We should open a fish and chips joint and make that the logo
And invest in a bunch of unused newspaper (supposedly that's how you know it's the good stuff)
Yup. The people they planted exported all the quality food from cattle etc back across the Irish sea after they took over the country. All the Irish were forced West, where the land was only suitable for potato crop. The rest of the country was producing enough food to feed everyone, it just never got to Irish mouths
This highlights a really important distinction for many well meaning folk who say things like "the blight didn't cause the famine", because it did. But the reason that famine took hold so deeply was as you have so eloquently laid out, brutal British exploitation.
BTW, it was also illegal for most people to catch fish. Most of the suitable waterways were on the properties of the wealthy landowners. Poaching could get a person hanged.
I personally have stopped calling the events a famine or a potato blight, and started calling it a genocide. My ancestors were there, starving, eating grass to try and survive. The English pillaged Ireland for resources, took the land, used it all for cattle, then shipped all the meat and dairy over to England. They could have stopped the starvation at any time, and actively chose not to, because they viewed Irish people as a lesser type of being. The only reason it isn’t recognized formally as a genocide is that England did it, and there was no official government policy about intentionally destroying the Irish.
An Gorta Mór was absolutely caused by the blight. The reason that the populace was dependent on a single crop, and relief efforts were minimal was British imperial neglect and actively malicious.
Doesn't change the fact the blight was the inciting event. Without it, though not prospering, we do not lose so much of our population that we are still 1 million people below the population in 1841.
Ireland having fewer people today than 185 years ago is one of the most insane facts I have ever heard. You can count the other countries that meet that criteria on zero hands
It still makes sense to blame the British not the blight for the famine though. The tenant farming situation in Ireland that forced the Irish to grow potatoes on poor quality land for their own consumption while growing cereal crops for sale on better land because they had to pay their rent in cash caused widespread death and emigration. Systemic, enforced monoculture, export of locally-grown, available cereal crops caused the famine. The blight would have been little more than an inconvenience otherwise.
Out of curiosity I plugged this question into Gemini and got that out of 193 countries only 22 have never had conflict with or been colonized by England. And two of them are Monaco and Vatican City. Most surprising was Sweden.
As the descendent of both Irish folks who fled across the sea and Irish folks who had to stick around, this invokes an urge I can’t quite put my finger on but it’s not pleasant.
You can’t convince me that’s not what that actually is
This picture is melting my mind in general. That squash or whatever it is on the right looks like an out of focus human leg like in instagram pictures people take while laying down on the beach.
Nah, blight is a different kind of infection. This looks pretty similar to dry rot, but I've only ever known dry rot to infect wood, so I'm not sure if it's actually the same thing here?
Edit: I looked up hollow heart, the other thing they mentioned, and it certainly looks like it could be this. Weird as hell, for sure, no matter what it is!
I found the quality of potatoes stores have gotten much worse over the last couple years, everything is squishy and rubbery these days. I’ve read that there are some shenanigans going on with holding back potatoes by suppliers for a long time in order to raise prices, but I’m not sure if that is true or not.
You mean to tell me people are thieving my sacred potato pictures? Disgusting. Here’s snap from FB when I cut said potato 7 years ago. This is probably AI though.
Okay but wait in the last 7 years did we find out why this happened? I’ve literally never seen this before and the comments, while funny, have not clarified 😂
Ooof, that's like a bio weapon. Aren't there some very dangerous bacteria that spread in powder spore form? There was a panic about receiving it in the mail ~25 years ago...
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u/AjayRedonkulus 16h ago edited 12h ago
As an Irishman this evokes a generational urge to flee across the sea.