"Many of them were transported to North America against their...

"Many of them were transported to North America against their will, and many of them were sold for profit" yes an estimated 55k were in penal servitude..

55k?

Well, that's not really that much, is it?

But what about the rest you've omitted to mention - the million Irish who were forced to leave their homeland between 1845 and 1850 - not as "volunteers", as you trivially described it in an earlier post, but because they were starving in a country which, under English rule, was exporting vast amounts of food to England.

And what about the million who actually died of starvation and related disease?




My long-made observation with people who downplay the oppression of the Irish people is that they involve two kinds of Sassenach Imperialists:

1. Those that are conversant with Irish history, but who seek to re-cast it, for whatever reasons, and
2. Those who are ignorant of Irish history.

Given your flagrant contempt for the facts, I figure you in the latter.


So that you don't continue trivialising something due to lack of knowledge, maybe you should actually do some proper reading about Irish history, instead of gleaning it from mainstream, western-centric media.

Suggest you start with English historian Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger - Ireland 1845-9 (Pub. Hamish Hamilton UK).

You might learn a thing or two about "Peel's brimstone" and the evictions at the hands of Lord Palmerstone [*], the then British Foreign secretary. Here's what he had to say:

"... any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation [through] a long continued and systematic ejectment of Small holders and of Squatting Cottiers"


And here's what the local bishop wrote at the time:

"Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them ... The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless agony of honest industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The landed proprietors in a circle all around—and for many miles in every direction—warned their tenantry, with threats of their direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter ... and in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves.^"


Not so much volunteer departees, but flight from systemically-induced starvation at the hands of the Palmerstone adminsitration.


[*] Numerous statues of Lord Palmerstone exist in town in England, as well as across the Commonwealth, and numerous towns and streets are named after him. I've not met a single Irish person calling for those statues to be pulled down, or for the names of streets and towns to be renamed. The prevailing view amongst Irish people is that symbolism of English oppression is merely a product of its time and that trying to erase it has no bearing on the Irish identity and consciousness. In fact, its existence in many ways serves as reminders, which reinforce the aspirations and energies of us Irish.

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