evidence all around us we don’t actually need, the evidence itself do we?

                    3. Well said. Chris Fogarty is a liar and a fantasist and has been pushing this drivel for years now. No-one in Ireland takes this kind of racist nonsense seriously. Yes, there was (some) appalling mismanagement of events by the British Government but no, there was no genocide.

                    4. To: Piaras Mac Éinrí

                      Chris Fogarty is not the liar! Robert Nielsen is the liar! Robert Nielsen literally wrote, “Actually as I don’t live in England I can’t visit Surrey nor do I have time to delve through historical records. The fact you don’t specify your sources makes me inclined to think they don’t say what you claim they do.” He admitted in the first sentence that there were “historical records” that, by his own admission, he did not have time to delve through, and then in the very next sentence, Nielsen blatantly lied by accusing Chris Fogarty of not specify his sources! We can tell it is a blatant lie, because the first sentence effectively admits that Chris Fogarty did in fact specify his sources! (For context, Nielsen was replying to a comment where Chris Fogarty wrote, “visit Britain’s National Archives in Kew, Surrey and have a look at The Deployment of the Army records for 1845 through 1850. To learn the volumes of Irish food landing daily in English ports read, among others, The (London) Times of those years”

                      Such obvious, blatant lies are called gaslighting!

                      Gaslighting aside, Robert Nielsen essentially made a personal incredulity fallacy. By his own admission, he does not have time to delve through historical records! And yet, based not on research but on mere personal incredulity, he claims to think said historical records don’t say what Chris Fogarty says they do! Personal incredulity fallacies are a subcategory of arguments from ignorance. Robert Nielsen is essentially arguing that we should take his personal instincts about what he historical records say more seriously than the knowledge of someone who has actually looked at the records!

                      Researching and uncovering genocide is not racism! Denying genocide based person incredulity and gaslighting the people who have actually done their research is racism!

                      We can see that remembering the Irish genocide does not make people racist from the recent donations from numerous Irish people to the Navajos and Hopi. Thousands of Irish people sent donations to the Navajo and Hopi in 2020 to help them during a time of tragedy, in memory of the generous gift sent by the Choctaw to the Irish during the Irish genocide!

                      See “Irish support for Native American Covid-19 relief highlights historic bond” on the Guardian.

                      There is also a also a monument, named “Kindred Spirits”, honoring the Choctaw’s generosity to the Irish during the Irish genocide, Midleton, County Cork, Ireland.

                      See “Sculpture marks Choctaw generosity to Irish famine victims” on the BBC website.

                      I sincerely expect that learning how the starvation in Ireland was a genocide, and not a natural famine, will only increase Irish willingness to engage in anti-racist activity, helping the Choctaw, Navajos, Hopis, and numerous other oppressed peoples around the world to decolonize!

                    5. To: Piaras Mac Éinrí

                      Incidentally, Chris Fogarty is not the only one to go through the archival records and conclude that the starvation in Ireland in that time was a genocide, and not a natural disaster.

                      Dr Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois has also gone through the archival records and concluded that it was a genocide.

            2. The basis for your claim that the death of over one million innocent Irish was not genocide is hanging by an almost invisible thread. Given the existence of the very real probability that the famine was genocide, your strongly worded condemnation of a relatively small number of IRA induced civilian casualties, in fighting what they assuredly believe was the occupation of mass murderers, is unbelievably uneven in its measurement of justice in an extended time of conflict.

              1. “Given the existence of the very real probability that the famine was genocide,”

                Care to support your statement?

                “your strongly worded condemnation of a relatively small number of IRA induced civilian casualties,”

                All I said was that I disagreed with the IRA which is hardly strongly worded. It is incredibly callous to dismiss 2000 innocent deaths as a “small number” as though that somehow excuses the IRA.

                “in fighting what they assuredly believe was the occupation of mass murderers”

                So the fact the IRA mass murdered scores of innocent people in Enniskillen and Omagh and dozens of other places is alright because they meant well? What planet are you living on?

            3. Nielsen the Goth: You do speak utter tripe. Who do you think scrambled for the gold and diamond mines in Africa? And not a penny for the African?
              The same group in Westminster.
              To compare body counts IRA versus Britain’s occupations world wide is laughable.. . . you are not on shaky ground, but an earthquake.
              The people of the IRA were heroes, fighting for the return of their own country. How dare you call them murderers. The true murderers were the borderers who occupied Ireland. That is . . . your group.

            4. The IRA killed the least percentage of civilians of the three sides of Troubles, and were fighting a colonial regime that treated the native Irish Catholic people as second class citizens. History will remember them as freedom fighters.

        3. Good old england they were all saints to the irish people wasnt they they never murdered or raped and stole nothing it was the bad old paddy fault .english propaganda at its best.

          1. How did you jump from “The English didn’t commit genocide” to “The English are saints”? Is it not obvious that there is a middle ground? Of course crimes were committed during British rule, but genocide was not one of them. Also at no point did I blame anything on the Irish or say it was “paddy fault”

        4. What kind of crack you smoking. The English were mass murderers. Didn’t your mother tell you to never smoke anything that’s named after a part of your ASS.

      1. Lord
        The Times trumpeted that the day was coming ‘ when the sight of an Irishman in Connemara would be as scarce as that of an Indian in Manhattan’

    3. This reply is off-subject but the original comment wis also off-subject.
      A question to FOJAP. Did you ever visit Belfast during the 30 years of conflict there. If not I suggest your embarrassment at your friends solidarity with the nationalist community there is miss-placed. Perhaps you should reserve it for your own country’s continuing role of international “bullyboy”. A role which it inherited and still receives unstinting support for from Britain. As to N. Ireland you might be interested to know that most of the counter-insurgency tactics applied by the British there were learned by them at close quarters, in Viet Nam. This included
      1. Low Level Intelligence gathering and exploitation i.e., Operation Motorman. (General Ford officer commanding British forces in Ireland had served as a “military advisor” in V. Nam.
      2. Destroying undefended enemy “Targets of Prestige” Here the most notorious Irish example is the parachute regiment’s Bloody Sunday attack on the Bogside. Incid the young lieutenant* who led the brave boys of that distinguished band later reappears in Bosnia as Joint commander there of UN forces. And it was he who refused to order a defense of the UN Sarajevo enclave. Result approx 5000 civilian deaths.
      3 Enhanced Interrogation of prisoners, i.e. torture and tossing people out of helicopters, taken of course to a logical conclusion and often under direct CIA supervision by your countrys then allies in the Argentian junta. And dont talk to me about the definition of torture.
      * Perhaps if as a young man the lieutenant had been reprimanded rather than decorated and promoted for his actions in Derry his later behavior vis-à-vis Bosnia might have been characterized by a higher or ”ehanced” regard for civilian lives.
      (Please excuse the length of this reply and feel free to edit it as you wish.)

      1. You stupid fucking ass. You don’t know a thing about me except that I’m American. I’ve actually stopped commenting on this blog because of aggressive people like you that are eager to pick fights.

        I happen to lean left and have actively objected in my country to the policies which you pretend to dislike. I say pretend, because by lashing out at me you show that you have no ideals but simply an instinct to hurt anyone and I just happened to get in the way. Your supposed ideals are nothing but an excuse for your undirected anger.

        Christ, if I knew this blog entry was going to get so much attention, I would have never commented at all.

        Robert, would you do me a favor and delete this comment of mine, I’m really sick of this garbage.

        1. I’m sorry about the abuse fojap and I have to say this comment section is the least favourite part of my blog. However, I will not delete your comment because you said nothing wrong and I enjoy hearing your thoughts. The only people who should have their comments deleted are the rude and inconsiderate ones. However I had the misfortune of reading John Stuart Mill which put me under the spell of liberalism and opposition to censorship. As a result I fell duty bound to allow all voices a space no matter how crazy they are. Mind you enochered is seriously making me rethink this policy.

          1. Robert N

            I offered my apology. And I offer it again. Though I do not consider the remarks i made to constitute anything approaching abuse. That said I leave chastised and shall never darken the portals of your blog again.

            Jimmy (now departed)

          2. Why is that Robert? Are you frightened in case I expose some of your followers to the truth?

    4. I stumbled across your page and read with dismay your post it is clear you wrote this article to evoke a response! Very brief history lesson:

      History Around 1150, Pope Adrian 1V conferred on Henry11 of England the lordship of Ireland with hopes of curing some of our ancestors of their perceived ecclesiastical ills! Pope Adrian’s unlawful and misguided decision sold our people into bondage, slavery and starvation.
      By 1168 our misfortunes had gone from bad to worse under the boot of the English crown as they invaded again invoking more reforms, many dealing with the granting of land. The crown had systemically lay claim to our lands, by invoked reforms effectively stopping our people from owning land, voting, etc. by doing so they made it almost impossible for Catholic people to live, flourish and survive in their own country!
      Just when the people thought things couldn’t get any worse up pops James I (1603-1625), this upstanding King decided to colonise parts of Ireland by confiscating around half a million acres from across six counties! By confiscating our lands it forced the poor to grow potatoes on very tiny plots of land, which they had to rent from the very landlords who stole their land!
      The English planned to steal our lands and used reforms to achieve their aim! As a direct result the people could scarcely feed themselves so when the crops failed due to overworking the soil, the people starved because this in may cases was their only source of food.
      The ‘Great Hunger” lasted for six years during which the people of Ireland starved as a direct result of the land grab and reforms levied by the Crown!!!!!
      You should be ashamed of yourself for proof is available, when you systemically steal peoples lands and use reforms to stop people making a living the outcome is often tragic!! If you cared to plot the history of Ireland you will find proof, this was not heartlessly negligent as you state but murder.

      It was indeed ironic that the undoing of Ireland and the Irish Catholic should turnout to be the head of the Catholic Church Pope Adrian, more ironic still he was an Englishman!

      1. I’m not quite sure why you gave us a history lesson or why you felt the need for so many exclamation marks. History is full of oppression and conquest, neither of which are the same as genocide.


        I think we have different meanings of direct proof. If it was genocide and land was the cause, why did we not have hundreds of years of genocide? Why only six years?


        There is a big difference between tragic (which the Famine was) and genocide (which the Famine was not). You haven’t given any proof, you have merely stated your belief. Do you believe the British government deliberatively intended to exterminated the Irish population?


          But that *was* her (and others here) point… the genocide had been going on for centuries, the Famine being just another sad chapter.

          Oppression and war and ultimately genocide of indigenous peoples is obviously a human trait, as it occurs everywhere and every when there have been people.

          1. I provided a brief history to demonstrate that the Irish people had been ground down by reforms for centuries until they could barley feed themselves, this was done systemically and with INTENT. Having read all the other comments with great interest I have come to the conclusion your purpose is that of cause and effect. Having bated the hook you are enjoying the effect of your question!

            1. You did not show that there was intent on behalf of the British to commit genocide. By your broad definition, every invaded and conquered nation is the victim of genocide. If used so easily, then the word loses all meaning. Genocide refers to actions with the specific intention of exterminating an ethnic group.

              “Having read all the other comments with great interest ”

              Really? You read all 800 comments? Not even I have done that.


              I don’t know what that means.

              1. Sorry Robert you may be confused having been sat up on that pedestal for so long. Firstly I posted the essay twice by mistake, Secondly I have not replied to anybody’s comments and I have not read this entire blog so I am confused as to why you have stated I did. Thirdly I posted the entire essay to give people a broader understanding, which did include valid points such as cholera. A point that having browsed the blog seems to have been missed. And lastly I agreed with a lot of your comments, but sadly you have not taken an educative and analytic approach to my essay.

                1. This reply is not just to Mark Douglas, but to all of us who have posted.

                  The reply function seems a bit awry. I commented on Robert’s reply to Mary, and it appeared to Mary I was addressing her. Robert replied to Mary and it appeared to Mark that the reply was to him. That’s unnecessary confusion for all, and explains why some commenters in the past have felt that their comments had been removed. They weren’t removed, they just landed under someone elses’s comment.

                  I have a wordpress blog too, and it isn’t the owner who does these things. They happen. Sometimes I miss the detail of who is replying to whom, we’re all human and busy most of the time, and exploring this topic has value and meaning and is laden with emotion, whether you are home grown or not.

                  About that comment, many of us in America who consider ourselves “Irish American” have heard family stories passed down from those who lived it firsthand. Don’t forget… we’re here largely as a diaspora, our folks would not have left if things were right to begin with. It should be no surprise that Republican sentiment would be strong here, nor was it surprising that the Brits painted your troubles over here as a conflict between religions, Catholics killing Protestants over the same God. Talk about spreading confusion! One side says “they just want to kill Protestants” and the other side says “We just want to be free”.

                  Which side would you take?


          I have just received a reply in response to the above reply from fojap simply saying F**K off! is that how you debate!

          1. “I have just received a reply in response to the above reply from fojap simply saying F**K off! is that how you debate!”

            In fairness she posted a reasonable comment and you told her she should be ashamed of herself. If anyone should apologise its you.

            1. Robert I apologise I only went o this blog yesterday and so do not know the workings of it. I received four comments on email and automatically assumed they were all directed at me. Obviously I have since read these and they were directed at Marydoll or someone else.

              However I still believe my essay is valid in this argument and does cover points previously missed.

        3. It was stated, with a tad too much relish, during the famine in a House of Commons debate, that the sight of an Irishman in Ireland would be as scarce as the sight of an Indian in Manhattan. Ah lads there was genocide of the Irish in the minds of the British Establishment alright.

      2. Having been born myself in a lower class sector in London, and experiencing the effects through the impoverishment psyche and the economic situation combined with low status internalized structure of the mind, here I refer to my father’s condition, this peculiar state would be exasperated, through the class system, portrays the vindictive and hate of the establishment with those who are home grown, if the establishment can victimize those who live close to the seat of power, such as where I was born, Stoke Newington, it is hardly surprising that those who live just a little further away, as those who live in Ireland, can become victims, and mas murder would be second nature to a elite, whom must be deluded to believe that they rule by divine proxy.
        Of recent I have conversed with two people on the “the Irish Famine” with regard to this post, one of these persons is a professor, here in Ballarat, Australia, having not prompted him as to making no reference to the word genocide, he immediately responded to “The Irish Famine” as genocide, as I conversed with him, he had a good comprehension of the facts of this situation, in terms of military intervention and the crops grown, and a good outline of the circumstance of this depraved and corrupt organized crime by those in authority, the British Establishment.
        As you may be aware Cameron requires a investigation into atrocities in Sri Lanka, through the United Nations, it may be time for Cameron to investigate “The Irish Potato Famine” and have this investigation also carried out by the United Nations.
        The time before Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon, the British ruling forces, instigated the Tamils in to bureaucratic and establishment positions, who were a minority group that established themselves later than the native population, the Sinhalese, as the the president retorted to Cameron, “Do not Throw Stones in Glass Houses” is it not remarkable the British were culpable as history shows of once again setting them up!
        One can but only see the British Establishment as having a long history of what we would today say, human rights abuses, some would say they are at a base level, a criminal organization that is attempting to launder themselves, it is of misfortune for these people that the more intelligent no longer believe what the official line is, as much as the establishment of Britain, denies its history as a macabre and a blotch upon the human race, sooner or later it will become clear as to what the truth is.

      3. Actually Marydoll, pope Adrian was ‘a plant’. He was the first and last Englishman to become a pope and it was at the urging of Henry II. Adrian was a bishop of sorts and his real name was Shakespeare ! When Henry II forwarded Shakespeare’s name he was turned down. Henry kept up the pressure and over time Shakespeare did become Pope Adrian ,but he only lasted a few years before he was drummed out in disgrace. It was long enough to bring about the letter giving Ireland to England, which was a complete farce from the start.

          1. I stopped long ago attempting to insert some truth into this mess but its owner, Neilsen(sp?), blocks me by placing my comments into months-old sections of the debate where it won’t be seen.

            Sent from my iPhone


            1. Thank you, now I know the correct name of the most evil pope the world has known! And he was an Englishman! You see in England it is taught that Pope Adrian ‘gave’ Ireland to England because they needed to follow the correct Christianity, and Henry was just doing Ireland a favour. (Sort of like Cromwell’s reasoning). Meanwhile I believe it took three years to ship the gold of Ireland to Henry’s coffers in England. Regarding Neilsen, don’t worry I have him pegged. Hang in there Fogarty.

            2. Chris there’s no conspiracy to silence you, this is just how WordPress works. The oldest comments go first and everything else follows. This happens to everyone, not just you.

      4. Mary
        Are you aware that Pope Adrian was Richard Breakspear and an English man and Queen Mary 1, in the 1550s, was also granted control of Ireland by another Papal Bull.

    5. What this article clearly fails to acknowledge is that though the British did not bring the fungus that killed the potato to Ireland, once the famine “situation” arose, newspapers of the day (which were written by and for the same British upper class that determined policy in Ireland) openly called for the extermination of the Irish. Of course they would not openly admit to that policy in parliament but the British love to speak in double talk. Watch the British TV show “Yes Minister” for great examples of British government spin. Their excuse that they should not interfere with the economy was just a subtext to what they truly wanted. As with the Highland Clearances in Scotland, they wanted to get rid of their tenants and turn their huge estates into cattle and sheep ranches.
      Most damning of all however is that the whole discussion ignores that fact that since Elizabethan times, the Crown had had a policy of extermination. The original idea was to kill off the native Irish and replace them with new Protestant (and therefore loyal) “Irish”. They wanted to remake the Irish identity by destroying the real Irish identity and for many of that way of thinking, the failure of the potato crop created the perfect chance to finally realize their “final solution”.

      1. I left this comment in March. If you haven’t noticed, you’re not the first person to give me shit about it. I’ve regretted writing it. The only positive thing that anyone has accomplished is that I now know better than to comment on anything having to do with Ireland.

        If you reread my comment and Robert’s reply to mine, you might realize that we are in fact disagreeing, although very politely. Since I’m neither Irish nor an historian, I didn’t feel at ease disagreeing with him very vocally. He probably knows more about Irish history. My little bit of self-deprecating humor about my lack of knowledge should not be taken at face value nor should it be assumed that I’m proud of my lack of knowledge. Robert and I had had a couple of exchanges earlier and I figured he would get it. I forgot about the rest of the internet. However, it is true that there was a time in New York when pretending you couldn’t even find Ireland on the map would keep you out of unpleasant arguments. It’s not my country. I don’t even have Irish ancestors. I generally keep my nose out of other people’s quarrels. (And it’s not just Ireland. New York has lots of immigrants and I avoid all their quarrels. Israel vs Palestine. Golly, never heard of it.)

        When I made this comment, few people had visited this post. I commented more to be friendly to Robert than because I had a burning need to express my opinion on Ireland. I think Robert is an interesting writer on economic topics and I’m glad that his blog is continuing to get increased traffic. However, had I known that this particular post would become such a lightning rod, I would have never made a comment or I would have chosen my words far more carefully. I probably should have known better, but there you go. I’ve done it and can’t take it back, unfortunately.

        One thing I didn’t say, because it struck me as rude, is that I have my reasons for believing that the English are, indeed, racist towards the Irish. I have had the misfortune on a couple of occasions to be in the company of English people when the subject turned to the Irish and the things that were said did reinforce the notion that the English are racist. In one case they were gossiping about my boyfriend and all I can say was it was incredibly awkward. Now, I am aware that a couple of personal anecdotes hardly constitutes a sociological study and exactly how pervasive English racism is I don’t know. I do, however, know it existed. (Indeed, just the other day I was going to tell someone that they shouldn’t admire Emerson because of the racism of his book English Traits, but I wasn’t up for an online argument. Yes, and I know Emerson was an American, but it’s a book about Anglo-Saxon racial superiority.) Anyway, I didn’t mention my sense that English racism is real because its a very difficult thing to convey politely. Secondly, I will probably now get English people coming saying I don’t know what I’m talking about. Save your breath. You’re right; I don’t, which is why I didn’t want to mention it in the first place. I did say, I believe (I can’t see my original comment at the moment), that I felt that Robert was underestimating the role of racism. Perhaps I phrased it too politely and too gently.

        Now, I don’t know much about Irish history, but I do know a great deal about the history of my own country and I have, as it happens, a particular interest in the period of early colonization and I am very aware of the ways in which methods of early colonization of North America had first been practiced in Ireland. (Nicholas P. Canny is an interesting source for this.) You may have noticed that the large agricultural terrains relying on slave labor in the American South were called “plantations.” If you know Irish history, then I’m sure you know the origin of that word. The Plymouth Colony in the north was, in fact, called the Plymouth Plantation, and there were other “plantations” in the north as well. The English were far more successful in taking control of North America than of Ireland. The question of whether or not the drastic reduction in the number of native people, especially in region east of the Appalachians, constitutes genocide is an issue that is frequently brought up when discussing American history. To me, I don’t see why it would be less terrible if large populations were killed if the motivation was profit than if the motivation was racism.

        If we trace English settlement in North America, we find that English treatment of Native Americans varies by region according to economic motives. In Canada, were there was a profitable trade in beaver, Native Tribes were treated as trading partners and remained intact for a longer period of time. Further south, where main motivation for settlement was to use the land for cash crops, destroying the tribes as political entities and reducing the size of the population was necessary.

        I have a pretty good understanding of the brutal treatment of native peoples by the expanding British Empire, so I don’t underestimate what the British did in Ireland even though I may not know many details.

        I should thank you for at least being polite.

        1. Hey Fojap, sorry you have to keep putting up with these comments, I don’t know why they keep picking yours to reply to. To be honest I just ignore most of them are they are little more than irrelevant ramblings that have very little to do with the post. Its best just to ignore the idiots, they’re not worth your time.

          1. Thanks. I’ll try to take your advice. I think they pick mine because it’s near the top. They read your post and get angry and by the time the see my comment they’re steaming.

            1. In response to your blog, which was a long epic in trying to set something right, I thought you were a example of tolerance, and persisting to get a honest perspective, that did cover a wide ground, what you have to know about Neilsen, is he is a academic, and thus has a short fuse in particular if you do not fit into his status quo, you become the outsider, the importance of this blog, now approaching more or less one thousand comments, is the diversity, and your blog was informative on a wider range than what was the original subject matter, of genocide, having myself spoken to Irish people here that have migrated here from Ireland, their have been many who are well educated disagree with Neilsen, who states it was not genocide, in some ways I enjoy Neilsen insofar as he shows a limit of tolerance as to what he thinks is the story, it is fortunate for those who are searching for the truth not to be intimidated by academics, who become arrogant as to what is, especially at such a young age, it shows the limitations of education and what is considered as the true account of what the story reveals, the potato famine is not that long ago, already the lines are drawn as to how we shall interpret the story.

      2. JohnH, Neilsen is Northern Irish, he has made up his mind that this is not genocide, what ever truth or light you bring to this inquiry, he as with the British Establishment is and will be unmoved by any humanitarian plea, this is how the elite stay in power as the elite, the destruction of all that exists is inconsequential to these people, for the reason I have already stated.

        1. “Neilsen is Northern Irish”

          Wrong, I’m from the Republic (also that’s not how you spell my name).

          “he has made up his mind that this is not genocide”

          If you read the post you will see I exaimed both sides of the argument and made my decision based on the evidence.

          “he as with the British Establishment is and will be unmoved by any humanitarian plea”

          What? I’m a cold hearted puppet of the Brits? Where did you pull that nonsense from?


          Honestly, most of your comments on my blog get sent to the spam folder because they are so incoherent. What are you talking about? How am I part of this elite that is supposedly destroying people?

    6. British made the Irish only grow potatoes, while the British used most of the Irish Land to raise cows for only the British to eat. Growing anything but potatoes would have been a death sentence , for 970 years. You don’t know your own history. This was a propaganda piece done by a Brit. A pretty good trolling job. You don’t even mention this fact when you call it a conspiracy theory that is was forced starvation. Fuck off.

    7. Please read”the truth behind the Irish famine” by jerry mulvihill. The English intent was to to get rid of in any way possible the wretched Irish.

  2. Very interesting, I remember a poor Irish peasant once told this as genocide and since I have been thinking a lot about it. Will try to read the book,

    1. Just got back from visiting Ireland. My grandmother was from Sligo.visited the famine cemetery in Donegal there r hundreds of the m in Ireland.jerry mulvihill quotes reliable sources .if that was genocide then the holocaust didn’t happen either.

        1. Of course it was genocide, in fact I believe the EU accused Britain of genocide regarding ‘The Famine’. As for the Irish people not being as aware of the genocide, this is sheer nonsense. You may meet Scots Irish or Anglo Irish who wish to evade the memory, but the true Irish are very much aware of their history. Recently I saw that ‘Prince’ Harry, while visiting a memorial to the Famine victims in Dublin, was shocked to find out that there had been a famine in Ireland! How can this be? I refuse to believe that the English are that stupid! My father was Irish, born in Ireland, my mother was English, born in England and they were both very well aware of the horrors of the Famine. There were many people in England at that time who tried to help, but the powers that be objected. Queen Victoria sent 10,000 pounds for famine relief whereas the Sultan of Turkey offered 100,000 pounds. His offer was turned down.

          1. “Existing policies will not kill more than one million Irish in 1848 and that will scarcely be enough to do much good “Queen Victoria’s economist,Nassau Senior- 1848 . The genocide was well planned . This was no accident. Jim kent

  3. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It seems to me that it’s the difference between murder and manslaughter. Both are still pretty bad, and particularly in the corpse’s point of view.

        1. Of course it was a genocide. It was a genocide that was still going on into the 1920s. There are only three million people in Ireland, there 8 million in the 19th Century. Is this link available anywhere else? I hate Facebook.
          You seem to be on the point of blocking me so I guess this is goodbye Robert.

          1. Yet again you’re facts are wrong. The population of the entire of Ireland was 8 million before the Famine. In the 26 counties it was 6 million. Today it 6 million total and 4 million in the 26 counties.

  4. A very interesting read. I am an Irish sociologist and obviously the famine has featured throughout my career. The ‘genocide’ idea had never been raised in such a direct way before but I think your argument is well made. Thank you.

  5. The neglect and indifference from Malthusian principles holding sway,which were tolerated in an era that gave us Marxism, Darwinian eugenics, and fostered effects in Ireland that were no different than Wounded Knee, or Rawanda, Call them what you will. The scale in Ireland makes the case that neglect is a co-conspirator in genocide. The UN let 900,000 die in Rwanda while they quibbled about the definition of genocide. The 19th Century eugenic experiment began in this era with British colonial rule in Ireland and was later perfected by Nazi’s. A transfer of land and wealth aided and abetted by British domination, fostered this death. The Irish who were forced into a single crop economy by the the transfer of land and wealth were victims. This neglect/genocide was a blueprint for the IRA to come about.

    1. Unlike in Wounded Knee the military did not attack people nor where people killed in battle. Nor was there mass murders like in Rwanda so the analogy doesn’t hold. The UN is not responsible for the deaths in Rwanda, the Hutu militias are (not that I see what this has to do with my blog post). There was no intervention because countries did not want to risk getting caught in a situation like Iraq where their troops are deployed for years.

      There was no eugenics experiment in Ireland nor is it in anyway comparable to the Nazis. To claim so is to spout delusional conspiracy theories. This was not genocide and it was not committed by the British.

      1. OK so would you agree that collective neglect gives rise to great tragedy? Or is it just a part of the landscape of humanity? Is British racism a delusion, I have lived through American racism I know it is real.Was the abject neglect and greed described in Dickens novels delusion? Same era.Same folks calling the shots in Ireland. . You seem to imply that jack booted red coats came to Ireland for three hundred years only to foster good manners. The IRA at the time of the Easter Rebellion had the moral high ground–the great hunger had its part in that war irrupting. I’ll comment no more as I want to read the book you dismiss. So perhaps the British did not commit genocide but ‘Laissez Faire’ economics fostered by the ruling class of England did.

      2. The scale of the horror of the Famine was such that the English historian A. J. P. Taylor compared the state of the country to that of the infamous German concentration camp Belsen. He declared “all Ireland was a Belsen.” 3

        Coogan, Tim Pat (2012-11-27). The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (p. 3). Palgrave Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

      3. Stalin and the Ukraine. Stalin and the Kulaks. Both are examples of starvation used to eliminate unwanted populations. Both are probable/possible attempts at genocide. Charles Trevelyan regarded the famine to be ”a mechanism to reduce surplus population.” In Irelands case by half. Thus far a more radical ”reduction” than the above examples. But if an analogy is needed then it should be made to the Ukraine and the Kulacks. And possibly China under Moa but not Rwanda.( where actually the Blue Helmeted French UN soldiers and thus the UN itself may have been very directly complicit in facilitating the genocide there. They delayed for crucial weeks the collaspe of the Hutu regime.)
        You say. There was no eugenics experiment in Ireland. There was no pseudo science of eugenics in 1847. And the british were very definitly responsible. The question is only were they murderously so.

        1. jimmy C, interesting you go to 1847, and not 1841 when people were pulled out of there houses and murdered or striped naked and forced along the road. Manny died of starvation then, of corse having your eyes gouged out and sent to wonder the countryside naked will cause difficulty looking for food, The shore of loch Erin ran red with the blood of those massacred separated neither by age or sex. This was a armed population targeting a group of people and removing them by murder or other means based on there religious practices. I question wether you miss the largest act of genocide in the history of Ireland because (a) The victims were Protestant and therefore you feel they deserved it and (b) unlike other acts of genocide where victims were hidden away in camps and transported by rail (giving the population the chance to say “we did not know”) this happened with the full knowledge of the population as thousands of naked men, women and children would be imposable to miss, even in Ireland.



          1. I’m not sure what exactly you were referring to. Can you provide links and sources to the events you are describing because I was unaware that the year 1841 was any more violent than others at the time. However, it is completely unfair to accuse Jimmy of believing Protestants deserved to be murdered. You have no reason to say that.

              1. Opps, I got my years confused, should have been 1641, that should make more sense, here is a link http://www.1641.tcd.ie I was intending to ASK Jimmy is this the reason the events get ignored, that i beleive is a fair question from a inquisitive mind

                1. You might try a very interesting Hedge School organized by History Ireland magazine on the 1641 revolution. Its available on line.


            1. I am afraid there is not enough time to provide all the links needed to educate you.
              Oh by the way ‘was’ is singular ‘were’ is plural. . . must agree you know.

          2. Do you mean 1641. If so my answer I didnt pick the date. This was a debate on the famine. But the history of ireland is indeed atrocious. And the 17th century particularly so. I Would be happy to discuss it with you however, though maybe this is not the forum.

            1. Yes, i meant 1641, I was 200 years out, sorry. I thought it was a debate on irish genocide, that would be the obvious one to go for, it involving murder as opposed to a natural disaster, that could have been managed better by everyone, however genocide it is not. Ill have a look for the site you suggested anyway

                1. i don’t think there is any other way to describe it. Unfortunately the attempt at systematic removal of anything British or Unionist or Protestant continues, nothing is ever new or finished in this Island. We have politicians that refuse to use the correct name of the country, Northern Ireland.

                  1. Some time ago in a west African land I met a very pleasant scotch man I mean adult male scot. The setting was a fairly crowded Shebeen and we were alone separate and apart though neither of us were drinking heavily. Bone weary from the side effects of a malaria cure I was not looking to introduce myself. But a familiar near magical process of osmosis was in operation and though I was fiercely resisting the effect we were moving ever closer. Its a humbling measure of black African hospitality that there is always an assumption that two white guys in any social setting would much rather be sharing travelers stories that talking to a local. Try as you will to avoid it gentle yet insistent shoulders will nudge and shepard you across the most crowded room. And like it or not, sooner or later you will find yourself seated beside and in the company of the other Mazunga. Such was the case. We exchanged greetings and began talking.
                    Now C as I shall call him was many things more than pleasant. Besides being as I remember a Hibs supporter he was then and presumably still is the only white man to have played and scored a goal in the Sierra Leone cup final. The winning goal, I think. And in front of a full stadium and in wartime. Quite an achievement for an only middling good amatur footballer. I remember he said Scotland were playing Brazil that night and he wondered how they might fare. I suggested if the usual pattern was followed Brazil would be three down with 20 minutes to go but would come back and win 4-3. In short we were becoming friends.
                    Later he transpired to be chief investigator for the war trials tribunal of S. Leone and was in the country where we found ourselves to assess the viability of establishing there a Truth and Reconciliation etcetera Commission. The interim government of the place was proposing a TRC approach to its own just recently concluded civil war, a full blown criminal trials option would they thought or claimed to think be ”too traumatic” for the poor population to endure. Hah I thought thats a good one. Dont you know what the poor shits have had to put up with from your lot for the last (add your own figure here) years. G too had his doubts but had equal doubts about a War Trials process. Half of his chief suspects in S. Leone had been granted immunity and others of them were members of its new government (able to be such because much of the evidence he’d gathered against them had been destroyed in police raids on his Freetown offices.)
                    He therefor was coming to the opinion that a TRC tack might be the better option for L , I’ll just call it L and you can guess to which country I refer, because there too a number of the worst war crimes offenders were getting ready to take places in its new government. Worse still a notorious torturer was recently returned from exile and was about to resume his old job as head of the country’s secret police force. (Yes. They still see a need for such a body.) The prospect of which was causing sever nighttime sweats to some of my acquaintances. Thus, according to G a TRC on the S. African model would be the thing to go for. “Here in L” I sputtered ”you cant be serious. That means no criminal charges” He noted by uncertainty but knowing by then that I was Irish added ”Yes. Much like the one that should be set up in Ireland.” I was stunned ”ah no, G” I said ”You dont want to go there. Not Ireland.”
                    In L the TRC came and went. To almost no effect. And the only convicted war criminal from that country was charged for crimes committed in and against S. Leone. (As part of the Hague based Leonen War Trials.) And the police chief, well to be fair rumor has it he has not killed or tortured anyone in years. Myself I think Ireland should adopt the Spanish civil war system and just not talk about any off it for a couple of generations. Blunt trauma injury to the head will often induce amnesia. And even if afterwards we are all left feeling a bit dazed, amnesia is a great pain killer.
                    Speaking of amnesia, remember what Joyce said ” history is a nightmare etcetera ” Well, I for one am ready to wake up. And therefore propose we negotiate to set the alarm to an agreed date. That will be a tricky enough business on its own. You might say 1641 and I’d offer 1798 and the act of Union. Countering you’d naturally skip over the famine and offer the Ulster Covenant and the Somme. At which point I’d feel obliged to turn the hand back to 1847 and the fighting would flare up again. And it would be my fault. Because I’d have broken the rules ie the negotiation must go forward. Thus I should obviously have opted for 1998 and the Good Friday agreement. Finaly may I express the hope you dont think I have avoided answering your question in my long winded reply
                    http://www.historyireland.com/1641-rebellion/the-1641-depositions/. Heres the 1691 link I mentioned in an earlier comment.
                    INCID. I appear yesterday to have offended a contributor to this site by comments I made on a related subject. I hope that is not the case with any of the above. I am now going to take my own advise and shut up.

                    1. Hi Jimmy, just a quick note to say I’m sorry someone was offended by your comments, and don’t worry about offending me for two reasons (a) you seem to put forward your views in a reasonable manor, there is a huge difference between disagreeing and offending and without differing viewpoints how would we debate ? and (b) Im a male escapee from a 25 year abusive relationship, after that you gotta go some to offend me 🙂

                      full reply after dinner,



                    2. Hello again, ok if we are going to do the pick a date thing you misjudged me. I would go for around 7500 BC when the only populated section of Ireland was Co Antrim. The people who would latter be called Pict/*Corneithi (*guessed spelling ! ) nourished themselves from the fertile land, or 5935, when these Picts (easier to spell and the same group of people ! ) where building the Mesolithic buildings at Mount Sandel, the oldest discovered human habitations in Europe, the Third cent BC when the son of the King of Ulster set of across the water with his Egyptian Bride “Scotta” taking with them the stone every King of Scotland has been crowned on, giving the country its name Scotaland, or around 3500 BC when a large number returned. Basically any time pre 250 bc when The Celts arrived, in waves, the Gails being the last group to arrive, before 250 BC my forefathers lived in piece, there has been none since the Celts INVADED my homeland. This also allows me to not undergo Christianity, a large bonus to Pict pagan/druid type people like myself. However i cant to that, the one date i would not jump to is the good friday farce ! That agreement is badly broken and needs removed. Who you ask ? let me explain, we have went backwards since then. Pre “agreement” we had four political parties that could conceivably form a majority, DUP, SF, UUP and SDLP, now we have two, DUP and SF, that is regression. Pre we had terrorists on the streets, post we have terrorists on the streets and in Government. Regression. Pre we had one community that did not trust the police, post we have two communities that don’t trust the police, regression. Pre we had contentious Protestant parades, post we have contentious Parades of all hews, Protastant Parades banned, contentious parks, yes contentious KIDS PARKS, named after terrorists, Post we have laws about what clothes you wear to work, someone got a 20 grand claim because he did not like what people he worked with wore ! laws about what you say, a victims campaigner arrested for attending a protest, sent to jail without trial, released because he has cancer and given bail conditions including “no person living at your address may possess a phone or computer, no talking to the press” we have continued ethnic cleansing, most notably in Londonderry, we had shots fired at the Police this week, as yet the police or media have managed not to state it was the work of republicans, failed to state the shots were fired from a Nationalist area and said it occurred “close to Dunmurry” a Protestant area. We have people running the country that refuse point blank to use the name of the country, Northern Ireland. As for a TRC, that can never work. We had millions spent on Bloody Sunday Inquiry, i waited with batted breath to hear what our Dep First Minister would say, which turned out to be “I wish to make it clear that I will not provide the inquiry with the identities of our members of the IRA on Jan 30 1972 or confirm the roles played by such persons whose names are written down and shown to me.
                      “I have been advised by my lawyers that the undertaking given by the Attorney General does not extend to such persons nor am I confident that their identities would be protected. As a republican I am simply not prepared to give such information.”

                      No truth, No reconciliation, No justice

                      to conclude, i still think the “great hunger” was a unfortunate disaster that affected people according to how poor they were, not how they prayed.

                      Sorry for being long winded, Africa ea, I fancy doing the travel thing when (eventually) i wrestle my wages away from my ex wife, now there is a struggle worth fighting for, equality for men, fair divorces for men, mortgage payments stopping when you no longer live with a abusive wife, the famine gets lots of comments, nobody looks twice and male victims of domestic abuse. Im stopping now before i come across Irish with “poor me” lol



                  2. Well, you’re very kind so I’ll take off the gag. It was bothering me anyway. And say.
                    A) re. You cant be insulted. Well I should warn you I’m an unreconstructed Fenian. Already empty rooms have been known to turn into complete and perfect vacuums after I’ve spoken.
                    B) Re. The whole business. The truth is just not simple and the history should embarrass us all. And not just us but the British too. Though they should be embarrassed not just for their role in Ireland. But Kenya too. And for the infamous WW1 blockade not to mention the bombing of Dresden et al. Read if dont mind my presumption and if you ever come across it ‘Among the Dead Cities.’
                    C) Re. Your your escape. Congrats. And a C/Western song to celebrate. I’m calling it ”Takes heart to walk out on a losing hand.”

                    Took boots to march down my streets
                    Took iron make up their hats
                    But stone can cut through to flesh
                    And lead’s a poison for all

                    Takes a heart to walk out on the past
                    And a suit to make the man new
                    But the truths not as easy as that

                    Aint no hands that are clean on these islands
                    And no one should hold his head high
                    For we’ve all been busy with murder
                    And we all had our funerals as well

                    Takes heart to walk on the past
                    In the the suit Ive been keeping for grave yards
                    I have laid down my guns in the clay

                    Wanted to send you this Mr Forty but there’s no reply button on your most recent so its transposed. Hope you still see the context.

                    1. Ah shite there’s a typo in it and I didnt see. B*tard. Ah well try again. Fail again. Fail better… you know the rest.

                      Took boots to march down my streets
                      Took iron to make up their hats.

                      Me and that fecking dyslexia

                    2. loved the song 🙂 and nothing offensive in your post BTW, they “did” Dresden to get a marble factory ! yep, those little balls kids play with, they were to be used to instead of ball bearings for tank turrets. Agree with you, nobody but nobody is all good, or all bad, I would make do with acceptance of the other, dont see it happening any time soon tho, we can but hope 🙂


                      Ps, im going to follow your blog

                    3. From Jimmy to Forty. I have absoluely no idea how to operate this thing you call a blog in a proper comment-reply- comment manner. But here goes

                      And so now i discover youre a poet. Well I’m not nor do i have such aspirations. so one faour do please not publish this on your site as a poem song or whatever. I was unaware that i was blogging. Or indeed that this was a blog. I thought I was merely commentating on other peoples musings. But since you liked the “song.” here i give to you a version closer I think to the finish.

                      Takes Heart to Walk

                      Took boots to march down my streets
                      Took iron to make up their hats
                      But stone can cut through to flesh
                      And lead’s a poison for all

                      Takes a heart to walk out on the past
                      And a suit to make the man new
                      But the truths not as easy as that
                      For the suit must be cut from a cloth
                      And a heart to be true must be whole

                      Aint no hands that are clean on these islands
                      And no one should hold his head high
                      For we’ve all been busy with murder
                      And we’ve all had our funerals as well

                      Takes heart to walk on the past
                      In the the suit Ive been keeping for grave yards
                      I have laid down my guns in the clay

                      I said closer to the finish because actually I believe theres another two lines on the way. If they arrive I’ll shift them over to you and you may do with those laggards whatsoever you fish, up to and including murder. I understand that it is sometimes in the nature of these things(song-writing poetryficationing and so forth) that they go on for years. I certainly hope not in this bloody case. i had that experience once before and it did not sit well. presently I’m drinking wine though not inebriated and listening to Steely Dan. Both are soothing. As to blogs youve enlightened me and i will have to reconsider a perhaps bad habit of being like the dog-that-got-run-over by chasing after every loose ball and chain he saw.
                      Re. Your reply. You replied to my S. Leone Liberia thing and for that i thank you. I’ll read it tomorrow with a clearer head.
                      Re dizzylexcia or however the damn word should be spelt Lee Harvey Oswald was also chosen for that affiction*. I hope we fare better.
                      * There did you see the way it just suddenly happened as if of its own violition . And f*k it didnt I just spot another one. Fish indeed. the bloody thing, it thinks I’m a fool.
                      Why not disk. Why indeed not a Very Large Array of astronomical disks.

                    4. nobody but nobody is all good. you say. Actually and I know its dreadful to admit but sometimes and maybe tonight its just the wine. I sometimes think sometimes that nobody just nobody is good. Full stop. Period. Or would be even if they wanted. And thats not an admission of a psychological malady more a philosophical perspective. I mean maybe weve had our chances and weve blown them. Perhaps i should just stop or at least stop reading Schopenhauer.

                      INCID Bet you never thought you meet fenian who read that stuff.

                    5. Jimmy, can you say more with regard to your blogs? is the subject commenting on reached a impasse from your point of view? @/ are you a sort of surreal artist with a play on words? for our/your entertainment, 3/ are you bored?, 4/ are you on medication or drugs? or non of the above?and or 5/ quoting as a mystic, as say in no language can satisfactorily explain reality? or make sense of any level of reality when one is born or incarnated in a human form?
                      Your elucidation is most appreciated.

                    6. Re: recalcitrant fool. if that comment has insulted any “hold out republican” then i apologize for it. I did not know Bobby but a friend of mine gave shelter to him once in her home. And i like you wish that he and his comrades were still among us.
                      If the above has etcetera-ed any body else then i apologize for the hurt but not the sentiment
                      If those apologizes annoyed any one who might have read them then yes for that too please except my etceteras
                      And thats the danger of the whole Offense/Apology business. Its dreadfully addictive.

                    7. To Forty
                      Spent yesterday recovering from a hangover and had to attend a funeral as well. No. A wedding. I swear that mistake a complete accident. It was as weddings go a pleasent affair. No fights but then I only drank very moderately. Though there was a grave yard near by and misery had me sitting in it for a spell. Does that explain the wedding/funeral slip. Which is all just to say that I’ve only now got around to reading your thing. I’ll get back to you on it.

                      re The song. its finished. Two more lines arrived as i emptied the bottle that night. Though Id rather not post them here. Not because I’m ashamed of the thing no matter how feeble. But because not everybody is as well I dont want to say ”thick skinned as you” so would ”battle hardened as us” fit. I ref your escape and all. Suggest an alternative and I’ll send it to you. Though you know the condition.

                      re. Proper ownership. if the proper owner of this blog wants me to shut up I promise to do so. And no offense will on my part will have been taken.

                    8. Robert. Sorry for the bother
                      I fully respect your decision. Its probably very wise. But would you also consider then deleting all my comments or if not that at least the one with the “Recalcitrant fools etc.” reference of May 23. Its very out of context now because of the deletion and sounds as if i have an ax to grind. Which I dont think I have. i know you’re no censor and im sorry to have inadvertently forced your hand. If you cannot do as I requested there is also no need for explaination.
                      Best wishes and good luck in your endeavors

  6. Great blog. I am always being told that I am a general ‘ist’. I seem to have an overwhelming feeling of self righteousness. Love the concept of ‘solutionism’ too. We don’t have any actual problems in the developed western world that strictly require a solution, not at least anything that is needed for basic human needs.

  7. I’m Irish, living in Ireland. Our Irish teacher in school used to say to us, ” The British didn’t need to try to destroy the Irish, they just had to wait for the advent of television, to kill our language and culture through British and american programmes!
    Growing up we did love to blame the British for everything, however that teaching is well gone and we have largely moved on. Thankfully.Enjoyed your article.

    1. your teacher did you a disservice, the main cause of the demise of galic in Ireland was the Church refusing to preach in in that language and forcing the people to learn English or loose the ability to communicate with the priest. As someone who lives in Northern Ireland i would question that the people who live on this side of the border have moved on from blaming everything on the English, or the notion that my community are “planters” and should be removed, by whatever means necessary.

      1. I think you see my comment as historical. I am refering to modern Ireland. In our gaeltacht community most teenagers communicate in English. The medium of television and computers has had a far greater effect on the demise of the irish language amongst our young than the lack of priests in the past or the Tudor laws! And I have children, why would I preach “the removal by whatever means possible” As I watch my children watch american sit coms and accidently use words like cupcake and diaper, I still think my irish teachers comment was spot on!

        1. I got your context wrong as to the demise of the language, sorry. In that context television has a lot to answer for through the form of social learning. Thank you for clarifying that for me.
          As to my community being “planters” and justifying “the removal by whatever means possible” unfortunately that is still being taught in Northern Ireland, not only that but we have the perpetrators of terror to remove us in government. Your teacher may be right about the language but as i watch the world around me, a bomb attempt of some description every day for the past few weeks, the latest one being very close to succeeding in murder, in the name of Irish Nationalism, i don’t think we have moved on at all. I do believe (and hope) there is a vast difference in thinking in your part of this Island, i just wish those “Up North” would also accept I too belong where I was born.
          Thank you for taking the time to read and reply

          Forty Two

  8. It was British government policy to use starvation and famine in other countries apart from Ireland. At the end of world war 1 the British enforced a blockade of food into German ports which caused the death of 900 000 civilians and maimed many more from malnutrition related diseases.
    During world war 2 Churchill deliberately allowed millions of Indians to starve during the Bengal famine.
    The British did not earn the nickname “Perfidious Albion” for nothing!

    1. You are absolutely right. Millions died in India in 1943 under the command and control of the Britishers Empire. Some of the pictures available from those era are enough to bring tears to anyone’s eyes. There were bodies laying on the sides of roads from Rural India towards the big cities (e.g. Calcutta) of the people who were trying to flee from villages to cities in search of food and died of hunger on their way. Villages after villages in Rural Bengal left with nothing but dead bodies.



    2. You have to remember that the blockade of Germany took place during the World War so was considered military action like an artillery bombardment.

      The Bengal famine was more a case of economics than genocide, the English did not intervene for similar reasons as above (though also due to the disruption due to the war). It was not deliberative starvation.

      1. I am not ignorant and I am not a conspiracy theorist. If you cannot supply evidence of what you write you should describe your work as fiction. If the best you can manage is to descend into abuse you quite obviously are short on proof.Have you ever been to Ireland? Have you seen the markers for the mass graves? Have seen the lists of the names of the British Regiments which guarded the food at gunpoint? Are you aware that the Irish were not allowed to fish in the rivers and were not allowed to take boats on to the sea?
        As for the IRA they were infiltrated at an early stage by the British and most of the bombings which were laid at the door of the IRA were in fact the SAS. The SAS planted two bombs in Dublin, one of them nearly killed my brother, the British have already apologised for this, thirty years on of course.You seem to have attracted a large number of responses from those whom believe that the British are basically ‘good’ people and would not have perpetrated such a foul act. Sorry to disagree, the British are scum, they have spilt more innocent blood on the planet that any other race in history. There is nothing of which they are not capable. The atrocities which they carried out in Ireland are legion. They have been killing the Irish for the bankers ever since Cromwell found himself in debt..and was sent to Ireland to start the culling. Churchill ordered the bombing of German civilians using all of the banned weapons in the process. Little children were stuck in melting tar on the roads, burning to death from the white phosphorus which had landed on them, unable to move. Don’t talk to me about the British please. Have you seen David Cole’s film? He is a Jew and he pours scorn on the Shôa tale. Just as you pour scorn on all of the other cullings, they were just accidents of course. The blockade of Germany, for what it’s worth, was after the War. with the intention of forcing Germany to sign the treaty of Versailles I believe. .

        1. I am Irish, so I would know my own history. What sources do you have for your claim that the Irish were not allowed to fish in the sea? The problem was that fishermen lack the capital for equipment or sold their nets and boats and couldn’t fish, not that the British prevented them from doing so.

          Your claim that the SAS infiltrated the IRA and committed these acts is why I call you a conspiracy theorist. Not a single historian who has studied the Troubles has suggested such a thing. If you know something they don’t, I’d like to hear where you got it from. The British are good people and not responsible for the actions of their government, because after all, in the 1840s, Britain was not a proper democracy (there were elections but few could vote).

          If you want to make outrageous claims and rant away, you can. But if you want anyone to take you seriously, then you’ll have to provide sources and rely on facts and evidence.

          1. You quite obviously do not have a clue what you are talking about. The British themselves have admitted to having been involved in bombings with the UDF and other Loyalist groups. I have already pointed out to you just a few short weeks ago, David Cameron apologised to the family of Pat Finucan for the murder. Do you not get that. The British government apologised for the murders on Bloody Sunday The McGuires and the Birmingham six were pardoned. The Shankill Butchers worked with the British, they also killed children for the British child abusers at Kincora. Irish are you and know none of this? I’m not interested in this it’s not the people its the government, well why don’t they get rid f the government. You’ll be telling me next you believe that Tony Blair brought peace to the North and that Obama caught Bin Laden in Pakistan. I don’t know where you come from in Ireland but don’t go down the North Wall way and talk your rubbish about the English down there…

            1. Wait one minute you’re saying the IRA were run by the British, now its the UDA and UVF (there is no such thing as the UDF). Yes there was collusion, but I haven’t a clue what your point is. I have never heard of Kincora and a google search only brought up conspiracy theories (surprise surprise).

              “well why don’t they get rid f the government.”
              Because England wasn’t a democracy at the time so they couldn’t remove it but through revolution.

              I’ll skip over the other ramblings . . . . .

              1. You have never heard of the Ulster Defence Force?. You say the Kincora child abuse is a conspiracy theory? Where did you find these tales of the Irish selling their fishing nets? From the word go you expressed your belief that what happened in Ireland during the potato blight was in no way the fault of the English. You dismissed Coogan’s book as merely political and not good history. You now pooh,pooh, what has been admitted by the British Prime Minister that there was collusion between the Loyalist groups and the Security Services in N. Ireland. Chris Hogarty did not list enough ships cargoes to satisfy you, when there should have been no ships cargoes taking food out of a country where people were dying of starvation, but the British absent mindedly were looking the other way. Now on the other side of the argument, you have never produced one shred of evidence to support your claim that the National Socialists in Germany had any intention of deliberately exterminating the Jews. In your own terms without this proof there was no genocide. Where is your proof. As I have already stated I would like more than hear-say which you have dismissed as rubbish.We have all seen the Hollywood films depicting the gassing of Jews, off the train, off with your cloths, into the shower, close-up of the shower, the dah-dah,dah,dah music and cut the film. At that point we know all the Jews have been gassed in the shower.Well they had not been gassed they had been washed. Why have we never seen a film, which showed us exactly how a gas chamber worked? Because no gas chamber has ever been found, even the Jews themselves no longer talk of gas chambers, they don’t know how they worked. Whatever you think you saw at Auschwitz was not a genuine gas chamber, it was an air raid shelter, which the Jewish director at the factory, on film, explained had been turned into a gas chamber, and was used for a few months, it was then changed back into an air raid shelter and then after the war( it was changed back into a gas chamber, make of that what you will. The incinerators were built after the war by the Poles, to cope with the hundreds whom succumbed to Typhus. Typhus killed Jews and Gentiles alike. You claimed to have visited the factory, where slave labour was indeed used not only Jews but others as well. During your visit you failed to spot the Theatre, the swimming pool, the Cinema, and the system of credits with which the workers were paid, which could be used in the factory store for various things, when available. This has been verified by “Eye Witnesses” but these witnesses are never heard, we hear mainly from people like the woman whom claims to have swallowed her diamonds daily and had to scratch through her own excrement daily to recover them and whom had her tattoo removed by Mengele, in the most horrific fashion, of course leaving no scar. OK do you understand we all know the Hollywood tale, will you now finally provide what you claim is indispensable to the claim of Genocide, documentary proof the Hitler, ordered the extermination of all Jews. You apparently can claim that the Irish Holocaust was simply a problem with the spuds and no fault can be attached to the British, whereas I have come under attack, for simply referring to a man in an unacceptable manner, and have had demand after demand for the documented evidence of what I claim, even as I write there is a character, whom I have asked for a description of the famine, which has not been forthcoming either from him or anybody else, including your good self, who is still jeering at me to produce a link to an SAS attack in Dublin. Now can you produce the evidence or not that Hitler ordered the genocide of Jews?

            2. Dear Enochered- a la “Life of Brian”…

              What did the Brits ever do for us?
              Well- there’s the postal service,
              Ok- well apart from the postal service- what did the Brits ever do for us?
              The canals…
              ok – well apart from that…
              ehhh…The steam engine?
              Ok-apart from the post and the canals, and the steam engine, what did the Brits ever do for us?
              eh… Television?
              Ok Apart from the Post, canals, trains and television,what did the Brits ever do for us?
              Penicillin?- saved millions of lives that did…
              Ok -Apart from the Post, canals trains and television, and penicillin, what did the Brits ever do for us?
              Eh- the internet?- thats handy! we wouldn’t be talking about this otherwise…
              Ok- apart from the Post, canals and television, and penicillin and the internet, what have the Brits ever done for us?-
              Didn’t they help us out with a loan to save our banks?
              Ok, apart from the post, canals, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, what did the Brits ever do for us?
              Well… they always give us good marks at the Eurovision…
              Ok, apart from the post, canals, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, Eurovision- what have they ever done for us?
              Well-The jet engine- they invented that…or maybe that was the Germans…
              Ok, apart from the post, canals, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, Eurovision votes, possibly jet engines…what have they ever done for us?
              The Toothbrush!
              Ok, apart from the post, canals, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, Eurovision votes, possibly jet engines and the toothbrush…what have they ever done for us?
              Catseyes!- they’re brilliant at night in the country when you can’t see a hand in front of your face….
              Ok, apart from the post, canals, trains, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, Eurovision votes, possibly jet engines and the toothbrush and catseyes…what have they ever done for us?
              Independence!- Oh yeah! never thought of that one till now!

              1. Along with all of that you have added Concentration Camps and Mustard Gas, Tanks and Piracy and Gatling guns and Napalm, what has that to do with this for example: “One of the reasons for the Roosevelt-Eden plot to overthrow the Chamberlain government and remove Bonnet from the French Cabinet was because they would not agree to pay the price Stalin demanded to encircle and defeat Germany. At Roosevelt’s and the Jews’ insistence, England and France guaranteed the boundaries of Poland in order to encircle Germany and renew Jewish control. This guarantee of the boundaries of Poland was the direct and proximate cause of the World’s War; in fact, it knowingly necessitated it.” (War! War! War!, Cincinnatus, pp. 188-189).
                In your opinion of which should the British People be more proud, your load tosh or the responsibility for the most murderous war there has ever been, which they then blamed on the victim?

                1. Oh Dear, this gets worse.

                  My load of tosh.

                  1. I am speechless, was I meant to take the Monty Python sketch as a serious reply to something? Are you suggesting that the toothbrush is a form of penance, which forgives the British for their long history of criminality? Have you read the newspapers lately? Who is paying the terrorists in Syria. Who bombed Iraq into the stone age.Who starved 500,000 children during the sanctions against Iraq. You can find Madeleine Albright on YouTube saying that was a price worth paying, to find those WMD which did not exist.

                2. @enochered

                  Concentration Camps – Used by the Russians against the Polish and by the US against the Native Americans before England ever used them.

                  Mustard Gas – Probably first made by the French, Germans the first to put into actual use.

                  Tanks – First conceptualized by a French captain, first designed by the Austrians but didn’t go into production. Brits may have been the first to field them but most of the design and the development was French who gave us the first modern tanks (rather than simply armored and armed tractors that the British used)

                  Piracy – Been around longer than England.

                  Gatling Gun – American.

                  Napalm – American.

                  0/0 – It’s not that your views are crazed, conspiracy theory based, anti-semitic rants that makes them offensive… it’s that they are SO ignorant that they serve as a grim and foreboding message to humanity of what happens when the education of a child fails utterly. People literally become stupider for listening to your comments. In short please, for love of all that is good and right in the world, do not post or voice your opinion anywhere, ever.

                  PS If everything is all the fault of the Jews then really we should put them in charge anyway since if in such small numbers (less now after your Nazi mates did their best job to destroy them) they control the entire world they must simply be thousands to millions of times more intelligent than everyone else.

                  1. I am not sure you understand Wills terminology? how can you think compliment? unless you are what has always seemed to me conceited, in today’s world this is a commodity that is not in short supply, whats more do we need more of it? I mean when you are just plain up yourself making your self into a invulnerable bore, come out from ” theresdangerhere” and reveal who you are?

              2. Today I learned that Britain is the only country in the world to have the post, canals, trains, television, penicillin, the internet, the Bank loan, Eurovision votes, possibly jet engines and the toothbrush and catseyes.

                1. And why did the Spanish call them ‘The smelly English”? And why, except for actors, do they still have dreadful looking teeth?

        2. Total and utter horse tripe. “I am not ignorant and I am not a conspiracy theorist”. by suggesting the SAS left two bombs in Dublin to kill innocent civilians, you are being both, ignorant and a conspiracy theorist!

          1. The Irish Government carried out a long and detailed investigation into the two bombs which exploded in Dublin. The verdict was that it was the SAS whom had planted the bombs. The British Government accepted responsibility. This was the same SAS whom were arrested in Basra in Iraq, disguised as Arabs, having been caught planting bombs to stir up religious conflict. They were taken from an Iraqi Police station by British tanks. The British also accepted responsibility for the murder of Pat Finucan in Belfast, where the B Specials were working with the murderous Ulster Defence Force. All of this is verifiable. Is there anything else you don’t know? Oh! I almost forgot “Bloody Sunday.”

            1. Can you actually point to an article about the Irish government investigation which proved the SAS planted the bombs in Dublin?

              Can you actually point to an article which shows how SAS men were arrested in Basra for planting Bombs to stir up religious conflict?

              The British apologized for Bloody Sunday, Pat Finucane’s murder, and also for many other things. They also apologized for the Birmingham 6, and the Guilford 4. They even apologized for the famine as well. I don’t think they apologized for Cromwell though…

              Did I miss anything else?

                  1. I don’t understand what you mean. There were dozens of possibilities I simply picked the first one. Check out the rest if you’ve already found a problem with that one.Keep going til you find the one that suits. I did not expect an apology. any more than I expected an acceptance that you were wrong. By the way what is wrong with Braveheart? Are you referring to his comment about the Jews by any chance? I guess its all in the name, therewasdangerthere then your brain dropped out.

                    1. Were you trying too? Do I detect someone whom believes Enoch Powell to be a racist?

              1. they didnt plant the bombs. They the sas supplied them to the bombers and probably escorted them as far as kildare. You shouldnt be shocked it was after all a war.

        3. Shortly after construction had begun at Birkenau, the decision was made to change its designation, and turn it into an extermination camp. The first experiments with gas were carried out in the main camp in the fall of 1941, and in the light of their success, the SS decided to build four permanent installations in Birkenau, for the specific purpose of gassing people to death. The construction began in 1942, directed by the Topf and Sons company, supervised by the SS. As a stopgap measure until the installations were completed, the Germans converted existing buildings to erect two makeshift gas chambers next to the camp.

          The four extermination installations started operating in 1943. They each included an undressing room and a gas chamber, both underground, and a crematorium for incinerating the bodies of the murdered. These facilities made the murder of the Jews a far more efficient process.

          SS man Perry Broad describes one instance of murder by gas that he witnessed:

          “A number of victims noticed that the covers had been removed from the six holes in the ceiling (of the gas chamber). They screamed in terror when a head, covered in a gas-mask, appeared at one of the holes. The “disinfectors” went to work…. Using a hammer and chisel, they opened some innocuous-looking tins which bore the inscription “Zyklon, to be used against vermin. Attention, poison! To be opened by trained personnel only.” As soon as the tins were opened, their contents were thrown through the holes, and the covers were replaced immediately… about two minutes later, the screams died down, and only muffled groans could be heard. Most of the victims had already lost consciousness. Two more minutes passed, and Grabner (one of the SS men) stopped looking at his watch. Absolute silence prevailed.”
          The extermination reached its peak in the spring and summer of 1944, with the deportation of some 430,000 Hungarian Jews to the camp, and the subsequent murder of the majority of the deportees.

          Just so as we are clear- the Nazi’s gassed people to death, a deliberate action.


          1. i dont agree, watching the diplomatic ,political and cerimonial antics of the british lately suggests they are getting ready to pull out of the north and do to the unionists ,loyalists exactly what they have always done to anyone who has ever supported them in their occupations—— stab them in the back and abandon them. they have done this everywhere they have been, which leaves a trail of refugees following them back to britain.

      2. The German government surrendered in 1918 and all military action on their part ceased. The hunger blockade by the British continued until 1919 with the express purpose of getting them to sign the Versailles treaty and admit that Germany alone was responsible for world war 1 so they could rape that nation financially.
        Indians consider the Bengal famine to be a deliberate genocide. Of course, if Japan or Germany or any of the other members of the Axis did the same thing to a conquered people it would be called a “war crime” and they would have been punished. I am so sick and tired of the hypocrisy and double standards that apply between actions of the Allies and the Axis. A war crime or an atrocity is bad no matter who commits it.

      3. yes but 4-7 hundred dead civilians. Even wars are fought by rules and it continued for nearly a year after the armistice. Compliments by the way on your restraint vis a vis censoring comments.

        1. You’re doing well Jimmy. We have already been here and Robert keeps on plugging the same old stuff. The blockade of Germany was after the Armistice. It was imposed to put pressure on Germany to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Hidden Historical Fact: The Allied Attempt to Starve Germany mises.org/daily/4308‎. There should be a link there somewhere. I’m not good with links. As for the Bengal Genocide, we ave also touched on that one and like all of the others it is a case of neglect or lack of attention and what have you. However even as I write this for the second time, there is a Court case pending against the UK and Australia, for having seized the crops of the Bengali people, partly to feed the British Army which was preparing to go into Burma and also to stop the crops falling into the hands of the Japanese. You could say this was neglect or just a plain case of didn’t give a toss about the locals.In any event it is just another of Churchill’s long list of War Crimes.

  9. Looking at English affairs across the course of Irish history, it’s safe to say that if they had intended a famine conspiracy, they would have bungled it.
    As you argue, doing nothing had harsher consequences.

  10. One could look at the arguement that those nations whom
    claimed to be the friend of IRELAND of it’s people’s were in
    truth guilty of genocide /they had every opportunity coming
    to the aid of IRELAND of it’s peoples / yet they did not they
    deserted the people’s of IRELAND in an time of great need.

    Why did they turn their back’s as a blind eye to the plight of
    IRELAND it’s people ?/ because they wished see the blame
    for IRELAND’s tragedy placed fully on England on it’s Govt.

    In reality / truth be all nations failed IRELAND it’s people in
    such a grave time of need / to single out only ENGLAND as
    having done wrong but adds further injustice unto injustice.

    One need learn from past mistakes thus their be a more just
    future / in time of need nations will support as aid each other.

    The reality of history IRELAND could have been used as a
    platform for a invasion on mainland Brtiain / thus a military
    force needed to prevent such / thus the stage was set for
    conflict. No nation wished a foreIgn power on it’s land / yet
    the circumstances such that mainland Britain having little
    choice on the matter / they then forced into such situation
    they did not wish or desire / yet in reality having no choice.

    Such ongoing conflict of IRELAND & mainland Britain as
    also used by others to stir up malice hate /anti British or
    in main anti ENGLISH propaganda through the centuries.

    One must take into account the changing times of history
    where the British held the might the power / unto the USA
    in claiming their independence from the British / and then
    putting in their claim to be the master race in both military
    as political might where now the reality Britain in truth but
    only another state of the USA / the British govt’ are now
    but mere puppets of a USA administration / whatever the
    USA commanding the British Govt will follow to the letter.

    At present times USA military command venture on their
    being the worlds master race as have done for centuries
    and as others have learnt from history being the master
    race is never achievable / rather in reality it brings one’s
    own destruction ( the error (always) be a nations wealth
    being ploughed into it’s every growing military forces…..
    the result of that being the nations social structure starts
    to collapse / thus the people turn on the govt / in turn the
    govt then turn the military agin their own people / rather
    than being the master race the situation becomes but a
    tragedy where they can’t feed as provide even the basic
    services for their own people / poverty becomes the king.

    1. I don’t know who you’re trying to blame because Ireland didn’t have allies or friends abroad and no other country would be responsible. Why do you have some many / in your comment? I’m not quite sure what your talk of America being a “master race” has to do with, well, anything.

      1. Robert, on *my* keyboard the / is located just to the right of the period and one key away from the comma. Perhaps WW is using it deliberately as a substitute for the appropriate punctuation, or he has trouble using the ring finger on his right hand.

  11. I am an Irish-American Jew, my family from Ireland migrated here during the famine and my family from Poland moved here after surviving the Holocaust. As someone who knows stories of genocide and terror all too well, I want to thank you for this post. It was a tragedy what happened to the Irish, but I agree that it was not genocide. The difference between harmful neglect and malicious murder is vast and I appreciate the distinction. I would keep going but this is a comment so I will leave it at that. Thanks

  12. I agree with you. The Great Famine was a case of extreme negligence on the side of the British. I believe they didn’t really care if Irish died, but they also didn’t care if they lived. I think they saw it as Ireland’s problem and they were still going to make money off of their exports. If a child dies from neglect, then the parents are charged with neglect, if a child dies from being smothered, then they are charged with homicide. I think the same kind of distinction applies here. The British were neglectful, but they did not commit genocide.

  13. My grandfather was Irish, he told me stories about this. It didnt seem like a reality for me, i didnt understand the magnitude of what had happened.
    He would later tell me that the reason his family moved from cork was because most of his family predecesors had died and the family at the time made the decision to run. He used that word…. ”run” as if to emphasise they were running from the boogie man.
    The attitude of the Brittish was the same attitude they expounded on the rest of their colonies….”who gives a damb….slaves”, is this attitude worthy of Genocide? Who knows, as a law student i know that one would have to prove “intent”, this is immpossible to prove from the above given facts, further more, there is no available evidence to support the notion that the brittish intentionally did anything. Neglect may also play a role, however i think that this is minimal since the Irish people should take responsibility for their own people, their own actions and their own crop.

    Its easy to blame the imperialists almost 200 years later, forgeting that it was a different world than what we know today. The world they lived in and the “constitutional democrasies” we live in today are very different, also there were no UN or Red Cross, there were no World Health Organisations.

    Its easy to look back today, in todays world and express our condemnation of the “coloniasts” in Brittain or the “apartheid” regime of the South African government, but the truth is…..those regimes did alot of good too, they built the entire infrastucture we know today, developed the educations systems we use today, banking, finance ect…. lets not go coloniast bashing, for one day our (200 years from now) future homo sapiens may look at us as unevolved and brutish??

  14. Interesting article Robert – historical perspective, and all. Heard of the lack of genetic variability in the farming of the crop as the culprit there, other than that I’ve not given it much thought. Would that the human race could get along more though; alas all that – we should take what can be learned from at least.
    Our hearts are made for a better world.

    1. It is true that there was huge over-reliance on one crop, the potato and even within that, one specific type, known as the lumper potato. This would grow easily in poor soil but was not very disease resistant and failed when the blight came.

      1. + 100. By the way I meant to mention that I much appreciate interest generated via the history article – just such an important area to know, all important the lessons that can be learned from. Hope all parties will experience great mending by now, or will, as need be.

  15. Britain was the most industrialised and wealthiest countries in the world at the time, and yet it allowed so many people to die. I have always been concerned about the relationship between capitalism and Social Darwinism.

    1. The great famine was from 1845 to 1852. Darwin’s theory of evolution was not published until 1859. So Social Darwinism as a theory could have had nothing to do with the famine.

      1. Social Darwinism was coined by a contemporary of Darwin’s named Herbert Spencer. He developed his theory as part of pre-existing utilitarian beliefs which were current in Britain at the time. These involved a laissez fair attitude to economics and social policy, which had developed in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is all too easily forgotten that a many people throughout the British Isles lived in dire poverty and hunger. These were addressed by a thinker named Thomas Malthus, whose essay is often quoted by historians discussing the response to the Irish famine. In fact Thomas Malthus and other such thinkers had a profound effect on the theories of Charles Darwin’s work.

        1. Coogan pays a lot of attention to Malthus in the book and makes the claim that his ideas influenced the response, which is probably somewhat true. There was a belief that Ireland was overpopulated and that the potato couldn’t support them so relief shouldn’t be given. It is true to an extent, but I believe Coogan takes it too far in arguing that it was the same as intent to genocide.

          1. I should probably paraphrase what Churchill said about democracy being the worst system there is, except for all the others. I have a similar feeling about capitalism, but feel that the apathy with which it so often treats humanitarian disasters to be horrifying.

  16. I had read a little bit about the Great Famine of Ireland but I had never read anything related to the genocide allegations. Either way it was a pretty unfortunate event.
    Even if the allegations are proved right (which I doubt), what is going to come out of that?
    There are so many issues that need our attention in our present why do we need to dig in the past?

  17. Present genocide carried out upon all nations is in an need of attention
    such by the tobacco companies in bringing death to millions worldwide.

    Tobacco it’s added highly addictive chemicals but continues killing far
    more than famine more than that killed in wars by bullets and bombing.

    How do tobacco companies continue freely to carry out mass murder ?.

    The answer is money lots and lots of money gained in profits of tobacco
    $billions upon $billions upon $billions such vast wealth in being gained
    that tobacco companies can well afford in funding political parties to the
    tune of $millions yearly. With such wealth they can as do fund political
    parties as fund politicians of their choice thus put politicians put in place
    not to serve the people but serving the agenda of the tobacco companies thus they can freely continue to peddle tobacco worldwide in giving no warning of the grave danger of addiction no warning of tobacco’s ability
    in bringing a multitude of illnesses /of it’s killing millions being so lethal.

    Tobacco companies do not pick up the bill that nations face dealing with
    tobacco related ill health / such is left to the taxpayer a yearly bill which amounts to $billions. Tobacco companies should be held responsible….
    thus the cost of treating tobacco victims falls upon them / they should
    pay for worldwide programmes / curing people from tobacco addiction.

    The genocide committed by tobacco companies should not be allowed
    freely continue political parties should not be funded through tobacco
    profits / thus politicians in just turning their blind eye to the appalling suffering of tobacco / it’s highly addictive added chemicals which kills millions worldwide, one should not just close their eyes to such horror.

    1. Mr. Wallace, this seems a good topic to address in a blog about the tobacco industry or one you might generate yourself. It has practically nothing to do with this discussion.

  18. I’m Jewish, not Irish; but growing up my dad always said that the first genocide was done by the English against the Irish. They didn’t plan it, but when presented with the situation the English deliberately choose actions that resulted in the deaths of millions of people. That’s genocide in my book.

    1. dswidow / the bible parts One & Two are full of act’s of genocide
      where God encouraged people / in main jewish people / that they
      slay their neighbours & take their goods as the ownership of land.

      I’m not jewish thus I don’t have the full access unto converstaions
      betwixt God and the jewish people’s / however genocide being the
      common factor betwixt God and the jew / jewish people butchered
      countless all in the name of God / at least they claimed it t’was God
      whom ordered them carry out the genocide according to scripture.

      Your dad is 100% wrong accusing the english of genocide the acts
      of genocide be far earlier in history which were firstly carried out
      by the jewish people / whom claimed in following God’s command.

    2. dswidow, I don’t think the British choose any particular course of action, millions would have died if they did nothing. And that’s what they did. Failing to prevent something is not the same as causing it to happen.

      William Wallace, I don’t censor comments, but you are making me rethink my policy. You are welcome to share your views, however you are not welcome if you are only going to rant and rave about irrelevant topics or blame the Jews.

      1. Robert, thank you. I felt creeped out by his comment; it was way beyond what is acceptable.

        Regarding your (relevant and sane) response to me, it’s definately arguable. My point was that doing nothing when there is both knowledge of what the impact of that inaction will be, and when it’s possible to do something, is more than just simple inaction. I admit I was pushing it a bit in using the “g” word, but since the Brits at that point in history were capable of managing (and supplying) an Empire on multiple continents, surely they could easily have gotten food supplies to Ireland.

        1. Oh they are definitely culpable (the government, I mean, not the people). The Famine could have been prevented or at least mitigated. This was not done for genocidal or malicious reasons but due to the belief that relief would make things worse. The British government were afraid that the Irish would become dependent on aid if they sent help. In their own strange way, they thought they were helping Ireland.

          1. i tend to agree with one thing you said robert, i dont think they instigated the famine ,but it did fit right in with their policy of extermination of our poeple ,lets not forgt all of the inocent people they murdered,so when you condemn the ira ,lets see you also condemn the british for seven hundred years of murder ,you remind me of the c n d who during the cold war constantly called for the us and france to dismantle their nuclear weapons but never once called on the ussr to do so ,which wasnt surprising as they were supporters of the ussr, so surprise us

            1. Before the British industrial revolution the fields for producing basic ingredients of sustenance, with the fields rotating and leaving some of these fields laying fallow, to rejuvenate and recover from production, the British knew this ecological system well, and know the constant use of field growing one species of potato’s this would lead to a collapse of production leading to this famine, as a planned outcome of this famine, as to whether this is genocide is not the point but the planned collapse of food production known.

      2. Robert /just because you don’t undrstand that which said
        gives you not a right to take as be of such aggresive nature
        you need be more tolerant of others & of varied viewpoints.

        1. This was my fervent thanks addressed to Robert’s suggestion about his policy of censorship—in *no* way to be taken as an endorsement of the wild accusations of william wallace.

  19. I enjoyed reading this piece and appreciate that you approached such an emotional topic with reason and facts.
    I am Irish American, and my father made sure I never forgot that growing up. He was a U.S. social studies teacher, so I like to “believe” he tough me fairly. Of course he told me about the Great Hunger, but I honestly don’t recall him ever referring to it as genocide. He also told me about many horrific acts that were committed against the Irish, such as Bloody Sunday, and other stories about cruelty and murder.
    I remember my father’s stories and I’m proud to be Irish American, but I’m prouder still that I never let those stories make me prejudice. I adore England and my dear friends who live there. At the end of the day, I choose to remember the past, live in the present, and help protect the future.

  20. I’m Scottish.
    My understanding of the famine is that there had been efforts by the English authorities over a period of time to move Ireland away from its overdependance on potatoes, to little avail.

    And the British Government, like all governments at the time, were inept and understood nothing and nobody outside of their clubs in Pall Mall.

    Revisionist arguments do little to further a nation, as the Scots have found. The English are not racist, they hate everybody equally.

    If you want genocidal acts have a look at the Highland Clearances. Practically the whole of Northern Scotland depopulated to clear the way for sheep.

    1. jumeirajames /my experience of english people in going to England
      has never been a concern I found english people considerate /polite
      and helpful. I never once heard any remark that insulted scottish or
      Irish people. England has had a open door and a welcome for those
      of all nations in time of need / offering them shelter from the storm.

      Via history England did much to lighten humanities heavy burden
      bringing education & development of the brain thus the individual
      allowed the ability to know true freedom/not left bound in illusion.

      England has been a light in a dark world thus one should be grateful
      as give England it’s people’s the respect due respect they have earned.

      1. I must agree that the English are the very epitome of good manners but in my experience they harbour a disdain for other nations. That’s not to say that they are alone as a nation in that regard. The French, for example, regard England as a failed colony.

        1. jumeirajames / the last time I was in France was some lives ago
          then I found the higher French elite / to be arrogant ignorant to
          a stage that beyond belief/ I felt physically sick in their presence.

          With such French revolution it t’was no surprise french people
          held the elete to account / lined them up facing the “guillotine”
          the french people long desperate for a leader giving their trust
          were blessed with Napoleon /thus the French having their hero.

  21. I am Irish and I don’t think the English people hate everybody. It is much simpler than that – all non-English are criminals – the crime? Not being English therefore not being worthy of concern. There are facts and figures to be found like in the middle of the famine period £75 million exports of food left Ireland as 100s of thousands died. England under the British banner (representation in Westminister – numbers dictated an English majority in the decision making process) raped and pillaged the world and imperalism effects can be seen to this day – India/Pakistan, Palestine and Ireland. The sun never sets on the British (for that read English) empire because you cannot trust them in the dark. Tony Blair even went as far as apologising to the Irish people for the famine atrocity so there must be some feeling of guilt on high. The queen visited Ireland last year and made a half apology for the treatment of the Irish people. Intent or not millions died or were displaced and it went without notice? Nelsonian blind eye!

  22. Very interesting indeed, sparked an interest for some – after taking some time to check out a few resources, along with many infrmational comments on the subject; there certainly are the facts that would give cause for such controversy becoming profoundly more evident… really adding to sad times in history… for generations later… http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/An_gorta_Mor.jpg

    Ireland’s Holocaust mural on the Ballymurphy Road, Belfast. “An Gorta Mór, Britain’s genocide by starvation, Ireland’s holocaust 1845–1849.”

  23. Great piece. The Brits definitely didn’t seek out an opportunity to kill off the Irish, but neither did they seem too phased by letting us starve out. That has to be just as bad? I probably won’t be reading this book, Coogan’s never really been given to objectivity, but the sensationalist title takes the biscuit for me!

    1. I suppose we’re going into philosophical ground over intent and action, but while I by no means excuse the British government, they were not that bad. Genocide (at least not in this case) shouldn’t be added to the list of its crimes

  24. I suppose “Laissez-faire” (yes, that is how you spell it, Robert) and free markets are to blame for the famine in North Korea, too.

    Socialists truly lack any ability to use their brains.

    1. No that would be extreme communism run by a totalitarian dictator. I’m not sure what I said in my post that made you think I’m a socialist who defends North Korea, because I’m not. I support a regulated market where the government intervenes in times of need. Not socialism or extreme free market, but social democracy.

      (Sorry about the spelling mistake, I’ll correct it.)

    1. No I haven’t read but I have heard its supposed to be very good. The problem with Coogan’s book is that it isn’t that factual, more emotive and political, whereas Kelly’s is supposed to be more detailed.

  25. I had never understood the Great Potato Famine – but only because I wasn’t taught it in school and it wasn’t as present as other things of my day (the Chinese Cultural Revolution) for me to look into. You have educated me.

    My father’s side of the family is Irish; my Mother’s (r.i.p.) side Polish. I appreciate knowing anything about either culture.

    I believe it was genocide if the English was exporting food that could have fed the Irish. I had NO IDEA this happened.

    It just stuns me how little we know what is going on, both ‘in the day’ and past. I had for a long time there lost favour with ‘Freshly pressed’ announcements as the subjects seemed so tacky, dumb. But this: worthwhile & well-rounded. Cheers.


    Coogan, Tim Pat (2012-11-27). The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (p. 31). Palgrave Macmillan.

  27. Great post! In context, of course, the Irish famine was simply the most terrible of a succession of food shortages that swept Europe through the early nineteenth century, partly driven by the dislocations of the industrial revolution, partly by the weather as the Little Ice Age came ot its rather ragged conclusion. It is easy to look back on history and see patterns in it, or attribute intent; for me the key to understanding is the fact that, at the time, the people involved did not know their future. Could not know. And, often, we look back and attribute intent or meaning where, in fact, people were simply doing what they thought right within the range of what they knew at the time. I think the Irish famine is an example of it, definitely fuelled by the early free-market theories of economic of the day.

    Put another way, why attribute to malice what is adequately explained by bumbling?

  28. Reblogged this on thewordpressghost and commented:

    Robert does a great job of looking at the expression that “God brought the blight, but the British brought the famine.”

    I hope you enjoy the read. And I pray there is never a famine like the Irish Potato Famine.


  29. I think you are mistaken in believing that the English landlords were simply showing the same contempt for the Irish peasants that they would have done for English poor. There was a visceral antipathy towards the Irish from the time of the reformation because they remained staunchly Catholic, and Englands enemies tended to be…Catholic. It made it so much easier to salve consciences and ‘let nature take its course.’
    The poor have always been treated badly by their ‘masters’, but the fate of the Irish peasantry was considered abominable even by nineteenth century standards. Friedrich Engels in his study of European peasantry said that he thought the plight of the peasants of the Baltic States was the worst he would ever see. Until he went to Ireland.
    The English probably didn’t plot genocide in Ireland, but the result was the same. And they certainly did nothing to save lives, in spite of outraged petitioning of Parliament by groups like the Quakers, who, incidentally I think you will find were responsible for the soup kitchens where food was distributed without the obligation to change religious beliefs.
    Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the Irish were murdered with the intent of wiping them all out. The result was a million dead adults, children and babies on the one hand, self-righteous indifference on the other, and despite the protests of many principled and humanitarian individuals whose voices were stifled by the so-called moral authorities.

    1. “The English probably didn’t plot genocide in Ireland, but the result was the same.”
      Well, no it wasn’t. Genocide is the (attempted) complete annihilation of a people. The Irish people were not exterminated nor is a drop in population from 8 million to 6.5 the same as extermination.

      1. Thats a weak arguement. The Hutus didnt succeed in Rwanda, nor did the Khmer Rouge in cambodia nor thank god did the nazi in europe or not completely.

      2. our continued existence is in no way proof that the british did not try to exterminate us ,are there any lengths you wont go to to have us belive the british loved us and did everything to help us ,you are deluded robert.

  30. The English did not display brotherly love to the Irish. As I see it the English could have prevented the deaths

  31. The evidence seems to be that the way the English behaved towards the irish was worse than the way any other European nation behaved towards people who they were at pains to insist were subjects of the British crown, their own people for feck’s sake!

  32. I haven’t read Coogan’s latest, so draw no conclusions as to his presentation with facts or not. Your conclusions run counter to much that I have read, and will prompt me to further research. Thanks for that!
    The idea that, since what happened in the 1840’s doesn’t meet today’s UN definition of genocide is moot. It comes down to whether or not the British government knew that Irish catholics were starving to death. If they didn’t know it… that’s negligence, and I agree with your conclusions of inexcusable culpability. But if they knew, and purposely did nothing… that’s not negligence, that’s intent, and to me that qualifies as genocide.
    Thanks for a thought provoking post!

    1. They definitely knew people were starving, but genocide is not simply absence of helping, it is actually committing a crime. Had they burnt crops and blockaded cities, then that would be genocide. Had the troops attacked civilians and wiped them out, that would be genocide. If they failed to respond to people who needed their help? That makes them guilty of many things, but genocide is not one of them.

      1. What makes it genocide (or not) is whether it’s done on the basis of race/ethnicity/nationality/religion, as opposed to just plain indifference. It’s the difference between a crime, here in America, and a hate crime. The latter is directed by . a group… like your commenter who thinks everyone that was ever successful must have been jewish, or like insecure guys who like to beat up people for being gay, or catholic, or black.
        If everyone living in Ireland fared as badly as Ireland’s Catholics during the famine then we can agree that genocide is an inaccurate term. That’s not my understanding of how the history unfolded.
        If however, the British government took advantage of a natural disaster to accelerate the cleansing of a perceived lesser race, much as my country men did with the original peoples here in America, then genocide is a fair term.
        I think that history is full of documented examples of what the British Government thought about the Irish, as well as our actions here, some still going on today, towards peoples red. black, brown and yellow, which I for one believe reflects our kinship with the English. It’s in the genes.
        It’s not pretty, and there’s much to not be very proud of, but recognizing it for what it was is important to understanding why people treat other people the way they sometimes do.

        1. Thank you for providing one of the more thoughtful comments. There is a case that the British exploited the situation and there was certainly a huge amount of racism at the time. Unfortunately it is hard to compare the fate of Irish Catholics versus non-Catholics as the overwhelmingly majority of people were Catholic. The few Protestants were landlords, professionals or concentrated among the industralised North East. So comparison along religion lines may disguise differences that had more to do with class.

          I think there is a difference between taking advantage of the situation and exacerbating it. The British did nothing to make the potato blight worse, they didn’t block or destroy supplies of food. In fact they tried to alleviate it through food relief. The crucial point is that while they did aim to change Irish society, they believed they were improving it. They did not want to destroy Irish society, but rather make it better (for an albeit smaller population).

  33. If you look into Irish History, as told by The Irish you find a recurring theme of other people being to blame for there problems. The seeds for the famine were sown in the Irish peoples refusal to diversify crops, there unwillingness to rase cattle as it takes constant care as opposed to waiting for potatoes to grow. There destroying the forests for firewood thus producing a bog land that was useless for grazing or growing. You will also find these piece loving people have been attempting genocide as defined in your post as far back as the massacre of the Protestants in 1641. Doubtless more could have been done during and before the blight, by both the British and Irish, or the French that also have a nearby coast line. What has never been fully explained is how the penniless, starved hoards managed to gain passage to the new world. However the cause of the blight was not a act of biological warfare, the crops failed, it happened across the world. I have yet to hear any African blame the outside world for any drought, or mass starvation, yet we live in a world where there are un used food mountains. There comes a time when you simply must stop crying “poor me, its all your fault”

    1. You make a good point in relation to diversifying crops- but there are certain certain staple crops which could not and did not thrive in Ireland.
      Linanne (2001) points to the early Irish diet before the 1600’s, which was primarily based on what can be described as “White meats”.
      These White meats can best be described as milk products- milk, cheese and butter (often eaten in the hand rather than placed on bread) and various meals based on oats- oatcakes and gruels supplemented with meat and vegetables.
      White-Lennon and Campbell (2004) also describe in detail the nature and significance of these “white meats” in the Irish diet, and describe them as “Banbhianna”, with particular emphasis on soured milk called Bainne claibair, or Bonnyclabber as the English described-a type of natural yoghurt. With the recent awareness of pro-biotics and digestive health drinks based on yoghurt or dairy cultures, this early Irish diet would appear to be very healthy indeed.
      Wheat for example, did not prosper, due to the damp climate and had little favour with the indigenous population, (Clarkson and Crawford 2001), hence the reliance on oats and barley, a hardier crop. Wheat bread was eaten, but mainly in richer households, or bought from a baker- while there is a history of baking in Ireland- it would have been very basic.
      Basically food in Ireland can be described as “Pre” and “Post” famine.
      The popularity of the potato made complete economic sense at the time- it was a “Superfood”- basically a 1/2 acre would provide tonnes of potatoes which would keep a family in food for most of the year. Before the introduction of the “lumper” Irish peasants worshiped cattle- with the same degree of use as the Masai or any other tribe. Pork was also a huge staple- to the extent that the pig was known as “the gentleman who pays the rent” (Sexton 2001) so while the Irish were reliant on potatoes, not everyone was- and perhaps were in a better position to survive.
      So while you are right in stating that the Irish did not diversify their crops- because of the nature of landholding and succession at the time, there was no real “collective” farming, and as a result, potatoes gained huge popularity- leading to over dependence on the crop.

      Clarkson, L, Crawford, M. (2001) Feast and Famine.a History of Food and Nutition in Ireland, 1500-1920
      White Lennon, B. Campbell, G.(2004) The Irish Heritage Cookbook.Lorenz Books.London.
      Linnane, J, (2000) A History of Irish Cuisine(Before and after the potato) http://wwwravensguard.org/prdunham/irish food.html
      Sexton. R.(2001) A little History of Irish Food. Kyle Cathie. Ltd.

      1. Well you’ve outdone yourself with that load of piffle. So in the nineteenth century, the Irish only had basic cookery skills and ate cheese in their hand instead of putting it on a plate. I cannot believe I am reading such rubbish.

          1. You’ve read these four books? Or did you simply copy and paste a tribute to the Irish intelligence by accident. If you haven’t got the brain power to see what level of condescension to which that kind of writing has descended too, I am not surprised that you suggest that my bile is of no use to the wall to wall love affair with the English which has been evident in the majority of the comments including your own; A more intelligent remark may have been that it was necessary to add a bit of balance to the proceedings. You must be English yourself I suppose. Sorry. that you have such a bloody history. I expect it’s the fault of those Irish.

            1. Enoch- I suggest you actually read some history books instead of inventing your own. I actually recommend Feast and Famine, a History of Food and Nutition in Ireland, 1500-1920, by Clarkson and Crawford. You might actually learn something about pre and post famine Ireland in terms of what people actually did eat. Humble pie wasn’t one of them!

              1. you asked me for proof of a remark I had made, I gave you one. I asked you if you had read those books, you give a smart-ass answer. I asked you to provide a proof of a famine you point me towards a cookery book. I have just been called anti-Semitic, for asking a simple question, which may have implied a contradiction of the Jewish tale. Here with you I’m in trouble for questioning the British tale. You have now started to refer to me as Enoch as a form of insult. In fact you seem to have made a game out of tacking down comments which I have made, you may have noticed that I am constantly attacked and yet I have not received as yet, one straight answer from any of you. I don’t write this stuff, I have researched it all. The Irish Jew has just presented me with a tale of the liberation of a camp in Germany, where there were many dead people and many dying.the living were skinny and undernourished, which is to be expected as there had been no food convoys for months, as the allies were bombing everything that moved. The Irish Jew had told me that this was a death camp, which his father had helped to liberate in Germany. Well why were there any survivors and why were they in prison garb? And are the questions which were mulled over when discussing the Irish Holocaust allowed, like for example. “Are you saying that these were all Jews ?” In one camp the figures of liberated people were out of 32,000 inmates, only 1,200 were Jews.” But then you know all this sort of detail don’t you? Because after all you read cookery books don’t you? So you see you are in good company, I wont worry you any more, you can go back to your Fanny Craddock and Johnny. I feel I have been put in my place by superior education and inherited knowledge or something like that. Adieu.

                1. “…and yet I have not received as yet, one straight answer from any of you.”

                  You sir, have received plenty of straight answers from more than a few people here. Your response has been to discount everything as somehow manipulated by the jews, who have had years to dissect and to ‘find the shreds of possibly anti-jewish intent’, or to dismiss them as ‘old and tired’. Lemme tell ya, I was alive when men went to the moon. I’ve talked to people absolutely convinced that it didn’t happen. It may be old and tired in your neck of the woods, but folks here will still throw down over it. Same with JFK… new documentary on tv and evidence for everybody to ponder. And don’t even try and tell my aunt that Elvis is dead.

                  From the guy whose father rode into town with the tanks and was gracious enough to share what he saw and heard and smelled firsthand, you dismiss as his religion bias. Referring to him time and again as ‘the Irish Jew” is tacky, and honestly weakens your credibility, as you make good points at times.

                  Then there’s the obsession with numbers… as if trying to say that only 3 million dead is somehow more excusable, and that since it might not be 6 million then it never happened, or is absolute proof of a multi-national worldwide conspiracy.

                  None are so blind as those who will not see. Tell me, how did you reconstruct the Einsatzgruppen? Or is that another “the jews had time to doctor the numbers” excuse.

                  I am not jewish, and after being here for over five decades it’s just incredibly hard for me to believe that ‘the jews’ run the world, and have fixed everybody’s history, and get all the perks. That sounds so much like the rednecks around here where I live that believe in ‘welfare queens’, decked out with layers of real gold bling and driving cadillacs to get their pedicures every week, all the while living off food stamps provided by the hard working white man. It’s crap. Bigoted crap, nothing more.

                  And besides that, I was drawn here to learn about the Irish. Eff the Nazi’s. Eff the bigots, of any nationality.

                  and Apologies for my virtual salty language.

                  1. Firstly the guy referred to himself as an Irish Jew, which was meant as a warning to say he has been upset by what I have said. He made remarks about anti-Semitism, well in my neck of the woods I spend my life with Semitic people, who take no offence should you question some aspect of the way they choose to live. I made no reply to Mr Kelly because he was so upset by my attitude that he requested no further correspondence with me I obliged him. What am I supposed to do,take his interpretation of some event which he has only heard about? I have seen the films of the people in these camps. which he described as a Death Camp, I asked him where it was located, because the Jews themselves have admitted that there were no Death Camps in Germany, therefore should this one have been in Germany, it was not a Death Camp. You I presume just took his word for it being a Death Camp.and left it at that. He ignored what I had said about all of the so-called death camps being in the East, failed to present his photos and presented a tale that was written by someone whom was not called Kelly. Is this a straight answer? I have asked in several comments, for the form of the Famine. Was it a drought, simple total failure of all crops, did all the animals die? Perhaps you could provide a straight answer to that. I did not ask to be told that some people think Elvis lives, that men did not walk on the moon or any of these things, so that was a straight answer to what? As for the Jews being responsible for everything I can produce links to any number of documents which were written by Jews confirming their intention of wiping out the German people.There is a letter from Eisenhower, who was a Jew, to his wife, expressing his total hatred of Germans. Now answer me this question, Why when I have made countless remarks about the English, I have not been called anti- English, yet the man whom refers to himself as a Jew,accuses me of anti-Semitism when in fact there is no such thing. It is a means of control over the goyim, a Jewish Rabbi said so, it is to make them feel guilty. There are a lot of myths floating around, one of them being that Khazar Jews are Semitic people, they are not, So if I have dismissed the straight answers to my questions I must have missed them,,perhaps you could let me have the names of those whom have told me all of the details of the famine so that I can check them out, instead of simply listing Elvis and the moon landing and JFK etc.

                    1. Eisenhower was a Jew? Call 60 Minutes, call CNN! I’m gonna be so rich…

                      … oh wait, he wasn’t? Not even close? Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite background? Baptized Presbyterian? Oh. And I thought I had the scoop on the first and only jewish president of the united states.

                      Why did I think so? Cuz me mate ‘nochered said so, online! He was real insistent on it, too.

                      Now I’m convinced that you are a troll, here to object to everything and agree to nothing, no longer deserving of a response.

                      I hope you find peace…

                    2. Call whomsoever you like Eisenhower was a Swedish Jew. He was not the only Jewish President, but you can check out the others for yourself. I find it just a little bit tedious dealing with people whom find that to refer to a man as an Irish Jew to be some sort of insult, including the man himself. Would anyone have noticed had I called him an Irish Catholic or an Irish Protestant? However still no answer from you either, just a few more quips. So just to sum up, all of you are allowed to,play around with the truth or otherwise of the Irish Holocaust, while it is forbidden to make the slightest remark about the Jewish one, so I must operate at a disadvantage, so be it. Nobody has produced the slightest piece of evidence in support of a famine because there is none to be found. The author of the post from the word go made his position clear, he also stated that the Irish in Ireland did not think that a genocide had been intended, however he too has asserted his acceptance of the Jewish holocaust. I have been associated with Enoch Powell a man whom was accused of racism in the UK, so there you have it, I am guilty without one shred of evidence in support of the verdict. The man whom referred to himself as an Irish Jew has left a sweet little note on another comment thanking them for calling me names. Thank you one and all.

                    3. In my post I wrote, “I am both Irish and Jewish and believe the antisemitism that has been expressed is reprehensible.” I did not refer to myself as an “Irish Jew,” that came directly from yourself, & by the context of your post, yes, you meant it to be derogatory. And you played this derision through several posts. As I worship a Jew, in that I am a Christian, and both my Irish and Jewish ancestors were of the finest of humans, I accept in solidarity the term “Irish Jew,” for both these downtrodden people groups, but I denounce your defaming heart and dogma of hate you scurrilously weave into your deluded ramble. I reply really only to thank those that have noticed your derision and called you on it. As I now must count you as an enemy, I am required to pray for you. So if those prayers are heard and I count that they will, this whole ordeal may be counted as benevolence to your misguided soul. Perhaps your Damascus road is coming up?

                    4. You made an assertion about something which you claimed had happened to Jews. I am expected to accept what you say. The slightest criticism evokes cries of anti-Semitism. On the other hand where the Irish Holocaust is concerned those whom comment can say what they like, to the point of suggesting that the English were trying to improve us. That anything that may have given the impression of having caused us harm was an accident or lack of attention, it was for our own good, whatever. When I on the other hand make a few remarks about the Jewish side of things, as usual the sky falls down. No mistakes in the reporting of that one is there? We cannot ask for evidence about what Hitler is supposed to have done can we? That speaks for itself doesn’t it? Well during the course of my comments, I asked for evidence of a Famine and I asked for evidence that Hitler intended to exterminate Jews. Neither was produced, why is it different, as in not allowed, to ask for evidence of Hitler’s intentions but OK to ask for evidence of a Famine which is the English excuse for the Irish Holocaust? Several commenters suggested that there had to be evidence of intent for genocide to exist, so what is wrong with asking for it? Is that where you sensed this anti-Semitism? Why I am being accused of denying the true extent of the Holocaust, and as some sort of blackguard for calling you an Irish Jew, not knowing of course that you possessed heightened powers of perception which would detect something sinister in my tone. For what its worth I made a point of saying that as a means of suggesting that you were coming from both sides of the debate. However it becomes clear that your mind is made up on one side with no room for doubt. I on the other hand have discovered so many discrepancies in the Jewish account of the war that I no longer have much faith in any part of it. Anyway Mr Kelly, not to worry I have been abused by the best of them. I know when I am on the right track when for example you choose to tell me not to continue the conversation instead of giving a solid defence of your case. I’ll be honest Mr Kelly, I’m not too moved by Jewish complaints of the past, I’m more interested in their behaviour with the children of Gaza and the White Phosphorus which they are burnt to death by. Cries of what about the holocaust ring just a bit hollow in the face of that.

                    5. Enoch- try as you might you will never convince anyone here that a word you have spouted is the truth. It is YOUR truth and you are entitled to believe it. The fact that its a crock of unsubstantiated, barely disguised anti-semitism, anti British bullshit, shouldn’t get in your way.

                      Keep up the good work… Tesla was assassinated by Otto Skorzeny?
                      Ike was a Jew? and the “proof”? this is a section of the web link you suscribe to as being the truth?

                      [Quote “The Zionists are a crock of fakery. They are not Jews. They are deceptive insidious, crafty liars. These people are the NAZIS. They are disguised from their true identity. They are white collar criminals. Wolves dressed in sheeps clothing. They are the spawns of the devil himself. They can no longer hide THE TRUTH about their past crimes, future evil intentions, or their motives to control and conquer the world with their evil plans, YOU can no longer HIDE THE TRUTH ABOUT WHO YOU ARE from ALL OF US. WE THE PEOPLE KNOW THE TRUTH AND WE KNOW WHO ALL OF YOU ARE THANKS TO THE INTERNET… end of quote]

                      In terms of a debate you have nor convinced me or anyone else as far as I can see that, the British systematically starved the Irish to death. All I have seen is barely disguised vitriol, wrapped in pseudo historical gibberish spouted by morons.

                      Can you show proof that Hitler ordered the Genocide of Jews please. You must have evidence to support your truth against my anti English anti Semitic crap, so lets see it; Real proof of course, not the sort of proof which I have provided which was not good enough for you. For what its worth, French TV reported the capture of two British Agents, disguised as Arabs, with bombs in their car. They were stopped at a police check-point, they killed a policeman while attempting to escape. They were arrested and taken to a Police Station. The British were informed which is why they knew the men were where they were; There is a photograph of the men, in custody, they are not in uniform. The British were allowed to interview the men, whom were being held for murder. The British forced their way into the Police Station and recovered the men. It was not a rescue, it was a gaol-break. Can you show me where the British tried these men for that murder? Of course not but you will try to imply that the British were justified because of whatever you say without evidence of, “something that happened in Ireland”. Just as you now send me a tale headed there was no drought. I already know there was no drought, having said so in many comments so why are you telling me? What I asked was, “Of what was the FAMINE composed” We now know it was not drought, if you say so, was it wholesale collapse in the manner of CCD in the bees world perhaps?

                    7. Enoch, I have to admire your trenchant but tiresome attitude.
                      You mentioned the drought. There was no drought.
                      The British for all their faults in Ireland (of which there were many) did not deliberately starve our people into submission.
                      Certainly the policy of the time in economic terms was laissez-faire, and with the benefit of hindsight, it was the poorest possible reaction to the growing famine.
                      Famine breeds disease, and it was disease which killed the majority of people affected by the famine. In pre-1845 Ireland famines were by no means unknown – those caused by a combination of war and poor harvests in the early 1650s and arctic weather conditions in 1740-41 killed as high a share of much smaller populations (Lenihan 1997; Dickson 1998) – but those that struck during the half-century or so before the Great Famine were mini-famines by comparison.
                      The excess death toll of the “great famine”-a million is an informed guess, since in the absence of civil registration excess mortality cannot be calculated directly (Mokyr 1985; Boyle and Ó Gráda 1986).
                      At the time there was little or no treatment available, especially on the scale that happened in Ireland. There was little or no medical help or proven large scale medical experience in dealing with outbreaks of Typhus, Dysentery andTyphoid fever on the scale experienced. Antibiotics were not even invented at the time.
                      The late E.R.R. Green (1984: 273-4) described the famine as ‘primarily a disaster like a flood or an earthquake’, by way of implying that there was little that state intervention could have done to save lives.
                      Its easy to point the finger at the British- did they do enough? No
                      Could they have managed it better? Yes
                      Are they responsible for all of the deaths? No

                      Source material: Cormac Ó Gráda, University College Dublin (2004)

                      Click to access WP04.25.pdf

                    8. So once again you deny the Irish Holocaust, despite the evidence which was provided on the Noraid page, which listed the tons of food which was available which if nothing else shows that there was no Famine. I see no proof of famine in the the article which you have discovered which I have already referred to myself, And still no link to Hitler and his intention to exterminate the Jews., Sorry I did not mean to use the word Jew honest I didn’t I had no idea until you pointed out to me that it was an insult. I will try to find another word, perhaps Khazar will do. Well keep plugging away, you have denied the work of Coogan Hogarty and all the rest of them, while being still unable to find the reality of a “Famine” A famine in Ireland is the same as a famine anywhere else, we all know what a famine is. Show me news reports of the Famine and its extent or some such evidence, don’t keep going off in another direction, the question has become, like the gas chambers if you like. Nobody has ever found one, but we know they must be there somewhere don’t we? So keep digging away you might find evidence of a few dry days in Ireland if you’re lucky.

                    9. It’s not my truth mate, it’s your lack of comprehension of truth. You are attempting to support, people whom not only slaughtered the Irish in large numbers, they were active everywhere. The Jews were in control in Russia, they slaughtered 65 million Christians, we don’t hear too much about that one do we? The British starved several million people to death in Bengal, keeping their food for soldiers whom going to attack Burma, whom finally had no need of the food. 1,000,000 people were starved to death in Iraq by sanctions, excused by the hunt for Blair’s WMD. But you know all of this and you stand in support of all of the slaughter imaginable apart that is from what we are told Hitler is responsible for, is that YOUR truth? Take a look at this link, I’ m sure it will provide you with a lot of quick quips. http://www.noraid.com/Holocaust.htm

                2. Enoch-
                  You proved nothing- you showed a link to a spurious website, which showed that 2 undercover soldiers in Basra were rescued by British troops. Perhaps they had learned from experience in NI what happens when you don’t. I’m still waiting for your “bombshell” link to the “proven” SAS involvement in the Dublin Bombings.

                  You then describe the work of noted scholars from Queen’s University, D.I.T. and two well respected journalists and food historians as cookery books!
                  You deny proven, accepted facts of history, and deny the full extent of the Holocaust.

                  You dared an earlier poster to come up to North Wall and “talk your rubbish about the English down there”…I’d dare you to try and defend your comments in certain parts of London, Brooklyn or Tel Aviv.

                  You refer to a poster as the “Irish Jew” in a manner which is utterly contemptible.

                  Adieu indeed, the sooner the better.

      2. Your knowledge of Irish cookery (and farming) is excellent, however the ability to grow different crops or rase cattle, or lack thereof does not explain (a) there part on creating a bogland by over felling trees (b) the genocide of the Protestants in 1641 or (c) there ability to pay for what was obviously a expensive passage to the new world. Like most things in “Irish” history, things just don’t add up.

        1. Hi fortytwo6x7..
          Lets take the first point. The Irish did raise cattle, and the pre famine diet was mostly dairy based, supplemented by small amounts of meat and cereals. The Irish used to bleed cattle and drink the blood mixed with milk for sustenance as well.
          When the potato arrived in Ireland it was originally a bedding plant, and did not thrive in our damp climate. It was only when they found a resistant type of potato that thrived in damp climates that the “Irish” potato gained popularity. Potatoes were generally part boiled- not fully cooked, so they could be digested slowly and last longer.(Soyer1854) Not all the potatoes were for human consumption- the majority were for feed for pigs and cattle.
          Second point- Ireland’s topography was of dense forests,mountains, plains and bogs- all naturally occurring. A lot of forests were cleared but not just by farmers. The Normans & British cleared a lot of the forest to build their ships over the years of occupation. Woods near the sea or on navigable rivers provided timber for shipbuilding, although this never became a major industry. The manufacture of barrel staves became a significant industry. It is said that in 1625, all the wines of France and Spain were casked in barrels of Irish Oak, taken from the river valleys of the southwest. For timber to be exploited profitably, a wood had to be near a port so that the timber could be easily transported to it.
          Land ownership- after the Norman and British occupation land was rented to tenant farmers and succession laws meant subdivision of the land- so instead of having large farms, you had many small landholders eking out a living. This was further exacerbated after the Cromwellian period. So land holders only had small plots- what was the most economic crop? Potatoes, alternated with barley or Oats. Wheat or Corn did not thrive in the climate and was never an economic crop.
          People left the land who could- they sold possessions, their animals, their furniture- clothes- -some women sold their hair, anything that could be sold to get out was sold. However those who were in arrears in rent had to settle their debts or be forced of the land with nothing.People in the poor houses were also given their fare to America or Canada, depending on the circumstances of the person and very much at the whim of the poor relief committee.
          1641- yes there was a massacre in 1641 of English and Scottish settlers in Ireland- by rebels who had been forced at sword point to leave their homes. I don’t think we have to go into detail of every massacre by either side during those times, as we are still coming to terms with it hundreds of years later.

          1. The point about trees is well taken. Almost all of Europe had been essentially deforested by the time of exploration, going back thousands of years to the times when they figured out how to smelt iron. Isn’t it funny (not humourous) how the ‘ignorant Irish’ have been blamed for not knowing how to manage the land and resources. The same is said (with the same underhanded sneer) about Blacks and indigenous people here in America.

            Wood, not gold, is the main reason that the Europeans got so excited about the New World. A squirrel could go from the Atlantic ocean to the Mississippi River (almost half way across the Continent) and never touch the ground. At the time of Columbus, gold was a rumour, but wood was everywhere.

            1. The Native American were managing there resources just fine until your forefathers arrived and decided to take there land. The war of attrition was slowing down progress, so a decision was taken that it would be much easer to kill the buffalo and starve the natives to submission. Somehow the “Irish” got all the credit for making America and none of the blame for that genocide. No blame for driving the natives off there land, no blame for killing the cattle. Strange similarity, Irish arrive in America, take the natives lands, and the story as told by hollywood (and lets face it, that is how people see the “cow boy” “Indian” thing) the cowboys are good and the natives are bad, the natives lye, don’t keep there word, don’t work. The same people that had arrived in Ireland from Europe, worked there way north until they came across the Pict tribes, waged war with them. Time passed and Pict became Ulster Scot, they drove large numbers of these across the water to Scotland. A land named for the egyptian wife (Scotta) of the King of Ulster when they went across the water with the stone upon which every king of ulster was crowned, there descendants known as the descendants of Scotta, from which we get Scotland. The true indigenous Ulster people that had fled regrouped and returned only to be called “planters” by the settlers from Europe who have ever since waged a campaign to remove these people, Thats a attempt a genocide that has lasted thousands of years ! How do they manage to get the world believing they are kind poor people ? Then when there here. As for Africa, I believe the the resource problem came after they moved from hunter gather to farm and the associated village life. I will stress this is a opinion and i have no in-depth study to back this up but i believe had they stayed hunter gather there population would have kept pace with there resources. For the record i will also state i believe the remaining hunter gather tribes in Africa and Australia have a superior life to ours, much better to work to feed yourself and your family, much better to have the strong extended family, much better to have villagers dependant on each other than do what us “civilised” people do. Work to gain a profit for another and pay tax to a government.

              1. Interesting points, fortytwo6x7…

                I’d submit that the native americans were not ‘managing their resources’, they were co-existing with them. Their belief… the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. It’s a distinctly un-European view.

                You are right to point out that “the great buffalo hunts” in the American west were designed to starve the locals and prompt them to move. I see parallels with the english response to the irish potato famine. I say “potato famine” to hopefully keep my friend enochered from feeling the need to weigh in that there was food around to be had. I am sure there was too. Nonetheless, the potato was the main food crop for many, and the blight really did decimate the crop for three years in a row, starving the lower economic segments of irish society. I for one firmly believe that more could have been done to save those who were starving. Whether the omission to do so amounts to genocide… is subject to vigorous debate. Thanks again, Robert Nielsen!

                It would be nice, from my standpoint, if the Irish had “gotten all of the credit for making America”, but alas, that’s not the case. America is the great melting pot… first we trash the new comers, cut them, dice them, make them mush…. then after a generation or two we call them Americans. Irish, Italians, Poles, Chinese… it makes little difference. They were treated like scum when they came. That’s one reason why we have so many ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ in our cities. Immigrants had to band together both to find a welcome place (not in MY neighborhood!) and to survive the ongoing hostility against them.

                It is for those reasons that the irish, or italians or poles… do not get the credit for the bad things done here. Americans did them. Americans lied, swindled and cheated natives out of their land. Americans took enemy combatants prisoners while under flags of truce or parlay. Americans treated other Americans like animals, all the while spouting “all men are created equal”. I’m a big believer in genetic memories, so I blame our Saxon genes. If you are English, you can too!

                The migrations that you describe have always fascinated me, as one of my Irish forbears has been noted to have come from Scotland (with an already Irish name (Blake) to County Tyrone in 1642, and other accounts have some Irish going to Scotland before that. My hope has always been that we are originally Irish, but we toured Scotland for awhile before moving back to the green. Romantic, eh?

                It is interesting also to note that relatively inexpensive DNA studies of family members can now pretty much pinpoint the part of Europe (or Asia or Africa) one’s family originated. I haven’t done it yet, but feel sure (ok, hope) that my father’s family originated in Wales. I know that my Mom’s came from Ireland (Blakes and Connolly’s).
                No doubt, there’s English in there too. No offense, y’all, but I claim Irish/Welsh, and Celtic, not Anglo-Saxon. (There’s those bad Saxon genes again!)

                As for primitive cultures having it better (talk about romantic) … wouldn’t we all like to live in Eden? That being said, I’ll take anti-biotics and x-rays over dying from measles and whooping cough despite the best dancing of the witch doctor.

                1. Hello, I will start with “managing there resources” bit. I used those words mainly because you had. The Native Americans did indeed live with the land, and believe the land owned them. They brought this belief with them from Mongolia when they crossed the frozen desert into what we now call Canada and worked there way down. This belief is also present in druidism/paganism, however you like to name my faith. It is hard to tell what exactly each sect believed because Christianity did such a good job of removing most of it. However it is clear the God(s) lived in land sea and air, and were to be appeased, the land owned them. There was effort made to promote harmony between land, tribe and God. Add water, air and land that gives a trilogy of trilogies. I digress…..The land owning the people is also common to Australian natives, interestingly so is the trilogy. It would seam the People owning the land is more a Christian idea than a European one, that book says “God made man the ruler of the beasts” or something close enough to mean the same thing.
                  As to the migrations, the son of the King of Ulster and his Egyptian bride Scotia departed Ulster in the third century BC. It is unclear how manny traveled with them but just those two is not feasible. This was not a total migration, in much the same way as the Irish did not all go to the New World, so we have a people expanding and holding territory both sides of the Irish Sea. These people traded and intermingled, obviously there would be rivalries between families but the notion that they were the same body of people, the language and (dare i use the word culture) stayed recognizable. There is still more common ground between the people of Ulster and across 11 miles of water to Scotland than the 90 miles of land to Dublin. The Gaels you believe you descended from did not arrive in Ireland until 436 AD (thats three and a half centuries of Picts in Ulster before that invasion of Gaels). It is around this time Ulster warriors began getting buried standing up in bog lands, shields and spears facing South, just as Cuchulian, the Hound of Ulster tied himself to a pillar and his sword to his hand with the last of his strength so he would die on his feet facing the “Men of Ireland” (its amazing what you can do in a myth)

                  What is not publicized about the blight is the houses that had food sharing with those that did not, regardless of religion. There are too many stories of Protestant feeding catholic at the beginning of the ecological disaster and then being fed by catholics near the end of it for these to be discounted. There are fishing villages that throughout “the troubles” were mixed and lived in harmony. When they were asked to explain this anomaly they simply point to the sea “we fight that”

                  Farming caused a population growth, the population growth caused currency and industry, currency and industry caused crowding, crowding caused infections, infections caused “proper medicine” it is irreversible, but I for one would take my chances hunting and gathering, however that says more about my experience of “civilized society” than anything else, I have not found it very civilized. That last paragraph truly reflects my tag line “the world through the eyes of a male domestic abuse victim” One certainty in life is we will all get shat upon from a grate hight at some stage, bye for now.


                  Forty Two

                    1. Ahh, I was wondering when the discussion would turn to the philosophy of War. Enochered and WilliamWallace were touching upon it, but never went there. I will.

                      “All is fair in love and war”. Proverb.
                      “War is Hell.” William Tecumseh Sherman.

                      Where does one draw the line between armies and civilians, between enemy combatants and the women and children with whom they live and hide? In the time of Frederick the Great and Napoleon it was perhaps not so hard. Then again…

                      I read stories about Cromwell’s army marching women and children off of a cliff in an effort to “cleanse the land from the vermin which infested it”.

                      English cavalry were noted to have targeted civilians, burning plantations and churches with congregations inside in order to hasten the demise of our revolution.

                      We have previously discussed here that striking a blow at the food supply, whether it be potato supplements or buffalo, is an effective way to strike a blow at the enemy without appearing to be striking a blow at all.

                      The English conquered Ireland, making the Irish a conquered people and Ireland a War Zone. The fact that some never stopped fighting does indeed make them criminals to the British. Our Washington, Adamses, Jefferson and Franklin were criminals to the British as well, and would have been hung (or forced to starve themselves in a British gaol for the concept of Liberty) if caught. Maybe this helps you understand why some Americans take the side of the IRA. We relate.

                      “The winner writes the history, the loser writes the songs. The Irish have many, many songs.” I didn’t write that, and cannot remember the historian who did. MacManus maybe. It bears largely on my point though.

                      Both sides in the Irish Troubles have been shown to have targeted civilians. Why is it that one side are terrorists and criminals and the other not? As for Bobby Sands, how many criminals do you know that would literally starve themselves to death… for a principle? Think about that for a second. Sands, like Che Guevara, is a terrorist to the mainstream, yet something very different to others. They are both criminals and heroes at the same time.

                      Just as an aside, we in America were told that the Troubles were about Catholics and Protestants not getting along and killing each other in the name of the same God. (How stupid is that?) Given that Americans have freedom of and from religion, we naturally recoil from that type of anger, and given that Americans fought to make our own destiny and won, we naturally support others who would do the same; whose version of the truth… the one that said that it was all about religion, not self-determination… whose version might that have been? I’m thinking it wasn’t very close to the truth.

                      Truth is always the first casualty of War.

                      Taking an objective viewpoint, admittedly hard to do when family has fallen… I believe that those who consider themselves to be at war… to be at War. While I personally do not believe in targeting civilians, that philosophy is in the distinct minority when it comes to history and war. Every major participant in war has targeted the enemy civilian population. “Taking out their resources” amounts to the burning of Atlanta by Sherman as well as the fire bombing of Dresden by the Allies. “Removing the will to fight” is both Hiroshima AND the IRA campaign against public places. If the UK government had decided to abandon Northern Ireland to the Irish, the IRA would be the equivalent of our Founding Fathers… revered, honored, memorialized. As it is (they lost), they are seen as hateful criminals. They are both and they are neither.

                      You mentioned 9/11, but a better example might be how Ireland supported the Nazi’s. Good move, strategically, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, bad move historically. Really terrible PR. Not that different really than Mr. Blair’s support of our War, although I believe history will judge it more favorably than supporting Nazi’s. (and I believe that some of you should cut him a break… it wasn’t his idea, after all, and sometimes you have to go just because you’re best mates are going.)

                      As for 9/11… there is a group(s) in the middle east who consider themselves to be at War with the West. War is Hell. Are they criminals? If we win and write the history, yes. If we lose, then they are Patriotic Martyrs, dying for their country and god just as all Founding Fathers did. In today’s environment of neither winners nor losers, like Sands and Guevara, they are both.

                      What is the answer? Brits said it best… (kudos to the Brits!)
                      All you need is Love. (John and Paul)
                      Love Love Love. (John and Paul)
                      Peace, Love and Understanding. (Elvis (the British one))

                      I’d love to change the world. (RIP, Alvin Lee).

                      I pray for all of those here who have lost family to war. It’s not fair.

                    1. thank you so much, it really means a lot to me, i started writing poetry about four months ago, to make sense of life before and after my escape, and I only started writing, what ever you call this type (article ?) about two months ago so to have it enjoyed is surprising and encouraging, honestly, thank you :-)\


                I’ll also submit that there is little difference between villagers dependent on each other, and paying a tax to a government that provides services to those that pay. It’s still being dependent on each other, especially in times of need or disaster. Many here in America conveniently forget that WE are the government, and it is us.

                1. Personally i believe it is the same across the world, the government forget they serve the people. In times of disaster i think your government can be found wanting, I believe if New Orleans was a self sufficient village it would have rectified the problems a lot faster. I STATE CLEARLY I do not live in your country and do not have enough exposure to KNOW this, and it may be half hope, but it is what i think.

                  1. You are right, despite not living here in America, you know that sometimes our government does not respond as it should… I would add either here at home (domestically) as well as overseas.

                    My point about “us” being the government, while sounding grand, really is an indictment against, not the government, but us as individuals. Whenever disaster strikes, neighbors help neighbors in a “there, but for the grace of God, go I” decision tree. When a non-neighbor is charged with deciding how to help… then other considerations rise to the front. “How much??” “Shouldn’t they have been better prepared?” “Why don’t they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?”

                    Although we are a melting pot, one of our layers is decidedly patrician and looks down on the rest of us. They have engineered our financial systems, tax systems and regulatory systems to benefit themselves at our expense. Like I said, patricians. Royalty without the the blood or respect.

                    Another layer is overly religious, and they would use the government to require not only their version of the Lords’ Prayer (certainly not the Catholic one, nor one that would in any way satisfy the Jewish), but what amounts to Christian Sharia law. They call it Dominionism and it is way more entrenched than many give it credit for. We live in a land that is by law free, both from and for, Religion.

                    We also have our rural working class folks, many of whom in my area of the country are descendants of Scot-Irish immigrants, mostly Protestants. They look down on the other working class layers, blacks and hispanics who have the same legal standing, just a different skin color and accent. Those three groups, the patricians, the evangelicals and the bigots… have banded together against what the rest consider to be progress, and are today’s Republican GOP, one of our two major ruling parties. It is an unholy alliance, and we are all, them and us, suffering today as a result.

                    When they are the majority, compassion and charity are out the window. That’s largely what happened with hurricane Katrina. That’s also why it took months for them to decide to help after Super Storm Sandy devastated the northeast of our Country. Both were a shame and are a black mark against our record.

                    But it’s not the government… it’s us. We elected them. We sent their sick philosophies to the ultimate decision making body. They reflect us to a large degree.
                    As one of our better cartoons used to say, “We have met the enemy… and it is us.”

                    Here’s a link to my related blog piece for those who may be interested.

                    1. oh, thanks for the link, i was trying to get o it but only got as far as the avatar thing. There is a very good reason you elect the parties you do, there is no other option. You have two parties, that is a illusion of choice. What you pick is not the party that best represents your views, but the one that has the fewest differences on major policy. The political parties long ago realised the way to gain power was to offend the least amount of people, not do what most people want. They use the press and media to confirm that elusion. Its like McDonalds or Burger King, that is a choice, of hamburger. The main priority of the government is to collect taxes, and encourage business. More business, more tax, more tax bigger army, bigger army bigger influence, simple really. looking after the people is at the bottom of there priority list, example. You want to go to a shop, you need to drive there, therefore you need to park your car. If the Government, represented by the City Council were putting your needs first, there would be free parking, that is what you need. What do the businesses need ? The shops need a steady supply of customers, which means a steady supply of parking space. I take it you have two hour max stay no return within four hrs or something like that at a meter ? that facilitates the shop, not the customer. The customer may want to stay longer. You have car parks for this type of stay, the company that runs the car park runs the meters. Use our service or we will fine you, again looks after the business, not the customer. This is replicated in a thousand different ways. The illusion works, diversion, distraction and misdirection. Ninety percent of people day dream through life and question nothing, this clip shows how things in plane view are not noticed. i will reply to the other one later (and get a read at your blog 🙂 )
                      Bye for now


                      Forty Two

        2. ” there ability to pay for what was obviously a expensive passage to the new world.” it wasnt expensive. very cheap in fact. Cheaper than feeding.

  34. I am an American, but my great grandmother was Irish born & raised. I don’t know of this was a “planned genocide,” it served a purpose, from the viewpoint of those who didn’t like the Irish. What I find interesting is that the potato isn’t even indigenous to Ireland!!

  35. I find the article having pointed the finger at say the British, the ambivalence of this categorization is as all the British were aligned to this process, I suggest the so called British were more or less the 1% elites, whom were the club that run a terrorist organization, this became known under varied names such as “The British Empire” the tyrannical onslaught brought about by technological advantage and finance obtained through the usual channels, as this violence perpetrated globally produced enormous wealth for the few, this club is operating today as in the past, the main change is the subtlety in the way it operates.
    As the reader is well aware of Cameron belonging to the Bullingdon Club, reflects the self confidence of the ultimate and arrogant attitude that makes up the ruling class in its violence and vindictive nastiness, this wealth being so vast, produces this type of subhuman being, it is not to the credit of the British in having a leader as such whom although well spoken of a type of jingo, is this not a reflection of bankruptcy spiritually of the British?
    A nation who the British police force acquiesce to the power structure and become its servant, paid for by the tax payer to keep the wealthy rich, these are the conditions that create injustice and British history is littered with such calamities, such as the Irish potato famine, in the main the history of the British Elite and Royals, are a sort of patch work of foreign interests, not only Jewish, but German infiltration, having more or less subdued the the older established Britons, to the extent that they are touchy as to questioning the status quo.

  36. The majority of people in giving a comment for whatever reason
    being anti british and in main if the truth be told are Anti English
    having no true understanding of history / people whom in reality
    live in the “Twilight Zone” victims of anti english propaganda as
    anti english brainwashing. The question that need being asked
    is whom is behind the plot to belittle England it’s people’s ? what
    becomes their gain in the accusations agin England it’s people’s.

    ps / A most definate long term “Twilight Zoner” is (suzysomething)
    it clear from her comment she’s not dealing with a full set of cards.

    1. Who is behind defaming the English?
      I got mine beginning from my mother through her grandparents, whose grandparents came from County Tyrone and had not much good to say about how the Irish were treated by the British, although they were old tales by the time I was hearing them. They were Protestants too.
      Or, you could start with Cromwell I guess… of course, for a more recent rendition Mr. Churchill (a hero here too) has a number of notable quotes regarding his opinion of the non-Anglo peoples of the Empire. The one that sticks with me is “The Irish are dogs, incapable of governing themselves”. Both are history. Neither need apply to the British today unless you insist on persisting in the theory of your own racial superiority, or you take it personally that some of your forbears may have done bad things.
      In America we know (although like you many of us don’t like to admit it) that bad things have been done throughout history in the name of Country. Some people here want to revise all of that, to white-wash away (forgive the pun) all of the distasteful things we’ve done, like slavery and the KKK and the assassination of another country’s democratically elected leader. That’s just wrong. Slavery happened. Jim Crow happened. The Inquisition happened. The near extermination of the Irish happened, starting hundreds of years before the famine. (and the Jews weren’t responsible for any of them, BTW)
      If we don’t learn from history we’re doomed to repeat it.

    2. I suppose it was by accident that the English Hanged Drew and Quartered your namesake and just through absent mindedness not in anger they slaughtered the Scottish at Culloden. Remember Bonnie Prince Charlie. And of course the English did not mean it seriously when they referred to the Scottish as arrant scum. And the million or so Iraqi’s whom were recently slaughtered do not count as real people, no more than do the Afghans. In fact it is something of an honour to be attacked and robbed by the English. The Iraqi whom was beaten to death by English Squaddies in Iraq, just managed to gasp, “I enjoyed every minute of it.” before he died. There is no excuse for the English, they have never changed. I was hoping that someone might let me know what form the famine in Ireland took. Mr Nielsen is unable to provide an answer.

      1. enochered, your comments are all over the place and you keep changing the subject in every other sentence. What does either my post or the comments have to do with Scotland or Afghanistan?

        I’m reading and re-reading your comment trying to find what you mean or what you are trying to say, but I can’t. Each sentence is unrelated to the last and there is no coherence at all. What are you talking about?

        1. Excuse me I did not mean to be so incoherent, I thought that I was replying to a man whom calls himself William Wallace, whom was a Scottish hero whom was tortured and killed by the British. There are several hundred Iraqi’s waiting for justice after being tortured by the British. William Wallace in his comment suggested that the British would not behave in this manner, therefore they could not be accused of the .Irish Genocide. I was simply pointing out that the British are capable of anything. The Squaddies whom battered an innocent man to death, were British men, whom many of your commenters believe to be above that sort of behaviour.In Ireland, the British battered many Irish people to death. I supplied you with a link to Chris Hogarty’s account of the Irish Holocaust. He provided you with Ships Logs, listing the cargoes of food which left Ireland under armed guard, on route to England. He also provided the names of the regiments which were guarding the food all across Ireland. You were not satisfied with this evidence because he did not list enough of the lists or some such nonsense, he pointed you to the source, why not take a look yourself, the documents exist. You have still not replied to my question as to the form of the “Famine” I would suggest that you had ever even thought about it from that angle you have just accepted the English excuse. Just as when you asked the question as to “Why did God not stop the Holocaust?” I suggested to you, that he did not stop it because he could find no trace of it..You immediately accused me of being a holocaust denier, I in turn accused you of being a holocaust denier because of your position over the Irish Holocaust. You are still trying to justify YOUR position on this Holocaust yet you have not provided a single documented proof that Hitler ever had any intention of exterminating Jews. Because no such document exists. This God whom you do not believe in has actually outsmarted you. He has presented evidence in favour of the claims of an Irish Holocaust, however the Jewish claims are evaporating on a daily basis. I ask you again, can you please supply at least as much evidence of a Jewish Holocaust, not eye-witness evidence which you have rejected as mere hearsay in your rebuttal of the Irish Holocaust, give a link to government documents as Chris Hogarty did in his well researched pamphlet.

          1. @Enochered, you make great points about looking at facts – then dissolve them yourself.
            There is ample evidence of German laws singling out and persecuting Jews before the war; there is ample evidence that Jews were massacred by Nazi’s for being Jewish in Germany and Poland; there is ample evidence of the Jewish concentration camps, slave labor, mass graves, Dr. Mengele and ovens. There is ample evidence of Jewish survivors tattooed with serial numbers who give eyewitness accounts of why there were 6 million less of them in 1945.
            You don’t have to like Jews to recognize what was done, just as you don’t have to be native born Irish – or Scot or Indian or African or Aborigine or other indigenous people- to recognize what has been done to them.

            Many of you, williamwallace for sure, seem to be taking history personally. You cannot. History happened, we need to learn from it, whether or not it is insulting to today’s sensibilities.

            My recent ancestors fought for the South in the American Civil War. They were poor Irish immigrant farmers, not one of them a slave owner – yet they fought for the side that wanted slaves. From their standpoint, maybe, they were fighting for local self determination, for the freedom from a far away government to tell them what they could do. Many southern men went to war for no other reason than the North sent troops down here. For them it was self defense and honor. Ultimately though, it was all for a dishonourable purpose, and it pains me to think that my family at the time would support such action, as much as if my family were in the Black and Tans (another of Mr. Churchill’s ideas I think).

            Nonetheless, they did actively fight for the South for the right to keep slavery. In the decades after the war, It is possible that some of my family burned crosses and lynched innocent men for their color. I hate that for what is, but cannot deny that those things happened and that some of my family may have unfortunately participated.

            Along the same lines, I love my Country, but cannot deny that America has, on occasion, done some shameful things. I raise my voice when I find them, in hopes that we learn from our misdeeds and do not repeat them. And not unlike williamwallace, I sometimes get my ‘irish up’ as we say in America, when I hear others knocking my country. That’s in our genes too. What is important to remember is to defend the good… and recognize the bad for what it is.

            It is the refusal to recognize the facts of history that doom us to revisit it’s horrors upon ourselves and our children.

            1. Can you please point me towards this ample evidence. Of course many people died in Concentration Camps mostly from typhus, in order to prevent the spread of Typhus, on arrival at the camps, peoples heads were shaved, they were showered and disinfected of fleas, which spreads Typhus, they given fresh clean clothes to wear and then put to work., Please explain why if they died in the hands of the English, it was by accident or lack of thought, as many Commenters have averred, they have even suggested that the English were trying to improve the Irish, with the best of intentions at heart. Yet when it comes to the Germans, well that is a totally different tale is it not?
              Now just like all the rest of those whom have no real information to impart, you repeat the age old tale which we have all been fed, as if I do not know it. Where is all this information? Do not just tell me it exists, tell me where. We know people died in the Camps, but not one victim whom was gassed, has ever, I repeat ever been reported, or discovered. It is all based on very selective “Eye Witness” reports. The Jews themselves no longer talk of Gas Chambers, because they have never been able to produce one. When they tried Djimjanjuk recently they were intent on accusing him of killing 28,000 Jews, using exhaust fumes from diesel lorries and tanks. They rapidly changed their minds when it was pointed out to them that diesel fumes do not kill. there has been only one recorded death from diesel fumes, that was a man whom spent the night in a lorry with the engine running. Djimjanjuk was sent home to die while the Jews tried to figure out another means of gassing people So please, if I have destroyed my own case, it should be a simple matter for you to show me the evidence.. Can you explain the lack of evidence of an extended drought in Ireland in the 19th Century? The author of this blog avoids any question which demands from him the evidence which he demands from others. He appears to be of the opinion that the unsupported twaddle which he presents, needs no back-up . It is not until you actually question the idea of the Famine itself that the stupidity of the whole idea stands exposed.for what it is. Hundreds of tons of butter, cheese, lard, pork, mutton etc, were exported from Ireland to England, which would suggest that at least part of Ireland was untouched by whatever it was which caused the Famine. so where was this untouched area, where presumably all the folk would have survived? I would suggest that this Famine is, like the holocaust, a religious belief, in order to protect the guilty, I have not seen one suggestion as to why a “potato blight,” which can occur at any moment, could possibly be the cause of millions of deaths in a fertile country. Never mind the question as to the need of over 200,000 British troops, to watch over all of those dying people.. Just one last question, where are all of these mass graves of Jews whom were killed by Hitler? He was blamed for the Katyn Forest Massacre, however that was carried out by the Russians, the allies knew full well that it was the Russians and yet they blamed the Germans at Nuremberg In fact the Germans were blamed for many things which they did not do. What was done to Germany by the “Good Guys” was one of the greatest crimes in history. The German people were the real victims of WW2, not the Jews. have a look at http://www.theirishholocaust.org

              1. “Can you please point me towards this ample evidence?”
                Yeah, I can help ya out with some evidence, but first… I have never once been on the side of those whom you say deny the irish holocaust. Don’t challenge me to defend points I didn’t make nor agree with just because you lack evidence of your own.
                As for evidence of German intent to get rid of the Jews…. google or bing or whichever engine you prefer… the Nuremberg Laws. Pick one of the non jewish links so that you don’t doubt the veracity.
                Next look up Auschwitz and Belzec and Treblinka… not just prison camps, but extermination camps. Why else have gas chambers and ovens? Certainly not for all of the bread they were feeding the prisoners.
                Next look up the Einsatzgruppen. Heckuva record, those guys…
                Next look up ‘holocaust images’ and check out the pics of the bony dead lying, literally, in piles. Doesn’t matter much if it was typhus, as you say, or gas or malnutrition… they were killed to death on purpose. It’s the same bad whether it’s the Nazi’s and Jews or the Brits and Irish or the Serbs and Croats. The facts are there. To deny them is folly.
                The Nazi’s meant to do it. Then they did it. That makes it genocide for the Nazi’s, and most importantly…. has absolutely not one whit to do with the Irish question. It matters not who does it, there is no justification.There is no valid excuse.
                I’ve always wondered about those who strongly believe against commonly held thought backed up with facts; those in my country who are convinced man never landed on the moon; those who believe that JFK and Elvis are alive and living in witness protection; those who believe that the earth is flat and the center of the universe; those who believe that the Jews control the world. I’d like to sit down over a pint and ask questions and just listen. I’d buy.

                My compliments to you, Robert Nielsen, for writing such a provocative piece! I may not agree with all of your conclusions, but I applaud your results!

                1. You’ve done very well, because the Jews have had access to 85 tons of German documents, through which they have trawled with a fine tooth comb in search of just a word which would suggest that the Germans were intent on exterminating the Jews, which they could use to incriminate the Germans. They found nothing. You are right I am less capable than you are because I have found it impossible to dig out a proof of this type of negative when looking for famine in Ireland. I did however give you a link to a site, which you have made no comment on. What you take as truth for example about Auschwitz, is piffle. Why for example were the Jews obliged to reduce the number of deaths which they had originally claimed for that factory? First there was no gas chamber there. Nor any incinerators, they were built by the Poles after the war to deal with Typhus victims. Check the numbers, a plaque at the entrance numbers the dead at 1 million not 4 million as originally claimed. From where did the missing 3 million come to keep the total at 6 million? There is no point in checking Jewish information about the holocaust any more than there is to consult the English about Ireland. The holocaust is a billion dollar business. which is why they gaol those whom might threaten the gravy train.”The fight against Germany has now been waged for months by every Jewish community, on every conference, in all labor unions and by every single Jew in the world. There are reasons for the assumption that our share in this fight is of general importance. We shall start a spiritual and material war of the whole world against Germany. Germany is striving to become once again a great nation, and to recover her lost territories as well as her colonies. But our Jewish interests call for the complete destruction of Germany…” (Valadimir Jabotinsky, in Mascha Rjetsch, January, 1934) I could provide you with a dozen quotes just like this on, showing the naked hatred of the Jews for Germany. So please give me a break. The British hatred of the Irish is just as fierce

                2. There was no “drought”- it was the failure of the potato crop through blight that caused the famine, and the fact the population were so dependent on it, they could not “trade down” to another food source. The majority of deaths were not from starvation, but Infectious diseases – especially typhoid fever, typhus and dysentery/diarrhea.

                  Click to access WP04.25.pdf

                  1. “The majority of deaths were not from starvation, but Infectious diseases especially typhoid fever, typhus and dysentery/diarrhea.”

                    Let’s think about that one a second… typhus is a bacterial disease carried by lice and fleas. I can think of nothing related to potato blight that would increase one’s exposure to typhus; but certainly, immuno-depression secondary to starvation, would decrease one’s resistance to everyday threats.

                    Typhoid fever and dysentery/diarrhea are diseases of dirty water, found where too many people live in proximity. Again, hard to draw a connection between blight and ‘the runs’ that does not include starvation first.

                    One of the guaranteed results of starvation is vitamin deficiency. Diarrhea and dehydration is common, as are pellagra, anemia, scurvy and a host of other third world diseases. The point is… starvation does the deed, something else gets the credit. The link to the O Grada paper (thanks for that!) recognizes that fact and refers to these diseases as “famine related disease”. They really cannot be separated.

                    O Grada shows that there was indeed a famine of the principle crop used to feed the population as well the livestock, giving it a double whammy; the famine lasted multiple years; the government knew about it, and opened some workhouses that were ultimately ill-equipped to help much; the Parties debated but fought over additional aid (the austerity measures of the time?); over a million Irish people, mostly poor, died.

                    O Grada notes that of those who emigrated, many paid for themselves, while others passage were provided for by their landlords. (Today in America there are those who advocate ‘self-deportation” and would also ante up to help get rid of the “unwanted”, and not out of goodness and charity. I’m wondering how many of the Irish landlords did too…)

                    O Grada states that of those who survived the famine, hundreds of thousands (again, mostly poor) were then evicted by their landlords. This point bears investigation, as the history I was taught says that the landlords were not Irish nor could they be catholic. Something about English laws preventing native ownership and outlawing native religion and language and culture (and way, way before demon TV… invented not by the Brits, BTW, but by American ingenuity. Our bad?)

                    Have I been taught bad history? Is that the same history as Robert Nielsen “knows well of his own country” ? This is not a challenge or a dis, it’s a sincere question. It’s an important point, because these are the seeds of the genocide theories, and reach back centuries before the Famine.

                    Then there’s this gem, based on non-existent-to-some yet researchable-by-others Export Records:
                    “However, in the winter and spring of 1846-7 more was exports still exceeded imports, presumably because the poor in Ireland lacked the purchasing power to buy the wheat and oats that were being shipped out.”
                    The poor couldn’t pay for food, so it was marketed elsewhere. An economist’s conclusion if ever I heard one. Or maybe, as some have suggested, food was shipped out to accelerate the demise of the native population?

                    Thank you again, Mr. Danger, for providing a bit of scholarly research, as opposed to the hate sites that some others have provided. Only by looking at the past as objectively as possible can we ever hope to know why it unfolded as it did to prevent it from happening to us again.

                    1. Well here I am again the purveyor of hate. The document which you quote does not speak of a famine in terms of the failure of all crops, it speaks of a failure of crops which were available to the Irish. They go on to speak, as does Hogarty, of the shiploads of food which left Ireland for the UK. The English have always claimed that because of commercial restraints, they were obliged to send the food to England in order to send it back for the Irish. Their words not mine. They have never denied that food was taken out of Ireland. Despite the impression that has been given in comments which have been posted here. There was no Famine. Food was always available, do you imagine that the rich English were dying alongside the Irish? There was ample food for everybody. Face up to it, it was genocide.

                3. Mr Williams? Methinks thou dost protest too much. You are lecturing Enochered against thoughts and feelings that you yourself are expressing. Do please listen to, or read, the speech given by Benjamin H. Freedman in Washington DC in 1961. Mr. Freedman actually attended the Treaty of Versailles, which of course led up to WWll. It is on utube and I am sure you will be interested. I really honour people who are brave enough to stand up and tell the truth. By the way do you know that Oliver Cromwell’s real name was Williams?

    3. How dare you make personal attacks on other commentors! I couldn’t understand any of your rambling nonsense and was willing to ignore it, but I will not allow you to make personal insults about other people. This is your last warning.

  37. AND of course, the Irish Potato famine would not have happened had the Europeans not plundered and caused the wanton destruction of numerous indigenous peoples in the Americas. Seems like potatoes are a portent of evil, eh? (written tongue in cheek). Both the Irish and American Indian issues are very serious, and very devastating histories. But one in which both cultures have risen up out of the ashes and created a new world view and understanding. They are still here!

  38. Emancipation had been somewhat mitigated by the Irish Reform Act (1832), which partially reformed the electoral system and increased the electorate from 37,000 to 92,141. But this was still only 1.2 percent of the population. In effect, just 1 in 115 people in Ireland was enfranchised compared with 1 in 24 in England. The fragmented Irish representation in the House of Commons rose from 100 to 105. O’Connell, the leader of the largest group, was now an aged and broken man. Militarily, England held the country in an iron grip. James Donnelly Jr., a fair-minded fair-minded historian who is always willing to re-examine and, if possible, refute charges that the Famine was the outcome of deliberate attempts at genocide by British officials such as Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to the Treasury, and to quote laudatory judgments on relief operations, nevertheless wrote, “It is no doubt true that the forced retention in Ireland of the entire grain harvest of 1845, or even the prohibition of the export of oats and oatmeal alone, would have been sufficient to offset the partial loss of the potato, but only if the government had been prepared to subsidise the purchase of higher-priced native produce. Thus oatmeal, costing around £ 15 a ton in the spring and summer of 1846, was about 50% more expensive than Indian meal.” 3 The government was not prepared to pay the higher prices, the grains were not retained, and though the crumbs from the rich man’s table were few and slow in dropping, they were all the Irish peasantry would get. Laissez-faire thinking held Irish famine relief in its deadly grip.

    Coogan, Tim Pat (2012-11-27). The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (p. 66-67). Palgrave Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

  39. To be terribly simplistic one of the main problems is if one is an occupied country by occupiers (the British Anglicans and their initial exports: the Scots Presbyterians and the Irish Protestants) who outlaw education in a particular class of people, the Irish Catholics of Ireland predominantly, and then a famine hits the already oppressed people, having their rights and education outlawed to the point they are institutionalized by their oppression and the cycle of poverty/class system injustices/lack of representation, etc – when a calamity such as the potato famine of the 1840s hits, they are unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because of their very socio-economic position in their contemporary society. Genocide or Neglect – they were overwhelmingly an occupied, oppressed, exploited, abused class who couldn’t advance themselves in society because their education was outlawed – therefore they were at the mercy of the British “Empire” who held them down with one hand whilst they turned their backs with the other. And exported food to feed their colonists in other areas. It’s such a complicated history and as I wrote I have dreadfully over simplified it.

    1. Nevertheless Champagne with regard to your oversimplification, sometimes main points need to be stated, always refreshing to state the general conditions as your letter does, before we ramble through the endless reams of academic diatribes, and whether unless you have a PhD, that you are to remain silent? such as it was not genocide realy, only one and a half million died, in this famine, it may be somewhat of a disappointment to the Ruling class, and others, that all of the Irish did not die.
      I note on a early blog a writer comments the landlords did not realize, being absentee landlords,, this innocence of fact as being creditable, surely ownership of overseas landlords, as being so disconnected to the land and the people, requires examination as to this being a acceptable situation that is in part a contribution to this calamity?
      What is of concern to me is this all part of the direction in the Government we do not see? Of recent “Harry Brown”, starring Michael Caine, as you who may have seen this movie, noted are British youth who a friend of mine said, “these are all part of the sc**m the establishment want to destroy but can’t quick enough” my thoughts with the lower and of human beings, is when the oil runs out and we require laborers for the tilling of the soil? whom are you going to get to do the laboring? as the working class of Britain become increasingly University degree’d, are the well educated going to do the job? what the superior class needs to consider, is as you destroy the lower end of human beings you will have a problem, I suggest the philosopher, Herbert Spencer’s summary as “The Fittest of Survival” has not considered all the ramifications of who should die? and who should live, certainly and I hate to say it, referring to the last European upheaval, but as the attempt of the superior race envisaged as the vision, we all loll around salivating and contemplating the Higher reality as we gaze at the States policy of endorsement as to what are the correct works of Art for our edification?

  40. Have you read John Kelly’s “The Graves are Walking” (just out this year I believe)? It’s hard hitting but a fair-minded and diligently researched book. I’ve read many books on the famine, and this is definitely one of the best – highly recommended.

  41. Many many interesting (fascinating actually) points and questions. I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. Daylight savings eastern standard time. I’ll have to post a proper reply tomorrow.

  42. My family arrived in the US due to the famine. I’ve never really been indoctrinated with the idea that the British tried to wipe us out, but it has come up. When I studied at UCC, the overall tone when discussing the Famine was that it was all the fault of the British. The word genocide was never used, but certainly implied. I still have yet to decide my own feelings about it.

    1. Hello mathairfiona. You have been indoctrinated, you have been indoctrinated to believe that there was a famine. Have you ever been told what this famine was like? We all know what a famine is. Animals dying of thirst, crops dry and falling to dust. we’ve seen Ethiopia on the TV. Have you ever, ever seen a report of a famine in the British Isles that went on for several years? This “Famine” could not possibly have affected only Ireland. This word “Famine” is as important to the British position as is the existence of Gas Chambers to the Jewish position, neither have ever been tracked down. However everyone believes that gas chambers were everywhere and everyone believes there was a famine. Think about it. The British starved millions of folk to death, but they are not likely to boast about it are they? .

  43. What people are doing here is discussing whether the Irish famine was a “genocide”. Freedom of expression in action. Open debate is the best way to sort out a problem. Let both sides of a story be heard and let the general public have their say and let the chips fall where they may. What I would like to know is why in EU countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland etc it’s a crime to publicly say that you don’t think that what happened to the Jews during world war 2 was a genocide? http://www.ihr.org/news/irving/022006.html Even if you have evidence to back up your claims “the truth is no defence” applies which is Stalinist totalitarianism. http://codoh.com/library/categories/1167 These countries are always referring to themselves as “democracies” and screeching about “human rights”. Not to mention that they are always criticising the nazis for being anti democratic. People can say that the Irish famine or the Ukrainian holodomor http://www.holodomor.org.uk/ was not a genocide and they won’t be sent to jail. Why does freedom of speech have to be destroyed in discussion of the nazi holocaust? Why has it been elevated to a holy writ that is above criticism?

  44. I don’t think it matters if there is ‘intent’ not every person that died in a concentration camp died because someone intended to kill them, many died of starvation, being worked to death or disease but we still consider their death to be part of a genocide because it was the result intended or not of a situation/system imposed on them that could have saved them or just not put them in that situation in the first place, the same can be said about the decimation of the native american population which I think is pretty much accepted as a genocide or the ukraine famine of the 30’s usualy refereed to as a genocide of course there were political propaganda incentives for the west to accuse the old ussr of genocide during the cold war the same incentive for the what happened to Ireland to be called a ‘famine’ by the same west as if it was some natural disaster and not the direct result of an externally imposed economic system, genocide is genocide weather it’s the result of Nazis deciding on a ‘final solution’ or of an Economic system


  45. Nielsen fails to make a case for the assertion that Coogan’s book does not demonstrate the charge of genocide. Having read Coogan’s book, it is my opinion Coogan repeatedly and convincingly demonstrates the case for genocide with facts and references and a logical progression of historical events. Were we the jury in the American system I would hold out and never vote to acquit the British of genocide because of Mr. Coogan evidence. Nielsen presents no evidence to the contrary. Nielsen simply echoes opinions, That replies to this blog now demonstrates a spate of Holocaust denying that makes me shudder. My father liberated a death camp in 1945 with his tank company I have pictures he took of that day and have talked with his friends that were there. Minimizing the famine has begun to seem hardly better.

    1. I would be interested in viewing the photographs which your father took of the death camp which he helped to liberate. Could you leave a reply naming the camp and its locality and are the photos available online? Coogan’s account of the genocide is supported by Chris Hogarty’s account at http://www.the irishholocaust.com At the end of the war a large number of people including Germans died of Typhus and starvation, which is why a lot of skinny people were found in the camps, there was simply no food for anyone. Just one thing all of the so-called death camps were a long way from Germany in the area which was liberated by the Russians, I suppose I am one of those to whom you refer as a denier of some sort. I am not a denier I am simply doing what you are doing, which is looking for the truth. What is not understood too well is that during recent years, the truth which was used as the excuse to hang hundreds of people at Nuremberg, has been drastically changed. The result is that people continue to support old claims which the Jews themselves no longer support, just as people, even Irish people still believe this tale of a famine. If you look through the comments which I have made, I have asked the simple question what was the famine. Nobody has yet offered a response. Through the years I have posed the same question in other places. This is not my first encounter with this subject, it was I whom provoked Neilsen into asking the question in the first place. I provided him with Chris Hogarty’s link a long time ago. He has completely ignored it, I have taken the flak as a denier, when I am looking for truth. He is the denier, because he is now denying what happened in Ireland as a form of support for the Jewish claims, to support his atheism because after a visit to Auschwitz he asked the question why did God not stop the holocaust? The Jews are at the moment in full retreat, they claimed Triblinka was a death camp and yet there are many accounts of people whom were at Triblinka whom were moved on to other camps, the two do not go together. The Jews tracked down all tattooed survivors, in 2007 in order to see if they needed help, they found two million still alive.Do the sums, how many had died in sixty years, add that to six million dead, None of it added up, but people are still supporting tales which have been abandoned. In school in Ireland children are taught that the people died because of the system of sharing the families land between all of the children, which meant that everybody ended up with a patch of land which was so small that they could not grow anything but potatoes.? When the blight came, there was some sort of alliance made between the blight and an indeterminate famine, which was never described, it was simply a word in the background to hide the reality from the rest of the world. There is no question it was MURDER. Many people were shot while attempting to steal food. What’s more most of my family are in Australia they were deported to the hell-hole prisons in Botany Bay.

      1. “why did God not stop the holocaust (or famine)?”

        Because She helps those who help themselves?
        Because humans were given free will?
        Because He did, or else the starving Irish would not have made it to America and the Nazis would have won the war?
        Because there were better things for God to do in the universe?

        To use a local phrase, y’all are straining at gnats now.

        1. If that’s a reply to me don’t waste your time with irrelevant rubbish. I’m not asking for God’s help or anything else from God, Neilsen it was, whom questioned the motives of God. I asked you to provide a link to some of these atrocities which you are so convinced were committed against the Jews by Hitler simply because they were Jews, that is not a reasonable response. If you cannot find the necessary evidence say so. Then ask yourself why you believed it to be there in the first place If the Irish Famine was real and truthful, it would be a simple matter to demonstrate it. There is no point in trying to destroy the work of a researcher. by doing the old, old, rubbish about those whom don’t believe men went to the moon, or that Oswald was a lone nutter and so on, that is the refuge of those whom have no answers. Your remark about the numbers of Jews whom were left alive after the war, proves that 6million died is also a nonsense, which you would soon discover simply by checking the Jews own numbers, they have accounted for only 3million. The Red Cross calculated on 180,000 as the number which corresponded with the numbers after the war. The Census which was taken just before the outbreak of war gave a number of 15 million Jews World-Wide the census after the war showed a number 15million450thousand Jews World-Wide. Take your pick. . Documents released by the Russians from Auschwitz show that 44,000 inmates died from all causes during the War. All of these things can be checked. If you do not want to move outside your comfort zone that is your choice, but please before you criticise at least check what you say. I can state my position quite simply; The Irish were treated like scum by the British from the days of Cromwell and the intention was to ethnically cleanse Ireland for the Jews whom had taken advantage of a debt owed to them by Cromwell. and ordered him into Ireland. Later the campaign was continued by the Duke of Orange, after the Dutch and the Jews had set up shop in London and opened up the Bank of England. This series of atrocities went on until Ireland was, in true Jewish fashion partitioned, this included the Famine Hoax and the deportation of thousands of indentured slaves to the US, all of this happened because the land had been stolen from the Irish. As for Hitler I find him to be the last man, with courage enough to stand up to this conquest through debt, of the European Peoples and for this his country was levelled and his name vilified in order to obscure his true aims, and to discourage other politicians from taking the same action against the system of usury, which is used to buy the planet we live on. I hope that all makes some kind of sense..
          “Although the Jews have appeared in the histories of other nations throughout the centuries, they were never able or willing to establish a nation of their own. They remain forever desolate in this regard. The only way the Jews got possession of Palestine was by using other people to steal it from the Turks and Arabs for them. The so-called ‘Israeli’ state is nothing but a parasitic state, since it is occupied by parasites. The Jews get billions of dollars from Germany as ‘reparations’ and ‘restitution payments’ for its alleged ‘war crimes’ against Jews. They get billions more every year from the United States. It (Israel) has to steal or buy technology from Western nations as the Jews have not the creativity to develop their own. The Jewish state of Israeli would collapse in a minute without the continued support, protection and assistance from Jacob/Israel (The White Nations of Christendom). It is not, never has been, and never will be a self-sustaining nation.” (Charles A. Weisman, Who is Esau-Edom?, pp. 27-28).


      2. My father was one of the Combat Tankers mentioned herein, Nordhausen was in Germany. I prefer no other dialogue with you on this or any other subject,
        I am both Irish and Jewish and believe the antisemitism that has been expressed is reprehensible. The reams of photos of death camps are well attested to on the internet:

        The Tragedy at Nordhausen
        Combat Command B entered Nordhausen early on the morning of April 11. The British had bombed the city the night before, and a large contingent of German troops had already withdrawn. Our tank columns wound their way slowly through the town, occasionally neutralizing a roadblock or flushing out snipers. City fighting was always a start-and-stop operation, but by this time our men had developed considerable experience and we were making progress through the city, block by block. During one of these stops, Maj. Dick Johnson came up to my Jeep. “Cooper, we’ve seen a lot of grim things in this war together,” he said, “but there’s something in the next block that you won’t believe until you see it.” I tried to find out more, but he just shook his head and went back to the T2 recovery tank to our rear. The small-arms fire up ahead subsided and the column moved forward again. As we approached the corner of the next block, we saw a tall, frail-looking creature with striped pants and a white towel draped over the head. The exposed skin of his naked torso looked like translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone. There were no breasts, but the height indicated a male. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out from beneath the towel. The teeth were exposed in a broad, tragic grin, and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets. “I never thought I’d see a live walking ghost,” remarked Wrayford. As we proceeded down the road, we encountered several more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting, but most of them were sprawled on the road and sidewalk where they had collapsed. In their last struggle to survive, these tragic figures of skin and bone had attempted to walk as far as possible and when the last bit of energy had been wrung from their feeble bodies, they simply dropped dead. Farther down the block, I noticed two warehouse-type buildings three to four stories high, separated by a vacant lot about a hundred yards wide. The doors and windows of the first building had been broken open, and German civilians were looting the warehouse. There must have been sixty people going in and coming out, mostly children and old men and women, each with armloads of bags or boxes filled with food. Several were pulling small sleds that dripped a red substance, which I later realized was frozen strawberry jam. The crowd was ravenous; they were pushing and shoving one another to get as much food as possible. They paid no attention to the pitiful wretches lying in the streets and gutters.
        In the vacant lot between the two warehouse buildings was a barbed-wire enclosure that was split in the middle to form a partial gate. What appeared to be garbage was piled in three rows about six feet high and four hundred feet long. To my abject horror I noticed that parts of the stacks were moving. Suddenly, I realized that these stacks were naked human beings, writhing in their excrement and left in the open to die. The stench was overwhelming. According to our medical officers, these slave workers could survive perhaps thirty to forty days without food under these conditions. They would lose 30 to 40 percent of their body weight, and their stomachs would be grossly bloated and distended due to the gases and the acid in their digestive systems. These people showed no such distended stomachs; they were nothing but skin and bones. They had been deliberately, painfully starved to death. Even our combat tankers, who had experienced much of the death and destruction of war, were horrified at the barbaric treatment that these people endured . General Hickey was ordered by General Collins, the corps commander, to assemble every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the city to bury the dead bodies. Collins also called First Army headquarters and requested a field hospital be sent immediately to take care of any survivors who might be rescued from the piles. Engineers with bulldozers dug large mass graves about ten feet deep and three hundred feet long. German civilians made small wooden stretchers out of scrap lumber, picked up the bodies, and took them to the burial sites. When I came back through Nordhausen on my way to maintenance battalion headquarters, I saw a steady stream of Germans carrying these lifeless skeletons, arms and legs dangling over the sides of the stretchers, to the burial sites. The whole scene reminded me of ghouls in a grave robbery scene from an old horror movie. The bodies were laid side by side in the mass graves. The army sent a Protestant and a Catholic chaplain and a Jewish rabbi to perform ceremonies as these people were finally laid to rest. General Sherman once said, “War is hell.” The Nordhausen tragedy made one think there must be different degrees of hell. Although the terror and violence of war can harden a person to new terrors, an unusually traumatic event can still shatter this external protective shell. The 3d Armored Division medical officers cared for the survivors of the death camp until they could be relieved by the army field hospital. Of the approximately three thousand bodies stacked in the piles in the open field, about 10 percent were alive. Captain Comar, our battalion surgeon, said that some would survive but that malnutrition had probably already caused severe brain damage.

        Cooper, Belton Y. (2007-12-18). Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (Kindle Locations 4715-4757). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

        1. Neither you or anyone else who supports the standard extermination of Jews story has explained why this version of events needs the protection of the law in EU countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland etc. I repeat the “holocaust denial” laws in these countries are totalitarian and should have no place in a true democratic society. http://www.ihr.org/news/irving022006.html (broken link corrected) Everyone having to conform to the same viewpoint with dissenters being sent to jail is totalitarianism. If there is no dissent it is not a democracy. The claim that holocaust revisionism is a form of anti semitism is false for the simple reason that there are Jews who are holocaust revisionists. Watch the David Cole video at http://codoh.com/library/categories/1167 Cole made a skeptical documentary about Auschwitz. There is also the blog of Paul Eisen http://pauleisen.blogspot.com.au The revisionists have used science and logic to dispel outdated fake atrocity propaganda about world war 2. The claims of mass gassings as described in holocaust literature are chemically and scientifically impossible.

          1. Some people may think that the Nuremberg trials prove the holocaust. I disagree. They were show trials using victor’s justice. One standard for the Axis and another for the Allies. At Nuremberg the soviet prosecutors tried to blame the German defendants for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the USSR committed this crime. http://www.katyn.org.au At Nuremberg the soviet prosecution condemned Germany for it’s invasion of Poland in 1939 but ignored the USSR invasion of Poland in 1939. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
            How can this be a fair trial?
            At the time of the trials many prominent judges and jurists spoke out against them including US supreme court justice Harlan Fiske Stone who referred to them as a “lynching party” and a “sanctimonious fraud”.
            The Nuremberg trials were a breathtaking display of hypocrisy.

  46. Not to throw out a new twist this late, but Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical “A Modest Proposal” anticipated the Famine by nearly a century — and gives a perspective regarding the longstanding Brit attitude toward the Irish. Wiki has a good piece, pointing to the book’s “hyperbole [which] mocks heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general.”


  47. Pingback: WordPress.jpn.com
  48. Anyway- Seeing as Enoch has it in for cooks and cookbooks- here is an interesting side note… Alexis Soyer
    There have been many books and articles written about the devastating famine in Ireland. Many have covered famine relief efforts in detail, and some, quite correctly, show how these efforts fell considerably short in resolving the desperate circumstances that faced the poor in Ireland. However although many mention soup kitchens in terms of famine relief, there is little mention of the man who undoubtedly helped keep starvation at bay for thousands of the Irish poor.

    Alexis Soyer was born in Meaux en Brie in 1810, and after a chequered career in his early education followed his brother Philippe into the kitchens of Paris. By the tender age of seventeen he had already made a huge impact with his determination and skill and after finishing his apprenticeship in Chez Rigon moved to the position of Chef De Cuisine at La Maison Douix in Montmartre, with a brigade of 12 chefs under his control. His flamboyant nature and his fondness for mixing with the patrons of Paris society ensured that Soyer enjoyed a high profile, not unlike the celebrity chefs of today. He was only nineteen years of age at the time.

    He eventually gained employment at the French Foreign Office under Prince Polignac, at the Elysee palace. During the 1830 revolution the Foreign Office was attacked, many of the household staff were killed, and according to legend, he himself only escaped through his quick thinking by singing ‘la Marseillaise’ and was carried off shoulder high amid the cheers of the mob.

    Following the July revolution of 1830, Soyer followed his brother again, but this time to employment in the great houses of England. Soyer was to find a number of prominent positions among the rich and famous, including the Duke of Cambridge, and in 1837 was offered the position of Chef De Cuisine in the Reform Club in London.

    While at the Reform Club, Soyer dispensed with the Victorian tradition of selling left-over’s insisting that any surplus should be distributed to the needy. This perhaps gives us an early indication of his thinking on poverty and hunger. Soyer continued to build his reputation and within a short time had all of London society enthralled.

    Soyer was not only a talented genius in the kitchen, but also an adept engineer and designer. He designed the Reform Club kitchens in conjunction with Charles Barry, a significant architect of the time. He was one of the first, if not the first, to use gas as a medium for cookery and many of the instruments that are seen today in professional kitchens are from his original designs.

    While working in the Reform club, Soyer became aware of the plight of the silk weavers in Spitalfields who were facing starvation due to cheap imports from France, India and America. Soyer visited the area, prompting him to write to the Times, illustrating the hardships that faced thousands on a daily basis. He was not impressed by the efforts of the time in poor relief, particularly in the production of hot food. He designed several recipes for what he believed would be a nourishing soup and sent them to the persons responsible for providing poor relief. Among these Patrons was the Duchess of Sutherland and Soyer would send not only his recipes but also the actual soup for her to taste. Alexis told her that the soup he had found in Spitalfields was not so much “soup for the poor, but poor soup”

    Soyer continued to keep abreast of events and quickly became sought after as a consultant in many areas. He was also very active in commercial food and sauce development, and was the originator of many popular table sauces, produced in conjunction with Crosse & Blackwell. He also designed the “Magic” Stove which was a small domestic table top cooking device. He also made time to write several books on cookery aimed at the mass market, as at the time, professional recipes were generally only published for the rich. One such publication was “Soyer’s Charitable Cookery” which he penned in Dublin, of which, one sixth of the proceeds went to charities.

    He thought about designs for mass catering units which could deliver hot soup for up to 500 people at a time. At this time he had developed a prototype soup kitchen in Leicester Square. He also developed in later life the Soyer Stove which was in use by armed forces around the world until the last Gulf war.

    Little did he know that his foresight would be called upon in 1847 to assist in famine stricken Ireland. His talent for design was to have a significant impact at mass catering as he proposed, designed and built the first tailor made mass soup kitchens to aid the suffering in Ireland.

    When the true extent of the famine in Ireland became clearer, Soyer was asked to investigate replicating his designs, and he asked for leave of absence from the Reform Club kitchens. He set about designing his kitchen and proposed having the kitchen fabricated in England and then on completion, having it shipped over. However, Soyer reconsidered as he realised that if the kitchen were built in Dublin, as it would help create some much needed employment. But even before Soyer set foot in Dublin the critics were circling. An anonymous article in the Lancet was casting doubt on Soyer’s claim that his soups would sustain health. But he forged ahead and the first “Model” kitchen was delivered by Tonge Coachbuilders, at the esplanade at the Royal Barracks.

    The criticism over his relief efforts stung Soyer. He asked that his soups be examined by an independent expert. These were tested by the Royal Dublin Society by John Aldridge, who was a renowned Professor of Chemistry.

    Aldridge claimed the most nutritious and cheapest soup was the no.6 Soyer Fish soup. He also added:

    “In the name of the Irish people I thank M. Soyer for what I believe to be his purely philanthropic intentions towards them. He has given to us two boons of no ordinary value, a model dispensing kitchen of great ingenuity, and a method of economic cooking far superior to any to which the poorer order of out countrymen have hitherto been accustomed”.

    While criticism of his soup from a nutritional viewpoint was at least defended, he was not immune to ridicule either, as Punch magazine made light of his venture.

    “M. SOYER deserves to be called the Gastronomic Regenerator of Ireland. His receipts for cheap soup are the best practical suggestion that has been yet made for the relief of that unlucky island.”

    The article went onto suggest how the soup could be improved by adding game with the twofold benefit- one to the farmer whose crops will be saved and the savings made from poaching prosecutions. “Our scheme we know will spoil sport; but it is rather better to sacrifice that, than human life”

    Greater vitriol was reserved from the Irish press. They ridiculed and spat at the idea of a cook of the rich and famous holding court in Dublin.

    “Since Easter Monday M. Soyer has enjoyed a succession of ovations. Fair ladies have smiled upon him while wielding his ladle, as a conqueror wields his baton, and their only rivalry has been who should receive most attention from this emperor of grease. Fashion, in her wildest caprice, never dreamed of such a fancy as has been exhibited in this worship of a cook…Inventive cruelty could not imagine a more inhuman proceeding than the parading of wretched thousands to render his glory more complete”.

    One disturbing aspect of the whole venture was the practice of ladies from rich families helping serve the soup and the charging of an entrance fee to watch the spectacle. The Freemans Journal summed up popular press feeling:

    “Soyer’s Model Kitchen—By the special desire of several charitable ladies who have visited and paid particular attention to the working of the model kitchen, it will be opened again on Saturday next, from two to six, on which day those ladies, under the direction of Mrs. La Touche, will attend and serve the poor; the admission for the view on that day will be 5s. each, to be distributed by the Lord Mayor in charity; after which the kitchen will be closed, M. Soyer being obliged to leave for the Reform Club, London.”

    The irony of this was not lost on the Irish press

    Five shillings each to see paupers feed!—five shillings each to watch the burning blush of shame chasing pallidness from poverty’s wan cheek!—five shillings each! When the animals at the Zoological Gardens may be inspected at feeding time for sixpence!

    One can completely understand why there was so much opposition to Soyers Soup Kitchens in Ireland. One could also imagine if Gordon Ramsey were to set up a relief kitchen in Darfur today, the righteous indignation that would follow. What cannot be ignored is that Soyer was one of the first popular figures of the Victorian age to recognise that starvation, be it weavers in Spitalfields or famine victims in Dublin, was a real and tragic fact, and did nothing more than to try and save lives. Not only that, but Soyer was driven not by a sense of popular altruism, but by a spirit of philanthropy in its truest sense. His kitchen; originally designed to feed seven hundred, within weeks, was feeding seven thousand a day.

    What is not recognised either, is that Soyer’s experience in Dublin only further strengthened his resolve to do good works. He later went to Scutari at the height of the Crimean war at his own expense and in conjunction with Florence Nightingale completely overhauled food hygiene and catering standards within the military hospitals. He also recognised that the truism that an army marches on its stomach, and when the British and French armies were on their knees, he revitalised and redesigned how rations should be distributed and cooked, establishing the beginnings of the army catering corps and revolutionising modern mass catering. While some will see the soup kitchens as evidence of Britain’s dismissive answer to wholesale starvation, I take a more benign view- that only for Soyer’s innovation and technical brilliance many more lives would have been lost, and that perhaps Soyer’s efforts, while scorned by the Irish press as a spectacle, perhaps raised more consciousness in Britain of the tragic events in Ireland.

    While it is not for me to argue the rights and wrongs of Soyer’s “soup” contribution to the Irish people, a subject best left to historians, there can be no doubt that he helped raise awareness of the “Starving Irish” when sympathy was a rare commodity indeed, and deserves, in my mind at least, the same reverence in Ireland given to Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole in Britain.

  49. The controlling powers, are not one body of agreement, the central Elite families numbering say 300, would not all sponsor genocide for the Irish, for certain a proportion of the Elite would desire a significant if not all Irish to be cleansed, if not in the physical, in spirit.
    To control what is left of the Irish and exploit any economic gain, would require some Irish to be left and be useful for this purpose, it is doubtful the House of Lords would put a motion forward such as outright genocide, nevertheless the tacit unspoken word is in this situation understood.

  50. The great famine was an more of an example of continued British exploitation of the Irish than any organized attempt at genocide. The English own vast tracts of land which were farmed by Irish tenants and these tracts were subdivided as families grew and subdivided. Any Irish farmer with lest than a quarter acre of land was considered an undesirable tenant, and thus it made economic sense for the English to get rid of them. The famine made it easier to rid themselves of these undesirables.

    There was continued export of Irish goods to England and though the British did send some relief in the form of corn, much of it was hard “Indian corn” that was virtually indigestible. The British government was slow to react to the famine and did so only in the face of worldwide outrage.

    The British viewed the Irish as subjects of the realm and therefore lesser beings than Englishmen. Although some Irish did rise up to be landholders and merchants, they were never given regarded with the same respect as true-born English by the ruling class. There were certainly exceptions within Ireland, but mostly I suppose it’s an example of indifference to suffering. Perhaps that is the definition of the banality of evil.

    For some interesting glimpses into the famine I’d recommend, The Graves Are Walking by John Kelly or The Great Shame by Thomas Keneally.

  51. I just found your blog and I am intriqued. I am Jewish so I understand the concept personally. I find your book recommendation interesting and I will look into it. Thanks for the share and I hope you will stop by my blog sometime. Harmony, Barbara

  52. I Am going to Re-blog this on my Blog tomorrow! Very informative and i have always wanted to know more about my heritage and about my people…so thanks for sharing this with the wordpress community and taking time out of your life to work on it and post it! I Will definitely be subscribing and liking your page and returning to absorb more content on my heritage and culture!

  53. Interesting piece Robert, thanks. I am currently residing in Melbourne but was taught History and English by a brilliant teacher from Kerry in my small secondary school in Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow. I’d say he had Republican sympathies but he was very even-handed with regard to the major events of Irish history and that of course included the famine. At no point did he suggest a genocide or genocidal agenda took place. Doubtless there was injustice but we were victims of poverty, dispossession and the gross indifference of the ruling classes. I am not a fan of TPC and have always found him somewhat iconoclastic and reactionary. The book sounds like a cheap shot. My first visit to your site, I look forward to reading more. Cheers, Dara

  54. RE: “”Some people claim that the Great Famine was an act of genocide committed by the British Empire against the Irish people.””

    —– Genocide as a concept was not coined until near the end of WW2 to describe the atrocities committed by the Japanese and specifically the German Nazi regime.

    Utter inanity to apply modern standards to older eras when every modern era utterly fails to stem the tsunamis of War and other military takeovers. Moderns have been unable to curb the excesses of the bodies politic and dictatorships to help to create these conditions.

    No doubt the Irish were gravely set upon by British powers, but then so were the British workman. Wat Tyler led the working mans Magna Carta movement in 1381, riding out with a charter of rights under the aegis of a white flag, and immediately set upon by all the King’s men, ultimately drawn & quartered, beheaded and set upon a pike to stampede the tens of thousands supporters who had marched to London with him after being savaged by boy King Richard’s tax men.

    How many hundreds of millions of “Chinese” were eliminated over the last 3 millennia if you want to talk about numbers, 20-30 mil during the decade of the 60-70s Cultural Revolution alone.

    Idiots fiddle on about the past whilst Rome burns down at their feet. Same ol’ story, just fresh arrogant actors thinking the world started with them..

    Hope I haven’t offended, but genocide is a serious topic that shouldn’t be trivialized………..

    1. “Utter inanity to apply modern standards to older eras when every modern era utterly fails to stem the tsunamis of War and other military takeovers.”

      I disagree. The fact that the word “genocide” wasn’t coined until the modern era does nothing to lessen it’s meaning or change it’s occurrence in times past. America practiced the intentional and organized removal through death of the native peoples of North America from 1800 through 1900. What does one call that besides genocide? We tried Manifest Destiny at the time, but it falls short. Maybe if we’d known about the word genocide…

      In times past, people died of dropsy, and the pox, and the humours… we know them today as heart failure, bacterial infections and pneumonia. Your argument suggests that because we did not know of bacteria until 1676 or so that no one could have died from iinfection before then. Bollocks.

      I suggest that my previous points still stand… because of our biases (and the fact that the winner writes the history and truth is the first casualty) we fail to recognize and learn from the past, which is why “every modern era fails to stem the tsunamis of war”. We still don’t know any better because we refuse to learn.

      As for my friend fortytwo’s assertion that the Irish are just crybabies who need to stop whining… I’d point out that the Irish aren’t the only ones to complain about the lack of compassion and caring shown by their English colonial overlords. I agree that before bad things happened to the Irish, bad things happened to the peoples before, and bad things are happening to people today as well because we refuse to learn. Bad is bad; just as two bads do not make a right, complaining about a bad does not lessen it’s badness.

      If England had held 6 choice colonies here in America (it could have happened), we’d still be belligerent too. Same for India and the rest of the empire that the sun never set on. The bright side maybe, is that England learned from it’s experience in Ireland and let the other colonies keep their land. It’s all about learning from the past so that we don’t have to relive the mistakes again.

      1. “…England learned from it’s experience in Ireland and let the other colonies keep their land.”

        They didn’t ‘let’ us keep ours, we took it from them. By force.

        With lots of luck and a little help from our friends….

      2. “”Your argument suggests that because we did not know of bacteria until 1676 or so that no one could have died from iinfection before then. Bollocks.””

        —- Your “argument” suggests you make up nonsense to attribute to others in order to justify an egotistical need to win an “argument.” I made no argument, I stated a fact.

        Genocide is a modern human concept still debatable in the modern construct, not a discovery of the natural unseen world of science. You are a case in point of the utter inanity of moderns too busy assigning blame for life’s misfortunes to parents, teachers, or whomever when the means to make a difference in stopping modern genocides and other atrocities is within the grasp of of every generation.

        No doubt if you had the means, you would be ticketing and fining ancient peoples for being litterbugs, now that’s the kind of modern
        ‘Bollocks” I was referencing, so thanks for being an example.


          Apologies if my science background led to me to a word with multiple meanings. By “argument” I meant a “reason given in proof or rebuttal”, not the shouting kind where the participants cease hearing each other in order to “win”. Most of this discourse has been full of arguments for, against, and about…. and yes,some have been shouting and a bit hateful.

          The ‘fact’ you stated, that genocide is a modern thing… I still disagree with. I agree that it is a modern “word”, but the practice can be found in the Old testament of the Bible and is apparent in every age and on every populated continent since. That cannot be (realistically) denied.

          We are not new things… humans are humans, and have been for (pick your really large number) years. If we are to truly stop “modern genocides and atrocities” (and interesting that you added ‘modern’ to something that you propose was never old), we have to understand why we do them. There can be no understanding without recognition of the facts.

          “Fine the ancients as litterbugs”? That’s good, it gave me a laugh, thanks! And it makes my point, as there were no “litterbugs” before the 1970’s. (I looked, it’s not in Latin or Greek or my Gaelic dictionary (a small one to be sure). If your original point held, there would be no trash from the ancients since litterbugging is a modern contrivance, Still, there was lots of trash left around and dumped in the streets and rivers wasn’t there?

          If one man’s trash ages and becomes another man’s treasure, was it ever really trash to begin with? What if the first word for ‘trash’ was ‘gold’? Does that make it trash, or valuable?

          Each age can change the word… but the essential meaning remains. Sorry that my attempt to illustrate that concept with ‘bacteria and pox’ fell short. But regardless of the word we choose for one body of people attempting to eliminate another, unless we recognize that it has been happening for ages, unless we investigate what it is about us, not just Nazi’s or Jews or Cowboys or Gaels or Brits or Picts, but all of US as humans, then we’re doomed to keep doing it.

          I for one believe it needs to stop, but it is so ingrained in human nature that I don’t see a stoppage any time soon. We are too defensive, too invested in “my people were good, yours were bad” emotions that cloud the facts and keeps us from seeing us as we are. Maybe if we can get to “all people are my people AND yours too” we can make some progress.

  55. Totally agree, The Famine was a disaster, no doubt about it, but it was never a targeted method to remove any group(s) of people from the earth. Your point about working people is very valid, the treatment of the people by the “government” or “state” or however you want to put it would have been the same. At some stage the “Irish” must stop crying “poor me” and blaming everything wrong with the country on another.

    1. School bully victims often are scarred for life, its all very well for the thugs to say get over it, what drives thugs is their fears, look at the size of Britain compared to Ireland.
      It becomes not a question as to what word is used, genocide colors the truth, the forces of power and corruption all played their part in the consequence of a historical and crippling outcome.

      1. I understand what you say about school bullies, however “The Irish” are not in reality the victim they would have you believe, and the famine is not the largest, or longest event in there history. Compared to the school bully, over a five year secondary school education the Gailes are people that came into a established school, took over the playground, forced half the kids to leave, have continued to attempt to remove the other half and constantly complain about the two months they had no dinner money. There was/is a genocide in Ireland, but they don’t want to talk about that….

  56. I found your post interesting and tend to agree. The famine was not a genocide, but the result of bad luck (the blight) and negligence, possibly extreme negligence, from the English. I just started reading it, so I only have the first few chapters to go off of, but “Paddy’s Lament” by Thomas Gallagher is so far a well-researched look at the famine itself, the mass emigration of the Irish, particularly to America, the English’s role in the famine and how that role affected both the Irish and the Irish-American’s view of the English.

  57. I would take issue with the contention that the famine was the greatest calamity in Irish history. Make that RECENT Irish history and I’ll accept it. The wars, the devastations and starvations of the 1640s made that period pretty calamitous, and so did the great freeze of around 1740. Going back further, the Black Death of the 14th century was massively bad. The details are lacking for all of these, but any or all of them could have been more calamitous than the Great Famine. The Great Famine might have been the worst, but we will never be certain.

  58. I’m English, in that I’m born & bred in England, although sometimes I’m not exactly sure who the “English” are, as most seem, like myself, to be of mixed ancestry. I’m trying to learn more about the The Famine, I don’t remember it ever being discussed when I was at school, but that was back in the ’60’s, so maybe things have changed. If they haven’t, then they should, because I agree with the contributor who said something along the lines that only by acknowledging & learning from the past can we prevent the same in the future (but the English burning people in churches?) I do agree that Ireland & The Famine/Gorta Mór are England’s shame. Genocide? I’m not sure. As an Englishman living in the 21st century I can not undo the things done by my countrymen in the past, if that I could, but I can acknowledge, learn & educate others about our true history.
    I’m unclear what the guy who has the hang up with the Jewish people is trying to get at.. I can’t understand how anyone can on the one hand champion an oppressed ethnic/religious group, yet on the other denigrate another oppressed ethnic/religious group?

    1. Yeah that guys a bit strange. Its best to ignore him.

      I really dislike the way people act as though all English people are responsible for crimes of the past or the English today are guilty for acts that occurred during the Famine. Yes it was a bad time, but it was also a long time ago and we mustn’t get too hung up about it. The future is more important than the past.

      1. For the benefit of the mixed Englishman whom does not understand the reason why I appear to be fixated with the Jews, allow me to explain. You Robert, set the parameters of the discussion. You decided, as a believer in the Jewish Genocide, that a Genocide had not occurred if there was no evidence of intent. You claimed that the English did not notice, or some such rubbish, that five million Irish people, men women and children, were dropping dead from starvation, in a country that was producing millions of tons of every type of food, apart from potatoes. I asked you to produce evidence of intent on the part of the Germans to commit genocide against the Jews. I am still waiting for this evidence. Where is it Robert?.If you can not produce it don’t talk through your bum about the Genocide against the Irish people which was started back in the days of the first Elizabeth and which was far more serious than anything which the Germans allegedly did to the Jews. or in your terms did not happen to the Jews because there is no evidence of intent.. Goodnight..

        1. Oh dear enoch….here we go again, dipping your ill informed mentally-gangrenous toes into the choppy waters of what construes genocide. If you apply your own twisted logic, as you claim, there is no evidence of (nazi) german genocide, therefore, there cannot be evidence of British genocide. Can you point to one documented piece of evidence which outlines a plan to deliberately starve the Irish to death? Hmmmm?
          Thought not. Go back to your flying saucer website and thank God that the British were there to protect us from the Nazis. Otherwise what Cromwell did would look like playtime with Bosco.

          1. Well I thought that might wake up the wankers and here you are. Still displaying your total ignorance of History and your closed minds.

          2. Why is there any need of proof of intent for one and not the other? Is that crisp and clear enough for idiots? As for the war against Germany, France and England attacked Hitler in a so-called defence of Poland, which was attacked by Stalin from the East at the same time, being of such an intellectual frame of mind, perhaps you could explain why there was no war declared against Stalin in defence of Poland and why did the British not defend Europe against Communism, which was a far greater threat than Germany. Let’s hear it know-all.

            1. Well enoch I’d answer you if I could be arsed. But to be honest I’m not, so Ill leave it at that.

              1. Don’t fool yourself you have no response. There is none. You are wrong on all counts. You have been talking continually out of your arse, which is why it is probably too sore to continue.

                1. Would you ever quit with your Jew baiting BS? If you want to talk about the Holocaust go elsewhere. If you want to stay here, then stop calling people names and show some evidence for the intent you believe Britain had for the genocide.

                  1. Listen you are jumping around all over my site and leaving snide remarks. I have just noticed on which post you were commenting. I have just re-read it. It is perfectly clear and cogent. I also provided written evidence of the fact that a choice was made between feeding the starving or emigrating them. Plus the fact that some Landlords did try to help the starving feed themselves, demonstrating that there was an awareness of the problem. You of course chose to ignore this and made some remark about “intent” I was in no way obliged to leave a link to your site. I have presented nothing that I am in any way worried about my band of readers seeing if that is what you are trying to imply. I also provided you with Chris Fogarty’s irishholocaust.org link which was insufficient for you. While you and your chums have provided nothing apart from what you describe as unsubstantiated rubbish. I noticed that another commenter provided you with a link to Fogarty’s YouTube interview. but you have a closed mind. I have no doubt that your real intention, when you came across Coogan’s book, was to dismiss it out of hand, simply because I had referred to you as Holocaust Denier, when you rejected my remarks about The Holocaust in Ireland after reading your rubbish about God not stopping the holocaust and you referring to me as a holocaust denier. because I suggested that he like me could find no trace of it. Remember that? Of course you do. So why do you keep blathering on about why I mention the Jewish holocaust. You know perfectly well why I mention it. Because we have a guilty little secret, don’t we Robert, which you don’t seem too eager to clear up with those who have asked you why I keep referring to the Jews. Do you think I could find a link for you to an English document saying “Lets Starve all the Irish to death” of course I can’t just like you cannot supply a similar document to support your claims.

                    1. Hahahaha! Just is so ridiculous! I just can’t stop laughing. Your mind is very strange place indeed. Yes the world is full of evil conspiracies and I’m part of it. Only you know the truth. Hahahaha!

        2. Oh Enoch. You never learn. Go back to your infantile blog and leave the discussion to grown-ups.

        3. Enochered, The reason I have not discussed the Holocaust is because it is not relevant to this discussion and secondly because there is no need to. Every credible historian knows this is a fact.

          You fail to understand what the word intent means. There was no intent to exterminate the Irish. No plan, strategy or proposal. You know this is the case which is why you keep dodging the question.

          I’d hate to disrupt your nonsense with a fact, but five million people were not “dropping dead” during the famine, famine related deaths are estimated at 1 million. Though that is an objective fact done by credible historians who have done proper research, so I understand if you don’t like it.

          Where is the evidence for the Holocaust? I don’t know maybe the gas chambers? Maybe the survivours in the concentration camps? Maybe the disappearance of six million Jews? Maybe all the documents eye witness accounts etc accumulated by almost every historian who have studied the Second World War?

          You sir, are the most dangerous kind of idiot.

    Your nonsense is becoming more and more profound, I understand perfectly wee the meaning of the word intent. I also understand when you say that the English made no concerted attempt to exterminate the Irish., they were simply negligent, So in the absence of the same documentary evidence, on what do you base your claim of an attempt being made to exterminate the Jews? Please send me a link to an example of a Gas Chamber. not an Air Raid Shelter,a Gas Chamber. Even the Jews no longer talk of Gas Chambers. None were ever found. Despite all of the film makers and journalists and soldiers with their Brownies, who scoured Germany after the war, not one of them managed to snap a Gas Chamber. So please find some other myth to support you claims. I wont hold my breath waiting for a link. .

    1. Been following this discourse from a distance, and had 30-45 spare seconds to help our friend enochered with his request for links.
      Yes, I know he really doesn’t want links, and will disregard these as proof of world-wide Jewish domination, just as he did the others that have been provided for him previously. Nevertheless, no call for enlightenment should go unheeded.





    2. Enochered why do you keep changing the subject? This is not a page for debating with Holocaust deniers, as the title clearly says it is about the alleged genocide during the Famine, now can you provide evidence or do you just want to rant?

      1. Raphael Lemkin who originated the word genocide wrote;“Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean destruction of a nation… It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity but as members of a national group.” You may not be aware of the fact, that the “Black and Tans” in Ireland regularly shot those whom dared to speak in Irish, right up to the time of liberation, which is one of the accepted signs of an attempted genocide. There was no written document which would be enough to satisfy you, so no doubt you will dismiss, as just hearsay So there you go, you have already discounted the hearsay evidence against Germany and Ireland, how many more genocides are you prepared to deny. Perhaps we could start with Rwanda, which is generally accepted as a genocide, I’m sure you can pooh-pooh that along with all the others. Could you send me a link for all of the documented cases of Genocide or even one example would suffice.

        1. I have studied genocide as part of my degree so I am well familiar with Lemkin. I think there’s an important point that you missed in your quote, “the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”. This is a crucial point. Britain did not aim to annihilate the Irish people, despite the cruelty inflicted. Your hypothesis fails on this main point. If the British intended to exterminate the Irish, why did they stop? Why did they only limit their actions to the 5-7 year period of the Famine? Why not continuous famine? Why not a century of famine? Why not speed up the process by burning crops in the field and mass shootings?

          Your hypothesis also fails to explain the reform that underwent. You may view the Penal Laws as part of a plot to eradicate the Irish, but why were they repealed? Why was Catholic Emancipation granted? Why was Home Rule proposed and independence granted? If the British were committed to genocide why not burn the country to the ground?

          At no point was Irish illegal during the time of the Black and Tans. There was no systematic execution of Irish people or imprisonment. If there was, the entire Gaeltacht regions would have had to be murdered. As this did not happen, your hypothesis is incorrect. You don’t even attempt to provide evidence to support your claim as you know well it doesn’t exist.

          Rwanda was genocide as there was a deliberate attempt by the Hutu population to exterminate the Tutsi’s. However, the British never hacked thousands of Irish to death with machetes so the comparison isn’t valid.

          1. If you have a degree they must be pretty cheap where you were educated. The British watched the reduction of the population of Ireland from eight million to three million during the potato blight. Had it been a famine, there would of course have been very little to burn. No matter. I asked you for documentary evidence of a genocide, any genocide will do, otherwise in your terms University Boy there has never been a genocide. Your idiotic claim that because a few Jewish historians whom have researched the Jewish affair, and claim it to be true is simply not an acceptable form of evidence, in your own terms. You have consistently told me so, There is nothing of importance missing from the Lemkin quote. As for the remark about the Black and Tans and the Irish language, are you now going off on one more of requests for written evidence? You are a joke. Whether they were ordered to shoot or not it is what happened. In your response to the Rwanda affair, once again you avoid the obvious, you mouth off with no evidence to support your claims. The one thing missing from your comment was the involvement of the French. and still no documented evidence. So I repeat, in your terms there has never been a genocide, which of course dismisses not only the Irish genocide but also the Jewish. You cannot dispute the logic of your own argument. Whether you like it or not, you can’t have one without the other. This example of the mentality of your future president might interest you.
            “My protests (regarding treatment of the German DEF’S) were met with hostility or indifference, and when I threw our ample rations to them over the barbed wire. I was threatened, making it clear that it was our deliberate policy not to adequately feed them.” – Martin Brech, ex-Private First Class, in Company C of the 14th Infantry, assigned as a guard and interpreter at the Eisenhower Death Camp at Andernach, along the Rhine River.