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

How do you know? Has there been recent surveys?

To be honest I’m not sure of the demographics of it, but this description (expensive boarding schools, maids, governess, finishing school in Paris for my aunts) and going to college (boys only) required no sacrifices) doesn’t seem typical of Catholic families in early 20th century Ireland.

I will say that lots of even quite small and not very well off farmers did have to have some help working the land, so one or two ‘servants’ living with a family wasn’t an unusual inclusion in the 1911 census in farming families.

Yes

Provide links then

Look up the Land Acts for clarity @Barill22, or look at the census data. I’m not doing it for you.
Of course there are Protestant farmers, but they don’t own ‘most’ farms in the Republic of Ireland today as you seem to think?

It really wasn't unusual! There was a substantial Catholic middle / upper middle class by the later 19th century, mostly nationalist (they would have voted for the Irish Party, which supported what we would now call devolution. Demands for a republic and / or full independence was seen as very extreme until post-1916). Plenty of them worked for the British state in various capacities, some quite senior (of course families memory-holed a lot of that post-independence!). Others were professionals, comfortable farmers, business owners etc. Local Government was democratic and in the hands of nationalists everywhere but Ulster and IIRC South Dublin. This is partly why the new Irish state turned out to be remarkably stable and pretty conservative - there was a very substantial nationalist managerial / professional / business / farming class already in place, with a vested interest in the underlying status quo. The idea that the Irish Catholic people pre-independence were a solid undifferentiated mass of oppressed peasants burning for revolution is very odd. Likewise Protestants were a fairly diverse community ie Dublin had a reasonably large Protestant working class.

So how come Tomas O Dubha said that in 1870, only 3 percent of the land in Ireland was owned by catholics.

“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)

Thank you.
I didn’t think Irish people were ‘a solid undifferentiated mass of oppressed peasants’ btw 😉
Neither did I think they were burning for revolution, mostly because they weren’t.

Catholics owned around 3% of the land at that point, so there can’t have been too many comfortable farmers, not land owners at least?

Fascinating, I would love to know more.

I must research my own family history. Plenty of trauma and youthful pregnancies, too busy childrearing and surviving to have energy for the past.

There is only one compulsory topic in the history national curriculum (the holocaust).

One of the areas that has to be covered is “ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901”. It is up to individual schools/teachers to decide which topics to teach within that heading.

The National Curriculum gives a few examples of topics that might be included . They include: Ireland and Home Rule, the development of the British Empire, and Britain’s transatlantic slave trade.

Totally agree with this. The real victims of the Irish famine died. The next most impacted emigrated. Some to the US. Many to England - cf the Mayo and Sligo Irish who were used to break strikes in the Northern Mill towns. Wealthy mill owners replaced the miserably poor English with even more miserably poor Irish. They cared nothing about either group.

The Irish who stayed on the island of Ireland were relatively well off in comparison and were often not directly impacted by the famine. Many Irish Catholic landowners (not just the Anglo Irish) were also complicit in evicting tenant famers from their land - something they choose to forget these days.
My own family - some of whom are part of the “The English should compensate us brigade” - were really shocked when they discovered what our own ancestors had done. Rather harder now to point the finger at the English - many of whom are direct descendants of those Mayo and Sligo Irish.

@BridgetofKildare
I agree that people are people the world over and Irish people are as a group just as likely to behave badly as other groups. However, given that only 5% of the land was in Irish Catholic hands at the time of the famine, I’m not sure how Catholic landowners could have had a very large part to play in the evictions by landlords as a whole. Though I am sure they did play a part, saying ‘many’ did so might be misleading, as Catholics mostly weren’t landowners at that time iyswim. So your statement does need to be taken in the context of the overall land ownership at the time of the Famine.

I also think it’s not fair to tell people in Ireland today that their ancestors weren’t too badly off, all things considered? Because they didn’t die or have to leave. For which we are very grateful of course. But there was a mix of people in Ireland at the time and many of those who remained will have had relatives who left for example. The conditions in the following years were extremely difficult for many Irish people.

This 🖕 My own family are from Connacht , the least populous Irish Province , which nonetheless had something called the Congested Districts Board. Because it could not support the numbers of Catholics whose ancestors had been driven there by Cromwell. Of course some Irish did benefit from the Famine - they acquired the tenancy of holdings left by those who emigrated, went into the Poor House or simply died of hunger and disease. Landlords and agents benefited from these consolidations too. Since the 80s at least there has been a concerted attempt by Revisionist historians - and writers of fiction - to get us to shoulder some of the blame for the crimes and idiocies of landlords and their proxies in Westminster. It is indeed the case that we now have our own landlord class squatting in the Dáil and owning idle land and empty homes. But that was not true 1845 -51.

If anyone is interested I recommend this podcast/YouTube series by Finn Dwyer on many aspects of the Great Famine.

https://www.youtube.com/@irishhistorychannel

BTW his name is spelled Fin, oops. His podcast series is amazing, it covers history from way back pre Norman times up to more or less the present day.

https://shows.acast.com/irishhistory/episodes/the-great-irish-famine-series---an-introduction

No, but there were merchants and traders and dealers in livestock and agricultural produce, and the dreaded gombeen man was a fixture of society, along with the publican.

There were families comfortably enough off to send sons to study for the priesthood and daughters to be nuns, and there were RC lawyers and doctors. Clongowes (Jesuit school) was founded in 1814, The Presentstion Brothers and Christian Brothers set up schools in the early 19th century too. All catered for the sons of families who didn't need the labour of their children on a farm or in a business, and who could afford to pay for a classical education.

Not all Irish historians agree that it was a genocide, but that obviously depends on how you define that word.

It was horrible and many awful things were done to the Irish by the British but nobody set out to delberately slaughter the Irish. Clearly it was very badly managed and probably the bad management was because those who should have didn't care enough.

If genocide is taken to signify the deliberate, systematic annihilation of an entire ethnic or religious group by mass murder, there is no nineteenth-century equivalent that applies anywhere. However, if it is defined as a deliberate systematic use of an environmental catastrophe to destroy a people under the pretext of engineering social reform, then there is certainly a case to be answered.

Ciarán Ó Murchadha, The Great Famine: Ireland's Agony (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 197–8.

(Just finished a history degree at an Irish university.)

Thanks @mathanxiety. Yes, I realised that, but governesses, finishing schools in Paris etc seemed like another level again in terms of life style. I guess it was a small minority who could afford all that.

5% of the land area of Ireland is over a million acres. Albeit the Catholic landowners undoubtedly had the worst million acres, and in small holdings.
Potatoes grown on a quarter of an acre is enough to feed a family of four for a year - so a 5 acre farm on decent land can be comfortable - until the crop fails.
In the 19th century the possibility of crop failure and the catastrophic scale was not imagined. In about 1845 a commission did warn but the response was spectacularly inadequate.
Now can we stop blaming this way and that way and start focussing on food security in Europe and the world in the next forty years, which does require us all to be paying attention and using our imaginations and holding all our govts to account in coming up with appropriate plans, which I believe was the topic the MP was talking about.
Supplying Europe with Scottish seed potatoes. What do we know about this? What are the implications? etc