WingCmdr Ginkapo wrote:Ireland was not left to fend for itself by the english during the famine. Somewhat misguidedly, england sent loads of grain, they just didnt know what to do with it. The irish gentry, left their people and went to england for the duration.
Yup, the Irish have a deepseated hatred of the english, because of the irish.
You are American, you have no idea.
And clearly you are English, so you have no idea either. Where did you learned that alternative version of reality - the Winston Churchill School for Colonial Apologists?
The English ran a system which forced the majority of Irish into dependency on potato crops. A few months after the potato blight struck and potato crops were decimated the English government sent some grain to Ireland, but it didn't have the milling capacity to actually process the grain (something the English government should have known).
In attempting to send something actually edible to Ireland in place of useless grain the central government faced so much opposition from MPs that it collapsed, and was eventually replaced by a new government which reverted to the standard English response to colonial famines - 'helping them would interfere with the market, we should leave them be'. As a result, something like 30% of the population of Ireland had no food to eat and starved to death.
However, if you find your sense of nationalism making the above too uncomfortable for you, feel free to retreat back into your fantasy land in which the rich Irish slaughtered the poor Irish and then scapegoated the poor, unappreciated English.
The Celtic tiger has flourished since throwing off English control. The republic's GDP per capita is more than double that of the occupied six counties (aka Northern Ireland). Now that English has voted Brexit, time is ticking on the last few small patches of the English empire left. The north is waking up to just how badly it has been extorted by London, the pleasant green fields of a reunified Emerald Isle beckon.
