Tory Mp Irish famine

[Barill22]

Andrew Griffith is al over the news for appearing to make a derogoratory remark about the Irish famine.

Any thoughts? I cant seem to link an article, but if you google his name youll see it

It was a genocide. Not only did over a million die, 2 million emigrated with many dying on the 'coffin ships'. Ireland has still not reached the population levels of the country pre-genocide.
Christy Moore has a song which sums up the sheer evilness of that sad period of history'

A list of exports from Cork Harbour
On a single day
The fourteenth of September, Eighteen Forty-Seven
Ran as follows:

147 barrels of pork
986 casks of ham
27 sacks of bacon
528 boxes of eggs
1, 397 firkins of butter
477 sacks of oats
720 sacks of flour
380 sacks of barley
187 head of cattle
296 head of sheep, and
4, 338 barrels of miscellaneous provisions
On a single day
The ships sailed out from Cork Harbour
With their bellies in the water
On a single day in County Galway
The great majority of the poor located there

Were in a state of starvation
Many hourly expecting death to relieve their suffering

On a single day
The Lady Mayoress held a ball
At the Mansion House in Dublin
In the presence of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
Dancing continued until the early hours
And refreshments of the most varied and sumptuous
Nature
Were supplied with inexhaustible profusion
On a single day
On a single day
It's about time this little country of ours had a bit
Of peace

Yes of course the rich Irish people went to University back then. Only rich people had access

A lot of those rich irish people were the descendants of the English landowners!

My mum grew up in Ireland in the 1940s and 50s. She said that absolutely nobody in her area could afford to go to university, except for one family. They were protestamt land owners.

My mum told me that everyone else she knew , went out to work at a young age

I thought pp meant her great grandmother was 9 in about 1849, about same as my great grandfather. The hunger continued for decades, and the impact of childhood starvation affects a woman's grandchildren.
A feature of Irish society in 19 - 20th century was the late age of marriage and childbearing. At times Ireland had the oldest firstweds in Europe (possibly the world), and consequences including high rates of Downs Syndrome as well as long intergenerational memory. There was a famous debate in the Dáil titled "The problem of umartied boys aged over 50".

I think there is difference between being 'permenant victims' or having a 'victim mentality' and expecting people who aren't Irish to have a little bit of sensitivity around an event that decimated the country. 1/3 of the population died or left. It shaped the country we have today, it wasnt until 2022 that the population exceeded 5 million for the first time in 171years.

Nobody is expecting to Brits to get down on bended knee and apologise but I don't think it's too much to ask that people aren't flippant or insensitive about it either.

Well this isn’t new behaviour from the Tories. Priti Patel threatened the Irish with famine regarding Brexit -

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46488479.amp

My great grandmother was a child about 12? when the family was evicted around 1845 so she would have been 19+ when the 'famine' ended.

She had the youngest, my grandfather 1860s - she'd already had had 6 at least. The eldest and the youngest lived the longest. Presumably the eldest used up what few resources she had originally and she had recovered somewhat when she was pregnant with my grandfather.

The 'famine' in Ireland was 1845-52 though she was suffering from the effects all her life, pregnancy wise. She just didn't have the physical resources to produce healthy children.

Strangely it did not affect her as badly as it affected her children. She lived into her 70s.

My mother was born 1906. I was born 1946 - got another 40 years to go to break the record though....

Its interesting because studies show that if our ancestors have gone through a famine, it affects our own genes to this day

PP said her great grandmother was a child/teen during the famine, not that she had borne children by then.

I am also in my fifties and some of my great grandparents were born in the 1850s and 1860s.
So my parents and their siblings do have great grandparents who lived through the famine.

It’s really not that long ago when you think of it by generation. There is no need to scoff.

My dad was born in the 40s and he and most of his siblings went to college. They were sons and daughters of a Catholic farmer from Donegal.

So they were rich. If they were children of a farmer, they were rich.

As i said , the rich people had access to college. The poor people couldnt afford to go.

My.mum (ireland in the 50s) said the ony girl in her area that could afford to go to college, was fhe daugher of a farmer. No one else could afford to go.

My grandad was a labourer on a farm

He didnt own a farm, like your grandad did.

My mums family were poor and she said most people were poor at the time. The only rich people in her area were farmers.

That was pretty unusual. Secondary school wasn't free until 1967 so it was quite common to leave school after the primary cert.

My parents were born in the 1940's too and they and all their siblings went to secondary school. Some of them also went to college. However, grandparents on both sides were self-made small business owners.

My mum's family were by no means rich. They were small farmers in the SE, but managed to send their kids to college (all born between 1930 and 1945, so during the Economic War and WW2).

They got their first car, a Ford, in the late 50s and went about in a horse and trap before then. They ate only what they grew or raised on the farm, and in summer all the kids worked all the hours to keep the farm going. Gran and Grandad managed two days holiday (two separate day trips to Tramore) between 1930 and 1980. They somehow got the money together to send everyone to school beyond age 14. Grandad paid fees for the first year of college only.

My uncles went to France during the summers in college (mail boat to Liverpool and 3rd class rail to Dover, then on to France) and picked grapes and did farm work to pay for fees and digs for the next year, sleeping in sheds and barns One by one as they graduated and got jobs they each chipped in for the next one to go. They lived in the cheapest digs they could find, rode bikes everywhere, thumbed lifts home, and their clothes were rags.

My dad's family were objectively rich (expensive boarding schools, maids, governess, finishing school in Paris for my aunts) and going to college (boys only) required no sacrifices.

There were - and still are - many variations in farm income. Before Ireland joined the EEC, many farmers just about managed to eat.

And wrt to the 'rich landowners' comment - all of my grandparents were RC. One side were all lawyers, judges, doctors, and the other farmers (former tenant farmers - the rent book was kept in a lead box along with the records showing the eventual buying back of the farm). Both sets of grandparents were involved up to their eyeballs in the war of independence and civil war on the republican side.

Sorry, but that really is a very simplistic and not an accurate account of events.

I am another poster who has a history degree, from an Irish university.

Ireland in the 1840s was not a land of impoverished RC Irish peasants all subsisting on potatoes and British aristocrats loading it over them, extracting rent at the point of a bayonet and stealing food for export. It just wasnt.

If a history degree teaches you anything, it's the fact that there's academic history and there's historical memory, and quite often it's a case of never the twain shall meet. It also teaches the attraction of the simple version of events, something that's very clear where feelings about the Famine are concerned.

Class based analysis (aka Marxist analysis, but don't let that tem put you off) of Irish history in the 19th century yields useful insights, as does the solid work of economic historians.

The devil is in the details.

A German friend said exactly the same thing to me recently. She was genuinely shocked that British people were so uneducated about their own past.

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.

Actually, at the time of the famine (ie mid nineteenth century) the vast majority of land in Ireland was in Protestant hands.
“In 1603 90% of land was still in Catholic hands; by 1641, after two series of plantations, this had fallen to 59%; by 1685 to 22%, in 1691 at the end of the Williamite War, to 14%, by the 1770s to 5% and by 1870 to as little as 3%” (Tomás Ó Dúbha)

Wow, totally removed from my parents experience. My dad was born in 1931 - had to leave school at 12 to work which was the norm on our town (his stories from WW2 especially as filled with poverty as he worked in a forge and there was a steel shortage). My mom born in 1939 was lucky even though they had a small subsistence farm and couldn't pay school fees she got a scholarship to secondary which kept her in education till 17 when she won an exam for a training place for nursing (then promptly at 22 had to quit when she got married due to the marriage ban (and that's a different rant). In our town the majority of kids who got to secondary school were protestant landowners, even in the 1930s and 1940s - and those who were the kids of doctors, or families with enough money the kids didn't need to work but that was rare. It was so unusual to know someone who went to university really until 60/70s - and then of course the free education system changed everything.

Laissez faire was always going to be a light touch government policy.

British government was far less of an all encompassing entity in the 1840s than it is today or even compared to the reach of government by the end of the 19th century.

Great Britain and Ireland were administered in the 1840s by local grantees for the most part. Magistrates, poor law boards, landowners, and local lord lieutenants all wielded local power. In Ireland, military occupation was the means by which the island was kept quiet. Suffrage was severely restricted in both Great Britain and Ireland, and MPs represented only very limited constituency interests. Tithes were owed by all to the established church on both islands.

The task of dealing with the crisis caused by the Famine was left to the poor law unions. Poor law unions also existed and operated in Britain. The poor law unions ran the British workhouses Dickens described, and there were also workhouses in Ireland (many were later converted into county hospitals). Local taxes supported the workhouses.

It simply didn't occur to politicians or government/ mandarins ( or anyone else) that national government should play an immediate role in the lives of the people. The role of the national government was not imagined in that way until the next century.

Thst being said, Trevelyan's attitude tipped into support for the idea that land should be managed with only profit in mind, and the calamity of famine presented an opportunity to reorganize or rationalise land management. And Trevelyan had a great deal of impact on the course of the Famine.

Your statement is a bit of a straw man - only the very poor were to be allowed to starve or cleared off land that would be more profitable if turned to grazing. Land clearance had been embraced previously during the Highland clearances. It wasn't a moral problem for those landowners who decided to charter ships and drive families off their lands or simply whistle up the militia and have them thrown out on the roads. Nobody at any point contemplated the death of all the Irish.

Were your dad’s family always Catholic?
It was quite unusual (though not unheard of) for Catholic families to be so well to do in the late 19th or very early 20th century.
You didn’t have to be Catholic to be a nationalist either, though things became more polarised later.

My mum was also born in the 40s and worked in a City Council until she had to quit after she got married due to the marriage ban! But she then had 4 kids in just over 6 years so she was otherwise occupied!

Yes always Catholic. We have a family tree done up by a relative who was a priest in the USA which goes back to something like 1750.

Thanks @Hollyhobbi but my question was to @mathanxiety whose Catholic family included judges and so on in her grandparents generation, so early 20th century (?). That’s quite unusual I think?

Even most of the farmers in my area in rural midlands Ireland to this day, are Protestant. Church of Ireland. I know because they've told me they are.

Oops! You are right about very few judges etc. being Catholic back in that era.

Okay but that’s specific to your area. It’s not a general thing.