Eamonn there was a famine in ireland. The potatos were ALL rotten for about 4 yrs. nowhere was hit as bad as Ireland.

It was the lack of action on the part of the British that could justify the label ‘genocide’ but the famine was not an attempt to wipe out the Irish. It was a very very unfortunate event that nobody quite understood how to deal with. Especially Robert peel.

Rebecca De Stanleigh the evidence is strongly against your point of view as the following extract demonstrates.

“Many members of the British upper and middle classes believed that the famine was a divine judgment – an act of Providence. A leading exponent of the providentialist perspective was Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan described the famine as ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, one which laid bare ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil’. The famine, he declared, was ‘the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part…’ This mentality of Trevelyan’s was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions — and this had the obvious effect of radically restructuring Irish rural society along the lines of the capitalistic model preferred by British policy-makers.”
-from Wikipedia.

I refuse to take seriously any argument advanced by a man who cannot spell potato.

Except for the fact that the famine video is based on the same old codswallop that has been debunked years ago. The famine was caused by providentialism, landlordism, blasé understanding of economics and callous disregard for human life.

Chelseajoe one can find similar explanations on the BBC website or one could just look up – The Irish Crisis
By Charles Edward Trevelyan available on Google books. Take heed only do so if one are not afraid of learning.

Damocles, as you are not Irish then it figures that you wouldnt be bothered about this but the population of my country was halved due to people starving to death and being forced abroad on coffin ships. I AM bothered about this.
You might not find the sight of famine walls in the west of Ireland and furrows from failed potato crops alongside abandoned villages and stone houses poignant but I do.

Declan Noonan, if you are correct then why is this supposed ‘knowingness’ not present in the famine video or in the comments here?

Nonsense Charles! There has only been a half dozen comments so far and the article is not a in depth history of the famine, just a article about the famine. If anyone wants to know more they can look it up in a history book or get articles online. Btw I went to a Irish school in Dublin with a big emphasis on Irish history. So don’t give me any criticism for not knowing what went on.

Hi Charles, just to clarify – we were actually looking at the famine from the point of view of the science (it was for the ESOF/Dublin City of Science conference). Of course the reasons for the famine were very complex, but I don’t think anybody can deny that the failure of the crop did indeed contribute to it. We were more interested in looking at the disease that caused it and of course the Irish scientists that did ground-breaking work on the life cycle of the fungus, which is often forgotten.
Thanks for watching though (:

Declan Noonan please give us a demonstration of your knowledge so that we may marvel at your erudition. You have not let us see any of it. Your claim to authority cannot be sustained by the phrase “we all know” it must be backed up with evidence. Every college teaches this as it is one of the elementary principles of rational discourse. Without such explicit evidence one is forced to believe that one has no knowledge of the subject or has even graduated from high school let alone college.

Charles once you posted ‘evidence’ taken from wikipedia it became abundantly clear that you did not study history in any college. It is literally beat into your brain from day one that wikipedia is a big no no. You may as well base your argument on something you found on a cereal box. Cormac Ó Gráda, Christine Kinealy, James Donnelly, Larry Geary… Please choose from any reputable Famine historian or reputable source.

Hi Aoife MacCormac, I do appreciate your point about being solely concerned with the scientific aspects of the famine however this aspect has also been sidelined in the video. Most of the victims died not of starvation but of disease which hunger caused them to be more susceptible to. Furthermore the video explicitly states the failure of the potato crop was the “main cause” of the famine. The main cause was the economic conditions the people were forced to endure and the high death rate was not as a result of a food shortage within the country.

There was a similar “potato famine” in the highlands of Scotland from 1846-52 and the masses did not die in their thousands. Why? The answer to this question proves that potato blight was not the cause of mass deaths in Ireland.

c.f. “Democide”, a recently coined term, has been suggested to be more appropriate — referring to a deliberate policy of negligence rather of planned extermination.

‘beaten into…’ bloody iphone.

John Burke the reason college students are told not to take information from Wikipedia is to counter their lazy tendencies and keep them out of the college bar. When you progress further in your studies you will have to deal with primary sources and progress on from secondary sources which you have quoted. I have already stated that the primary source is available on Google books which one can look up easily as most college bars now have free wi-fi.

Oh my God I don’t even know if your serious now or taking the piss. Please explain to me what you know about my level of education? ‘When you progress further…’ as if your all knowing and I have not yet reached your level of intelligence yet. By the way Google books? A 5 year old could choose that obvious one, might want to try the online article databases like JSTOR. Those are what real students use. Again when you go on about Wikipedia and Google Books your hand is revealed. Just to make it clear I have my degree in history and my masters also. I’m not going to even bother writing to you again because your smugness is frankly infuriating.

Oh the snobbery of being able to use JSTOR and coupled with ignorance of primary sources suggests one not past their first year of barflydom. Of course you do realise that this is a public forum and that most readers do not have access to academic databases but primary source material is publicly available through certain websites like Google Books. If you have a masters degree then I suggest you had it back or I will ask the college to rescind it on the basis that anyone that starts a post with OMG has not achieved a low not to mind a high intellectual standard! :)

Oh and ya John Burke, I forgot to mention that JSTOR does not have a copy of – The Irish Crisis By Charles Edward Trevelyan. (yeah I checked hehe) I therefore suggest that your claims to have degrees are as bogus as your claim to authority on this subject and others.