what began of the Irish potatoe famine

[lilmisstrouble]

How did the Irish potatoe famine begin, and whome was to blame.Was it the English?

[jackthehat]

It was an influx of 'e's' from the USA...........

[eyethenkyew]

http://en.wikipedia.o...e_Irish_Potato_Famine

[lilmisstrouble]

"e"'?

[Mosaic]

JTH is picking on your eccentric spelling of 'potato'.
The crop failed due to disease but the people starved because of laissez-faire politics.
The signs of famine were easy for the English ruling classes to ignore as the irish were considered sub-human.

[dotty.]

...and the land owners were growing potaties to sell and export not to feed their peasant workers who had to pay for the food but there was little work to earn a living.
Then the parishes were encouraged to arrange for whole villages to emigrate to England and beyond to get them off Parish relief.

[craft1948]

That's why, wherever you go in the world (nearly) there's always a bloody Irsh bar.

[craft1948]

^ Irish

[dundurn]

The Irish Potato Famine was a tragedy but not an isolated one. Try Googling the European Potato Failure. The fact that so many people died in Ireland was a measure of the degree of dependance of the Catholic population on the potato crop and the legal restrictions placed upon their ability to own land. It was a measure of the degree of separateness between the landlords (frequently absentee)and their tenants. It was a measure of the "invisiblity" of the Irish peasantry who were on the other side of a different island to the London government. It was a measure of the degree of indifference shown to the Catholic population by the Catholic Church. It was a measure of the general Victorian view that misfortune was to a degree at least a mark of Divine displeasure and therefore not to be meddled with. "There but for the grace of God go I", so to speak. Viewing the famine as some sort of perfidious Albion doing down the virtuous Irish is a gross over-simplification. Much of the blame for the severity of the famine in the West and South of Ireland has to be levelled at the more prosperous North and East of the same island. In the modern Irish population (most of whom of course are the descendants of famine survivors, not victims) there is a lot of repressed guilt when the subject of the Famine is raised. Far easier to place the blame on England than to examine the endemic Irish problems which made a terrible situation even worse.

[jno]

I'm not sure that 'the English' have anything to do with this. 'The British' maybe, as they ruled Ireland at the time, and it appears their response was certainly not what we'd now expect.

[Mosaic]

With respect, Jno - the people in the Parliament that governed Britain were English landowners, industrialists and toffs. You had to be a protestant to inherit property in English-owned Ireland.
Dundurn - you are correct to point out the widespread suffering of the working poor - this also happened at the time of the potato famine iin Lancashire, where the price of flour combined with a trade downturn, and a laissez-faire attitude to both, caused pockets of famine. An irish (how ironic) observer of the time describes visiting skeletal dying families in Colne and Bolton, who were simply being allowed to die because they were surplus to requirements.

[I.Don No]

and I wonder how many of you know that Irish slavery is recorded long before any African slavery, and that the Irish slaves were treated a lot worse than their African counterparts as they (the African slaves) had to be bought and the Irish slaves were given away.

http://www.giftofireland.com/IrishSlaves.htm

[Tweed]

Irishmen and women were forced to live on a diet of potatoes. There was no famine as there was plenty of poultry, beef, pork, wheat, barley etc. but the Brits kept that for themselves and sent it off to feed their armies who were out causing misery in other parts of the globe. British penal laws made the situation worse. Irishmen had no rights whatsoever, especially if they didn't convert to their oppressor’s religion or continued to speak in their native tongue etc. They were forced to work for absentee English landlords to pay rent. Food produced by their hands was sent to the Irish ports, guarded all the way by armed British troops before being exported to feed the British armies, while the people of Ireland died of starvation. Some say it was genocide, that the Irish were a problem to Britain because of their continued resistance to British rule.