The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

By Bill Bigellow

....Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44458.htm

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From the Famine Memorial in Dublin:

[kath]

1. The first thing that popped into my head upon reading this OP is this:

"My children starved, by mountain, valley and sea

And their wailing cries, they shook the very heavens
My four green fields ran red with their blood, said she"

From the song "Four Green Fields"



Read more at http://www.songlyrics.com/clancy-brothers/four-green-fields-lyrics/#TVcgCov4QCvFYE0Y.99

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

2. Very sad...

...and so frustrating that the Great Famine, like so much tragedy in humanity's history, was avoidable and unnecessary.

[Warpy]

3. A lot of the truth about the English landlords didn't get out until quite recently

and yes, they exported food in exchange for money to support their lavish lifestyles as country gentry while Irish peasants, already pushed off on the most marginal land on the island, starved as the potatoes succumbed to blight.

The Protestant preachers, especially the ones in England, railed against giving them supplies of food, saying it would make them weak (oh, where have we heard this recently?) and the more "progressive" devised a scheme of working starving people for a daily ration of food at such suitable tasks as building stone roads. Others chartered ships to take the nearly dead off the island to other places in need of population. It was said you could follow them across all oceans by the solid trail of sharks feeding on the dead tossed overboard.

There had been a population explosion in Ireland when peasants discovered that potatoes could be cultivated on the poorest land and needed to be supplemented with only a bare minimum of other foodstuffs to support life. Before the famine, there were 8 million people on the island. After the famine, just under 2 million remained.

Because of the callous actions of the English on the island and at home, the heartless culling of 3/4 of a subject population has to be seen as one of the world's most under reported genocides.

My own family survived the famine in Ireland, the first relative coming over just in time to collect $300 for taking a rich man's son's place in the Union Army during the Civil War. They were urban and fairly well off. My great grand uncle did well with his $300 stake and brought everybody else over starting in the 1880s. None of them ever talked about what their parents and grandparents had seen during the Famine, something they had in common with the people who survived the Coffin Ships and settled here in the 1840s-1850s.

[pnwmom]

6. My daughter, after hearing so much about this from her grandmother,

wanted to do a high school term paper on the topic. This was more than ten years ago but even then historians knew that there was no real famine in Ireland -- just a potato crop failure but PLENTY of other food that was being shipped off the island for profit.

Her teacher told her not to use this for her term paper subject, saying that there was nothing to research -- "there was a famine and people died." She said my mother must be pushing her -- that's the only reason my daughter would be interested. She even basically guaranteed my daughter a low grade if she chose the topic. But it was for a humanities project and the other teacher, an English teacher, was supportive, so my daughter decided to go ahead anyway.

I don't remember what her final grade was, except that her English teacher went to bat for her. But it was amazing to me that this history teacher opposed the project so strongly.

She also said that no one could do a project on the Holocaust. She said it had already been done too much. As if it wouldn't be new and important for any high school student learning about it.

[PATRICK]

8. On a global scale

current capitalism ordains a muc more massive culling. Arleady in our country we experiment with denying health care, a shrinking life expectancy, more infant mortality and a host of environmental madness for quick and dirty meaningless money. It marches on to a scripted wasteland. So the Holocaust of all scapegoats and great Wars to destroy and fight over scraps.

[KT2000]

4. good on them for art that tells truth

I can't help but think the GOP wants to duplicate the English and use their cruelty to control the masses.

[LiberalLovinLug]

5. K & R

[pansypoo53219]

7. i learned of the corn laws from an old oration books i have. jeez. the brits.

[JDPriestly]

9. The British also used the Irish as slaves/indentured servants.

There is quite a controversy over whether the Irish were really indentured servants with the ability to pay off their time or actually slaves.

Here is the review of a book on this topic. I have not read the book.

White Cargo
The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America

Don Jordan
and Michael Walsh

http://nyupress.org/books/9780814742969/

At least one of my ancestors was brought here as a child and indentured as a servant. Her fate was very sad. A 12-year-old girl who is an indentured servant is in a very, very bad situation with no hope really of control over her future. She is at the mercy of her master and/or mistress.

Slaves had it worse, but a child that was indentured had a really, really tough time, especially a girl. There was a lot of abuse.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

10. many hungry here in the ol usa

and food waste is huge

little changes

[jtuck004]

11. Maybe it takes such deprivation to create folks such as this...

"Mary Harris was born in the Shandon area of Cork, on the north side of the River Lee. Since 2012, volunteers have organized a Cork Mother Jones Festival which celebrates and honors the legacy of Mother Jones. In August 2012 the first Mother Jones Festival was held in Cork to commemorate her baptism on August 1, 1837 in the North Cathedral, as a daughter of that city, born 175 years before. A plaque in her honor was mounted in the area near where she was born and baptized. In 2013, the Cork City Council declared August 1 “Mother Jones Day, in recognition of a famous member of the Irish diaspora who fought tirelessly to end child labour and to defend workers’ rights in America during the early part of the Twentieth Century.”
...

Mother Jones was born right into this.



http://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/site-stories/ireland/

[tk2kewl]

12. k&r

[Skwmom]

13. The real history is told sooner or later. n/t

[appalachiablue]

14. The history of Irish Americans and many other people and movements should

be taught in schools but with our neoliberal conservative politics I doubt it will happen. Hope I'm wrong.