I always presumed that the political mindset that allowed the starvation in Ireland to happen in the 1840s as a consequence of deliberate policy, harshly backed up by the law, would never recur. I am having to reappraise that opinion. The mindset of abuse that caused that starvation to be imposed on millions still exists and is to be found in this government and in the Bank of England, which actively wants things to get worse. That is what troubles me, because I cannot see where this ends right now.
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Gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.1% in March 2022
Really not sure that 0.1 % either way is equivalent to starving Ireland.
No-one told the Irish to depend on potatoes. They made that decision for themselves for the sensible reason that an acre of potatoes feeds more people than an acre of anything else. Having decided to depend on potatoes they didn’t waste money on flour mills or baking ovens because they didn’t have a use for them.
Then potato blight arrived and decimated the crop. There was no usable substitute, since there were not the tools to turn grain into food. So people starved, because they didn’t appreciate the danger of relying on just one crop.
There is no reason to suppose that the British introduced potato blight, nor the slightest motive for them to do so- quite the contrary given how many Irish were recruited into the British Army and Navy.
But those clamorous for independence sure pushed that narative.
There was a chap on R4 a few years back who hypothesised that the Spud Famine was a typical result of monoculture. Guano was imported from S America ( Chile. I think) to be turned into fertiliser. This guano carried the bacteria that attacked the potatoes, conditio s were ideal because it had been pretty wet and only one type of potato was grown in much of Ireland.
( I say bacteria, but someone might correct me there).
Also Irish farmers were still exporting their grain until the British govt stepped in, bought it up and started distributing in Ireland. But it took many months before they organised the relief and the damage had been done.
It’s a fungus, not a bacteria.
But your point is essentially sound; except many of the grain exporting farmers were wealthy landowners who could be portrayed as ‘British’ by the left nationalists, despite the fact that many of them would have considered themselves Irish.
HH
Yeah fungus, thanks.
Essentially the govt did not wish to interfere with private landowners, who however did not “do the right thing”.
Also
Spud’s point actually seems to echo right wing conspiracy theories especially in USA where Biden is refusing to allow new oil and gas production in Alaska, food processing plants across the country are mysteriously blowing up and Bill Gates is buying all the farmland. Here the govt is encouraging farmers to retire.
The mindset of abuse in government that has been deliberately forcing energy prices upwards, deliberately imposing policies degisnged to make it harder to eat, harder to stay warm, harder to move around. I say, I welcome Lord Spudcup’s Damascene conversion on green policies.
Is he also accusing the British government of causing the potato blight in Europe at the same time? Does he even know their was a potato blight in Europe as well? Belgium, Denmark, Württemburg and the Netherlands lost a bigger percentage of their potato crops than Ireland.
The food plants blowing up – there are tens of thousands of them in the US and there have been about twenty fires recently.
The Bill Gates buying up farmland- the total amount he has bought is about 242,000 acres, or 378 sq miles ie a patch of land (if it was in one piece) measuring less than 20 x 20 miles. Admittedly I don’t know if he’s also a major agri investor ie he owns landowners, but unless he is – and while I think he’s a manboobed cunt of the first water – I don’t think that’s a problem, yet.
The oil and gas production is weird, but Biden’s a moron so what do you expect.
There’s also the plan to slaughter chickens and animals around the world, to halt bird flu/gas emissions.
Put it all together and there is the basis for a decent conspiracy theory, and even some concern, but there are bigger issues out there (I think).
Interested. I watch various ‘industrial disaster’ videos online as I’m interested in how industrial processes go wrong and there are some sorts of food plants, most notably grain silos, that due to the explosive dust that grain produces, that explode without any outside help. A dodgy and overly warm bearing can set off a grain dust explosion. Likewise sugar plants, custard factories and flour mills and similar all have fire and explosion hazards that don’t need any nefarious input to self destruct.
The CT about the exploding food factories sounds convincing until you start to realise that a) this is a very small number of enterprises and b) they may be factories that had a fire and explosion hazard anyway.
Yeah Otto. Although I understand the British government also bought maize as a handout.
Thank you jgh. It’s a pleasure to know someone else thinks like me!!!
(i) You can also collapse a grain silo without an explosion, just as a result of the stresses imposed by flowing granular material. I used to know a bloke who worked on that.
(ii) Potato blight also afflicted the West Highlands. But people there were reasonably accessible by sea so it was easy (a) for relief to reach them, and (b) for many of them to migrate to the cities to seek work.
It’s probably likelier that your landlord will try hard to get relief to you if you don’t spend your lives threatening to cut his throat and burn his wife and children alive. Just a speculation on human nature, mind.
Take (almost) anything flammable, turn it into a fine powder, suspend it in air, and you have an explosive mixture. The 17th century windmill I volunteer at has wooden shovels, to avoid the risk of striking a spark on a nail.
Shetlands Population even today is around 2/3rd of what it was in 1841.
Combination of reasons: potato blight hit the islands badly, whale oil got replaced by real oil from the ground later in the century, then herring processing got more efficient and went elsewhere.
But yes, the potato blight was multi-national.
Why it was worst in Ireland is complicated but not helped by a UK government which imposed the Corn Laws until the late 1840s.
Spud supports their modern equivalent. i.e centralised protectionism
As an aside, lovely to see Irish farmland owners in large part rejecting their government’s latest subsidy offer of 400 euro an acre to turn fallow land into cereal production this year. They say that they’re not buying fertiliser at today’s prices, nor running tractor pulled ploughs over the land at today’s fuel prices for such a miserly handout, so feck off.
Never forget of the 6 or 7 Primary drivers of the current crisis
1 – War in Ukraine and ongoing escalation encouraged by the Western powers
2 – QE and other government stimulus feeding in to the economy and causing asset price bubbles
3 – The continued pursuit of Net Zero
4 – Unlimited immigration and the cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands in temporary accommodation with zero productivity while asylum decisions are made
5 – COVID lockdowns and the ongoing failure of the public sector to return to work
6 – Impact of The ongoing issues with the Brexit deal
7 – Firms taking advantage of the situation to engage in super inflationary pricing
Murphy only believes in 2 (# 6& #7 and maybe 3 if you add the Ukraine war – #1) and he will not reverse 2 through 5 under pain of death. So he is in effect almost entirely responsible for the oncoming tragedy.
VP
Like the morons in the Labour Party he probably thinks that No 7 could be countered with windfall taxes.
Pat, the reason why the Irish were so dependent on the potato crop was because primogeniture was banned for Catholics. The oldest son could only inherit the land if he converted to the C of E.
Of course, in addition to primogeniture being banned for Catholics, so was education!
@Jean
Sounds like you’re talking about the subdivision of inherited land. Most catholic countries seem to have it. Spain & France certainly do/did. So it’s more likely catholics were excluded from primogeniture because catholics wanted to be. Not it was forced on them.
“in addition to primogeniture being banned for Catholics, so was education!”
For decades I was told that a nasty feature of Old Ireland was that Roman Catholics were banned from Trinity College, Dublin, by those vile Protestants. Only later did I discover that they were indeed banned, but by the Pope not by the Protestants.
Once again my Irish Grandpa proved wise: “All Irish history is lies” was his summary.
Sorta. The English insisted, no choice allowed, that if you were to be Catholic then you must use this inheritance method. Which achieved a dual purpose. The ambitious who didn’t care very much about religion converted, those who didn’t their land acreage based power diminished over the generations.
@Boganboy,
Yep, I also read that maize thing. Which made me smile wryly when last in Dublin to see tins of ‘sweetcorn’ in a supermarket, and get it served to me in a restaurant. Then I went to an Italian restaurant where there was polenta, and a Chinese restaurant where there was maize in a soup. Seems like you can eat it, provided that you cook it, so they shouldn’t have turned their noses up at it. The article I read said the Oirish rejected it as being too hard, and if they couldn’t grind it, perhaps they could have soaked it, boiled it on a peat fire – it’s not as though there was a shortage of peat or water!
Anyway, I’ve always somewhat doubted the potato monoculture thing. After all, what is colcannon without potato? (Answer: it’s cabbage). Didn’t they have owt else to eat? Molly Malone sells cockles and mussels, which are also a bit hard on the teeth if you try them in their shells!
Nah, what’s more likely is that all the men buggered off looking for gold, working on railway construction, descending on Boston and New York in droves or something, and no-one was left seriously working the land. (OK, the left-behinds had a spud diet and little else, perhaps. I doubt that much money was ‘remitted home’).
We had a load of Oirish Travellers annoying us a few months ago. Is there still a potato famine in Oirland? I didn’t notice them growing anything round their caravans apart from piles of rubbish – although they certainly left the land well fertilised with shite when they left. It isn’t only bears that shit in the woods.
Correct, Tim.
Much though they would love to claim it as an example of the English persecuting the Irish, the same was applied to Catholics in England, even down to the ban on owning any horse better than a nag.
“in addition to primogeniture being banned for Catholics, so was education!”
It was also banned for the Free Kirk in Scotland. So it built its own college.
Apparently there’s football chant which goes ” The famine’s over so why don’t you fuck off home.”
@Witchie
The problem with maize is, you can’t really make bread out of it. No gluten so it doesn’t produce the same sort of dough. We’re a partially maize flour based household (& yuca/manioca/cassava- choose word to suit your culture), for cultural reasons. We make arepas, which would be the equivalent of a roll but look more like crumpets. But they don’t taste anything like wheatbread. You can get maize flour based loaves. Coelic-safe bread. It has the texture & taste of unsweetened cake. And you can’t use maize corn as is. Needs soaking in lye or it’s indigestible.
So, basically, if you’re going to tackle maize based cookery, you need a maize based cookery course & the kit. Don’t suppose they were running them in C18th Ireland. So if you gave people maize it wasn’t much good to them.
The great thing about the spud, which came from the same cultures as maize, is you only have to boil it. If they’d been able to grow yuca, they’d have needed a yuca cuisine to go with it.
Thanks BiS.
“Apparently there’s football chant which goes ‘The famine’s over so why don’t you fuck off home.’”
Tasteless, but the authoritarian a***holes at Holyrood actually passed a law (since repealed) against that kind of thing. People spent time in jail.
Really not sure that 0.1 % either way is equivalent to starving Ireland.
It isn’t, but it’s fun to imagine it is possible.
Starving Scotland would be even better…
“It was also banned for the Free Kirk in Scotland.” I’m not sure I believe that.
I can imagine that after the Disruption ownership of church schools remained with the Kirk so the Frees built church schools of their own. But “banned”? You gotta link?
@Fahrenheit 211 yep absolutely
Plus the media pick up on something and make instances of it a thing. I was talking to someone or reading about or otherwise hearing of the Year of the Shark in the US some time in the 70s. The papers were full of attacks by sharks, but it turned out they were just finding what they wanted to find and actually it was a low attack year.