One St. Patrick's Day when I was a little girl, my mother stopped me as I headed off to school dressed in green. She told me that that bit of Irish in my ethnic stew wasn't "green Irish," but "orange Irish." "Orange Irish," she explained, was bad and I should never tell anyone.
Over time I would learn that "Orange Irish" meant I was descended from Protestants and British occupiers. I may have been the only 7 year old in Queens who watched documentaries about British soldiers and "Orangemen" shooting Belfast children with rubber bullets.
Much about Irish history is sanitized and distorted for public consumption. In the U.S., we believe the myth of the famine. It goes something like this: Irish farmers became (implicitly, through some fault of their own) too dependent on the potato as a food crop and when the crop was hit by disease (the "blight"), the Irish starved. Many Americans of Irish descent attribute their family's emigration to the famine.
So for St. Patrick's Day, I bring you an invitation to learn about what really happened to the Catholic Irish as a result of British occupation. And to help with this, here is Sinead O'Connor's rap about the famine.
I could cry, thank you so much for posting this
You may find this of interest also:
http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57944
http://www.irishholocaust.org/home
It’s sad, I’m Irish, and growing up as a child in Ireland we were told that the famine was due to potato blight, and not that food was actually being shipped out of the country by the English while the Irish people were left eating grass in the fields to survive. At the ports/docks as the food was being shipped out guards were there with guns on the people who were desperately begging for food, many i would say were shot. This is a genoicide!! Just shows, everything about our world is a lie. Humanity has been fucked over in all its forms for many many centuries!
Love to you my friend xx
England starved the Irish. There was no famine.
We must stop using the passive voice. England created the conditions that rendered the Irish working class dependent upon the potato for the vast majority of its daily calories. Prior to so-called Black ’47, there were three potato blights, each one taking an increasingly deadly toll on the Irish people; during each, the English government with very minor exceptions, did nothing. When 1847 came along with yet another blight, the Ireland was in an economic depression; its people already horribly weakened from years of malnutrition. The English government debated whether it made rational economic sense to intervene with aid, or to sit back and let more Irish die of starvation. Some Englishmen actually rationalized their inaction as consistent with the free market ideology of Adam Smith. Had any of them actually ever read Smith, they would have learned, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, that he supported state intervention in precisely this sort of situation. What happened to the Irish over those years of the potato blights was essentially a form of state sponsored terror, or if you will, a kind of shock doctrine. England had done it before in “famine” situations in its colonies, and later in the 19th century they would do it again in its murderous treatment of India. Since the 17th century, England had been practicing its peculiar form of abuse on the people in its colonial possessions . . . starting in Ireland.
The English starved the Irish.
I really like this song. I think it is quite beautiful in it’s own rap way. (I like mellow rap)
I would of never heard this had you not put it here. Thanks both for song and awareness.
[...] I’m going to cop to some Western ignorance, but I seem to recall from my mother’s admonitions to eat my veggies that famine has been a problem on the African continent, and that potable water is becoming The Problem. What a slap in the face to hear that now farmers are in crisis over food and flowers for Westerners. Obviously it’s great that Africa’s natural resources can bring in capital by being sent abroad, but I can’t help wondering how much good they could do to enrich their own economy if former colonizers (and China, the new colonizer) weren’t siphoning them off. This has made me think a little more deeply about the causes of famine and poverty in Africa. See, for example, this brilliant edification from Sinead O’Connor (h/t Sustainable Mothering). [...]
Great song. Although many people stay quiet in front of this problem, she dares to rap about it. What a woman!
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