Tory Mp Irish famine

I think this is true. A neighbour of my mum in Spain had a daughter studying history at a University in England and her daughter said they hadn't studied any Irish history in primary or secondary school also in England.

I am amazed no one has (quite fairly) blamed Gove yet. He practically single handedly rewrote the secondary history curriculum. One of the things he railed against for example was the teaching of war poets and the use of Blackadder because they were 'too negative'. He was keen for us only to learn (or to both sides) the glories of the British Empire and, in Geography, there was an (aborted) move towards both sidesing Climate Change.

I learnt loads about Irish history in school in Scotland in the 80s.

I have taught since the 90s and never come across an English curriculum with any post 1800 Irish history in it. I think it is there on A level specs but wouldn't be chosen necessarily as there are so many topics to choose from and teacher specialisms are often a bit restricted by textbook choice, school programmes of study and their own historical specialisms.

The Tudors are in vogue and there is a bit of Irish history in there.

Students I teach learn more about the Empire and the Troubles through English Lit GCSE and film studies GCSE and A level tbh.

The empire in general does get some coverage.

Why? is there some intrinsic link between the potato and Irish people? That’s pretty offensive to me as an Irish person. Someone should be able to make a comment about potatoes without it being automatically linked to Irish people fuck me!

Do they?? Where is your evidence for this?
How much do you know about Irish History?

I don't mean it's complicated as in there's too much information, I mean it's complicated because it's difficult to see who is in the 'right' and who is in the 'wrong' because that changes constantly and each side can simultaneously be wrong and right - if you see what I mean.

It was in our GCSE History lessons in London in 1989, bog standard crappy comprehensive.

@JasmineAllen yes but plenty don't even realise the role of paramilitaries or the British government.

They don't only teach three topics! You missed my point entirely. I was challenging you to choose a limited number of topics from the thousands available, i.e. you can't teach everything in depth.

Most but not all of those listed by you are covered in the UK too. Personally I agree with you - think the English history curriculum is too narrow, but the curriculum is crowded and time is wasted on SATs etc.

Teaching by topic and hopping from century to century isn't the best approach.

Survey courses give students a far better idea of cause and effect and the general sweep of human life on the planet.

When I was in primary school we started with Irish Neolithic settlements and worked our way onward through recorded history, looking at the development of agriculture, trade, invasions, movement of people, language change, landmark laws and their effects, development of transport, administration, suffrage, rebellions, political history up to 1960ish. Then in secondary school we did it all again, concentrating on modern political and social history from the French Revolution on, and encompassing the wider world, with Ireland's position within it examined.

I’m all for understanding your history but the Irish do seem to be welcoming the victim platform too much, especially third/fourth generation Irish in the UK who have zero experience of any of this.

That was the era of the plantations and confiscations.

But after that (in particular after Catholic Emancipation in 1829), land was bought and sold and the rising middle and umc classes of both Irish and English origin benefited.

You both missed my point. The point was making you choose a topic from the thousands throughout human history, because you simply can't learn everything in school.

Did you? Well, that was quite a lot to cover in a school curriculum. You must have had an excellent history teacher.

Any thoughts on the socioeconomic consequences of the The Black Death, or what the impact of the Harrying of the North might have on Northern English communities today, eight centuries later? These are areas of interest of mine, so I'm keen to hear your perspective.

Also, what were the 'many more' topics? I'm genuinely interested in this vast, in-depth school history curriculum and how it was taught.

Same (though I had left school before several of the events took place).

The approach to teaching history in the UK is very poor compared to the Irish approach, imo.

It's not entirely true that 'English ariatocrats' were to blame, though many were major landlords and saw the failure of the potato crop as an opportunity to clear tenants off their lands and put cattle or sheep there instead. But they weren't alone.

The famine affected different regions in varied ways, depending on whether areas had been primarily subsistence level farming or otherwise before the failures (over several years) of the potato crop, and even in areas where farming was a step up from subsistence, there were still many landless laborers or subsistence level farmers with tiny plots and very sub standard dwellings.

There was a protestant/ Anglo Irish landowning class and an RC/ Irish landowning class under the level of the aristocracy, and there was another absentee landlord class who lived in Dublin or London or other cities and employed managers or agents to run their holdings. Merchants in the cities participated in the export of food.

Some landlords were famously helpful to their tenants while some were notoriously brutal. In general, the poorest suffered the most. They died or boarded ships to literally anywhere else outside Ireland, in desperation.

@Barill22 If you had to choose, based on limited time in the school curriculum, what historically important topics resulting in the starvation, death or murder of people would you want taught?

Choose three (remember, there isn't room to teach any more)

The Great Famine (Ireland), 1845-1852
The Black Death (Everywhere), 1348-51
The Highland Clearances (Scotland, rural people),18th-19th Century
The English Enclosures (England, rural people), 13th-17th Century
The Holocaust, 1941-45 (Europe, Jewish populations)
The Rwandan genocide (Rwanda, Tutsi populations), 1994
The Yugoslav Wars (Balkan states), 1991-2001
The Harrying of the North (Northern England), 11th Century.

Did you base your selection on numbers killed, ethnicity of those affected, the perpetrators, how long ago it was, or something else?

Who might be offended by your list?
Would someone in future disagree with you?

Thing is, wherever you look in history, there are examples of people doing terrible things to other people.

I wasn’t taught about Irish history at school.
I taught myself.

I highly recommend anyone watching “once upon a time in Northern Ireland” to understand more about the Troubles
Other resources are available.

People would be in uproar if a British MP made a little joke about, say, the slave trade

It wasn’t just an isolated incident that happened 200 years ago.

The British brought about the circumstances leading up to the famine, and those circumstances continued on until you had the signing of the GFA which only happened in 1998

For me, it’s comparable with a German MP making a thinly veiled holocaust joke