>>>>The laid-back, communal lifestyle of Irish peasants with their long periods of idleness was also an affront to influential Protestants in England who believed idleness was the devil's work.>>>>

From the "Before the Famine " chapter.... mid 1800's.

I'm bookmarking this. One of the best compilations of a confused and complex history I've seen. It's rendered *absorbable* here.

"laid-back, communal lifestyle of Irish peasants with their long periods of idleness "

compare it to the contemporary writings on slaves WARNING - this page is very direct and honest about how African Americans were perceived by most White Americans prior to the current era and contains disturbing images)

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/coon/


What I find nearly unbelievable is that such attitudes seem to be accepted and taught at the finest universities in England to this day.

From my 1365 page volume, Europe - A History bu Norman Davies, Oxford University Press, 1996l;

'It (the potato) sustained large numbers of poor people who were left with too much time for singing, dancing, drinking poteen and telling stories..........But it (Ireland) was also the home of squalor - with large ragged families living in mud huts with no furniture and the company of pigs"



- The facts are that the native Irish had been driven off the best agricultural lands by Cromwell; the lands they held were marginal at best.

- While it is the most famous, the Great Famine was preceded by famines in the 18th century and followed by famines in the 19th.

- Such a description begs the question: who were the workers who produced all the agricultural goods for export to England?

- Many able bodied Irish planted a crop of potatoes in a so-called lazy bed, then traveled elsewhere as agricultural workers in Ireland and England. They returned in the fall with their wages to pay rent, and they harvested a year's supply of food. My own grandfather did this until he came to the US to avoid conscription in WWI. For the record, his family lived in a stone hut. He was so lazy he went on the road with his father as an agricultural worker when he was 8 or 10.

which did not happen in the "Great" Famine.

They were still producing some food, but the landlords were shipping it back to Merry Old England and elsewhere.

Read some of it, bookmarked for later. Thanks for posting link!

Julie

Such as the Corn Laws. These were protective tariffs on the importation of grain, mostly wheat, into the UK. Although thousands were dying of starvation in Ireland in 1845, the tariff remained in place until 1846.

Lord Peel, the Prime Minister at the time, arranged for importation of maize into Ireland. The reason he got maize was that he asked the Americans for "corn". According to Definition 3 from the on-line Merriam-Webster Dictionary, corn is

So, he asked for wheat, but because he used a word which meant different things in England and in the U.S., he got maize.

There were two problems:

• The first shipments of maize did not reach Ireland until February 1846.

• The Irish had no experience with maize, which was unknown in Ireland. So they didn't know how to prepare it for consumption. I daresay if you are presented with dried maize and told to eat it, you would not know either. Do you know that it has to be ground twice? The Irish certainly didn't.

In May 1846, Peel's government fell, and Lord John Russell (Bertrand Russell's grandfather) became PM. He set up a public works program in Ireland, that had also had a couple of problems. The first was that it was woefully underfunded. The second was that it was administered by probably the worst man for the job, Sir Charles Trevelyan.

Trevelyan believed that "the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". The program was deliberately set up to make no improvements to Ireland. The men employed did such stupidities as breaking up existing roads and not replacing them.

I shall not go into the problems of land ownership and so on in Ireland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule

Churchill bears a lot of responsibility for the Famine of 1943-1947. Ironically, his action/inaction was a major cause for a strengthened independence movement.

"Reportedly, when he first received a telegram from the British colonial authorities in New Delhi about the rising toll of famine deaths in Bengal, his reaction was simply that he regretted that nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi was not one of the victims.Later at a War Cabinet meeting, Churchill blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying that they “breed like rabbits.”His attitude toward Indians was made crystal clear when he told Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.""

http://www.ibtimes.com/bengal-famine-1943-man-made-holocaust-1100525