Genocide of an Island People
“The genocide … how did your great-grandparents survive?” I ask my mother.
She stops, weakened by the heat, and shuffles over to a nearby bench.
We sit in silence for a moment.
It is a hot summer’s day at the end of May 2003.
We are walking down Godthåbsvej in Frederiksberg, an enclave of Copenhagen.
My infant twins and their two-year-old brother are at home with their father.
She is visiting me from Ireland for the christening (into an evangelical lutheran church) of my infant twin boys.
“I asked my father the same question shortly before he died”, she says as tears roll silently down her cheeks.
“He cried as he told me. Their name was Langtry; they had a farm, you see. Once you had some land, there was always a chicken running around that you could eat.”
“Ninety-odd years later, nine family members were forced to emigrate to the US during the economic war precipitated by De Valera in the 1930's.”
They perished on the coffin ships, all but one. The surviving brother reached America alive. He buried eight siblings at sea:
sewn into their clothes when their spirits left them, to be buried at sea; of the one who arrived where they’d been bound; dumbstruck with grief
“West”, by Tom French from “The Way to Work” published by The Gallery Press.
People ate grass to survive, their starving mouths stained with green and documented by modest-witness English visitors: “famished and ghastly skeletons” “Phantoms”, “Frightful Spectres”
The 700 people who inhabited the farm where I grew up died or emigrated to America on coffin ships. They starved to death in the midst of plenty.
The corn that they grew to pay the “rent” (for the land torn from them by the English despots) was brazenly exported from Youghal and other ports by absentee landlords. The British army was called in to protect the export of corn from the ports from the starving multitudes who rioted intermittently.
Fishing and hunting were illegal for Irish peasants under British law.
The easily-accessible stony beaches were STREWN with edible periwinkles. You could pick up fistfuls of them any day of the week. But it was taboo to eat these shellfish and considered poaching, illegal under British law.
Even if they had been able to avoid law enforcement, people lacked the relatively simple technology, materials and know-how to make lobster pots or fishing tackle to harvest the sea that was teeming with fish, lobsters and prawns. Not to mention the fact that hunger and physical struggle had drained all their initiative out of them.
The absentee English landlords continued to export corn in enormous quantities and were outbid by France for the American corn boats whose maize they previously had purchased cheaply and distributed to the people. It was called Peel’s brimstone after the English prime minister. The new English government of 1846 were supporters of the Free Market (Hurrah!) and its leader, Trevelyan was subsequently knighted by Queen Victoria for his genocidal policies in Ireland. He saw the famine as “an effective mechanism” for population control.
Seventy years later, in my parish, the English landlords fed free milk to children that was laced with arsenic as lethal punishment of the innocents for an uprising by their elders.
The landlord who owned our farm, sent a mad bull to evict a tenant he didn’t feel like wasting his bailiff’s time on.
Many British academics appear to “forget” Ireland when discussing colonialism. Or have a serious episode of cognitive dissonance when discussing Brexit and only consider the Irish border as an afterthought, an appendage to the main agreement.
They must have noticed Ireland, surely?
They rarely deign to mention it in their academic treatises.
The UK plays Ireland down or uses it as a source of merriment and derision:
Or do they just ignore it, in an episode of mass-delusional cognitive dissonance?
This is a revised edition of a response I originally published on Medium on July 24 2016.
