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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (8285)	3/13/2001 3:01:01 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Ireland was exporting food to England while a million people were starving. Sounds like capitalism to me. The Act of Union, 1801, annulled the semi-independent Irish Parliament and transferred political power definitively from Ireland to London. The effective disenfranchisement of a corrupt Dublin parliament, and the flight of landowners to London, led to large-scale social transformations. The large estates were now run by agents, and these were under pressure to maximise income from rents for the benefit of absentee landlords. Many were corrupt, all were committed to the greatest possible exploitation of the estates and their tenants. One of the consequences was that Irish agriculture adopted the potato as the staple food-crop of the peasantry, and economic forces acted to bring about what would prove a disastrous dependency on a very few varieties. There were crop failures in the early decades of the 19th century, but the Great Famine proper came in 1845-1847. Potato blight, borne on the wind, swept through the land. Whole tracts of countryside were laid waste. Hundreds of thousands perished. Scenes of unimaginable horror took place while a complacent administration called for reports and provided military escorts for grain and meat convoys destined for export. A shattered and demoralised people begged for assistance, in vain. Government raised the inhuman banner of 'Free Trade', refusing to intervene, and what had been a natural calamity became a holocaust presided over by an indifferent administration. In the three years 1845-1848 it is estimated that 1 million Irish people died of starvation or of famine-related diseases such as cholera and typhoid. The country sustained an economic, political and psychic shock of enormous force - it is a wound which has yet to heal. http://www.emination.co.uk/commonground/notes/potato.html