Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

I spent some times in Ireland and Northern Ireland recently. What the locals told me about the famine were:

- Most land were controlled by large land owners. Most peasants had very small farm land, which couldn't feed the people if normal crops were planted so they had to plant the higher yield potato to have enough food. When the disease wiped out the potato crop, most people went without any food.

- The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals.

- The ruling class consisted of large land owners and British transplants in the Northern Ireland after the conquering of Ireland by Britain could care less about the shortage of food. They actively hid the problem from the central government in Britain. The governor/duke/whoever tried to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid appearing as incompetent.

- When the central government in Britain learned of the famine, they acted too late and too little, unwilling to spend money to deal with the emergency. Britain at the time looked down on the Irish people in general.

This led to great animosity of the Irish people to Britain, driving the subsequent independent movements.

Fun fact, about 10% of the U.S. population are of Irish descent, due to massive immigration from Ireland in the following years after the famine.

Edit: Just looked up the Irish population in U.S., about 11%. https://uscanadainfo.com/irish-ancestry-in-america/

Another fun fact: useless buildings were commissioned as a form of charity to the starving poor under the guise of gainful employment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conolly%27s_Folly

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/irelands-famine-follie...

Blindboy did an interesting podcast on this:

https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/pineapplefolly

Buildings and roads yeah. Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then, this was the time of the New Poor Law (oft called the starvation act) and the workhouses.

Being poor was considered a major personal failing.

Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor

FTA (for anyone's benefit):

> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.

> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.

It would be darkly poetic if Brexit brought these same conditions to the UK as a whole if they had crop failures one year.

(To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)

> Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then

That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.

Nope! I’m not going to claim it was great before, but Britain was actively regressing as the Whigs took control and followed the ideas of Malthus and Bentham. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (new poor law) was specifically design to check on and significantly downgrade the body of old poor law.

When the Irish crossed the Atlantic, looking for a better life, they travelled on what became known as "coffin ships". It was common for 20-30% of the passengers to die during transit, and sometimes reportedly up to 50%.

And not all that survived the trip across made it much further. Typhoid or "ship fever" was killing a lot of the passengers and when they arrived in North America, they were put into quarantine camps where many died.

As an interesting factoid these sort of mortality figures were not especially uncommon in naval voyages until surprisingly recently. Scurvy is kind of a joke now a days, but it killed millions of people. It was such a big deal that vitamin c is literally named after it - ascorbic acid, or anti-scurvy acid. But that only happened on into the 20th century!

The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.

Another fun fact, the current population in Ireland is about 5.3 millions. That means there're more Irish in U.S. than in Ireland.

And yet, so few of us Yanks speak it well. Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland.

Are you talking about the Irish language? Very few Irish people speak it well. Less than 2% use it daily.

I think GP is saying the Irish speak and write a more beautiful or clever English, the language adopted from their conquerors, than in the USA, or perhaps even England.

Correct, thank you.

I said “Nothing like hearing English spoken in Ireland” and wasn’t talking about Gaelic. The rich way they use English and the accent are spectacular

I misinterpreted "Nothing like hearing English..." as a comment on the fact that the indigenous language is no longer spoken very much. Just a bias of mine.

Btw "Gaelic" alone typically refers to either the language family - Scottish, Irish, and Manx - or specifically to Scottish Gaelic. Irish Gaelic, in English, is simply referred to as "Irish" or "the Irish language". And it's largely the source of the way the Irish use English.

We may catch 'em on a per-capita basis too, if current immigration, emmigration, and tfr trends continue.

What do you mean?

I suspect it means: With mass immigration occurring in Ireland at the rate it is, soon the proportion of ethnic Irish in Ireland's population may match the proportion of ethnic Irish in the US's population.

Hyperbole is a common facet of humour (to make a point) in the British Isles.

All the better for Irish crew diversity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaaZsBxWeiQ

It's also one of the few (only?) countries in the world whose population is smaller today than it was 150 years ago.

Census data I found is that Ireland has about 7.1 people.

But it also says that the year before the shit completely hit the fan, the Ireland population topped out at 8.18m. 10 years later it was down 1.6m, and another .6m after another 10. And it just kept trending downwards until the 1930's, (4.21m) and bottomed out again in ~1960 before it started growing again.

If you include Northern Ireland, it's 7.2 million. But it was 8.5 million before the famine; 6.5 immediately after. After that emigration drove that number down. The population size never recovered to pre famine levels.

My mistake. I did only look up the population in Ireland, forgot that Northern Ireland was part of Ireland until the 1900's.

Or you could say that Ireland was a part of Northern Ireland ;)

The fact that food was still being exported while people starved is just staggering. No wonder it left such deep scars and fueled the push for independence

> The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals

This is still happening in parts of the world.

In the Akkadian empire, archeologists found that every family house had a place to store wheat and other grains. That suggests that every family had the right to own enough land to survive.

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