Thank you Simon and the writers for telling this story. One interesting fact was the donation made by a native American tribe called the Choctaw. This tribe heard about the famine in Ireland and sent money to the people of Ireland. It was an amazing gesture of kindness.
Potatoes are an indigenous food developed in Mesoamerica over thousands of years. There is a common link because potatoes were taken back across the Atlantic and cultivated.
My father was born in county Cavan in 1920. He distinctly recalled the start of WWII and how for the first time in history a foreign enemy had taken a war to the British soil. He described the feeling in Ireland as mixed - in one sense they knew if England fell, Ireland would be next. On the other hand he described a strong sentiment of satisfaction amongst many irish as “after 800 years of having the boot on someone else’s throat how does it feel when it’s on yours?” My father wasn’t a vindictive or overly political man (in fact the only thing he ever said about politics was “wherever you go be against the government”) he was just sharing his experience during yet another challenging time in Irish history.
As an Irish person this hits very close to home. Our language and culture were decimated, people left home never to see it again, anti Irish sentiment was worse than ever. The lasting effects of the famine are still felt to this day and the Irish population still hasn’t recovered from the deaths during the period
I feel terrible that my ancestors had to go through that experience, especailly because it wan't just a natural event, but worsened by poor English actions. However, some fortunately managed to escape America and start new lives here. Many of my Irish ancestors fled Ireland before or during the famine and have made great lives for themselves as farmers in America.
This and other atrocities committed by the British government was never taught in school, at least in England it wasn't. I feel ashamed of what my countrymen did to your ancestors and I've nothing but admiration and respect for the people of Ireland. I've lived and worked with people from all over the place and I've never had anything short of good relationships with you guys even after all the awful shit in the past.
There was a Native American tribe that sent Ireland money during the famine to the equivalent of like $100k in todays money I think. And a when that tribe hit hard times a few years ago, the Irish government paid them back by sending money and medical assistance. The Irish and that tribe have a great relationship with each other because of it.
There is so much more between us. We are the Choctaw, and we are now Kindred Spirits until the next changing of worlds. That's how it is taught to us, to you its more like, my ancestors are your ancestors. Any Irish born is also considered Choctaw for how much Ireland has helped us over the years. How all of us can afford college, preserve our Native tongue. Ireland helped us during Covid. We continue to take in any Irish as our own.
@ruralliving3024 from us to yours. No difference. Our council sent that very little bit of money as a token of goodwill after the US forced us on the "trail of tears" in the middle of winter. You can look that up to understand more if you would like. But just after this trail, on unfamiliar land with no money or supplies, no livestock, no nothing....there was a family of Irish trappers who had immigrated to the US years before. He saved what few of us were left, his wife taught our leaders to read and write, his family helped feed us, taught us to build bigger homes. The story is still told us that his people, like our people were persecuted by invaders. When the famine hit Ireland, our council opened our borders for all Irish, a "safe place". Then sent what little money we could. Oh and potato seeds. LOL 😆 Kindred Spirits we will always be. There is a monument in Ireland dedicated to it. Many of us go to visit.
@maggiemae7539 of course now we are better. But right after the trail of tears...when we donated money to Ireland, we most certainly had no money. Besides...gambling became our only way to support ourselves after we weren't allowed to work the land or keep livestock for any kind of trade. No one ever likes to mention that bit of history....
In Ireland when we're taught about this it's unequivocally described as a genocide, I always find it so interesting other countries don't. The intentional shipping of all sorts of food from the island to systematically weaken the country, the blight killed the potato but the British created the famine
As adult and talking with my relatives about my ancestry this part of Irish history does hit hard as both of the main branches at least on my moms side can be traced to this time. However while one ancestor does very much remember the famine as he watched people leaving the Irish shores while sitting on his father's shoulders. The other major one was forced to leave during the protestant migration into Ireland as he was burned out of his home and force to flee to America. Nearest I can figure as to maybe why some don't call the famine a genocide is the death in some regards was an unintended consequences of the loss of potatoes. Vs the force migration of Irish familes from their homes because of how they chose to identify. Not saying either interpretation is wrong but from my own experience it seems to boil down how you view the event as a whole.
I can’t say much as an American (we mostly learned about the effects the exodus had on American culture and populations in school) but the more I learn about the British rule of Ireland, the more I’d consider the Great Hunger a form of genocide, mostly because the decades before seemingly follow the steps of genocide, although with the killings done by cruel negligence (although there probably were some sort of purposeful killings done by British forces during that time, because...yknow, the British did that a lot to people they didn’t like even if the reason was a stupid one) especially in the way the Hunger ultimately ended up devastating the population and the oppression lived under British rule - it almost reminds me of the forced colonization & genocide of the Native American populations here in the US.
My great great great grandparents came over due to the famine. My GGG Grandma and her brother were put on a coffin ship by her parents. Her mom and dad had to stay behind in Ireland and starved to death but their kids were able to survive in the US and carry on the family line
@@cornstar1253Livestock is expensive, even more so back then. Also, you need land to raise livestock, which they had been evicted from, as stated in the video.
It must've been incredibly horrifying, imagine nearing your harvest only for every potato in your field to be hollow, infected...realizing you and your entire community may very well starve.
@@zaubermaus8190 Not many survive via hunting alone, notice hunter gather's still existing have very low population densities, it was agriculture that allowed millions off ppl in a modest size land.
The biggest take away here IMO is *be diversified* even if just multiple types of tuber, likely sweet potatoes (much healthier anyway) for example, would not be so susceptible to same disease, multiple types of potato, etc. The best eating shippable banana's went extinct half a century ago, what we typically have today is not as good and also threatened bc bananas are *all clones* , near zero biodiversity. Naturally there are 'hundreds' (at least dozens) of other types consumed in the tropics but not so suitable to transport.
But the ottoman empire did send aid in secret. Boats landed in Drogheda. Their football club s badge has the crescent moon and star as tribute to the generous act.
To get soup in some of the soup kitchens you'd have to give up your Irish name for an Anglican one. And those road work projects are known as Famine Roads where many were worked to death and thrown into the ditch.
@@surpriseandterror9698 genocide is maliciously intentional, most of these atrocities came simply out of ignorance and sudden necessity . . . don't get me wrong, what the English did was an unforgivable mass violation of human rights . . . however, they weren't gassing people for being irish not a genocide
@@NymbusCumulo928 The English hated the Irish, wanted to remove their culture, saw them as subhuman workers at best and a pest at worse. They were *very* clear about this, and their half-hearted attempts at alleviating suffering that were mixed with Means Testing of all things are pretty clear examples. Even when they were starving to death or dying of disease the English saw them as moochers and parasites. If the Irish Famine wasn't an active act of genocide, then neither was the Holodomor, or the Bengal Famine of 1943 (the latter also commited by Great Britain). You don't need a gun or a gas chamber to commit genocide, all you need is to control the food supply. It's demographically-biased mass murder which, I'm sure we can find a shorter name for.
Sadly, this is occurring in Eastern Ukraine as we speak, the 'ability' of humans to wish to eradicate a different thought process, is as old as the dawn of civilisation itself, we all have evil within us, yet we claim to be 'civilised', even worse, America claims to be the leaders of the 'Free World', yet their Foreign Policy is often anything but 'civilised'. China is doing exactly this to the Uighurs right now, and has being doing so for many years. When will we humans actually learn?
I've been waiting for this one. Wanted to see how an Englishman would tell the story. You did quite well to be fair, couple of little things glossed over like having to revoke your religion and become protestant to have the soup in some of the soup kitchens. Many god fearing people would choose death before doing something so blasphemous. I'd be interested to hear how much of this information, if any, is taught in schools in the UK.
i think something incredibly disgusting he did was continually try to make the irish look dumber than they were, like saying we lived in mudhuts and that the starvation dysentery was the irish eating blight potatoes, when it was actually improperly prepared corn, as the english didnt show us to actually make the corn edible
Simon didn't write it. He has writers who send him the script and he reads and records it. He also has editors who get it ready to post. As he has writers from many countries, the script could be from anywhere.
@@maryhildreth754 literally no excuse, what he reads is on him, you wouldnt say biden or trump or exempt from judgement because all of their public addresses go through team. stop making excuses were there doesn't need to be any
I'm an Englishman who married an Irish woman and when she first told me about the famine I couldn't believe it. We were never taught about it at school, it was the sort of thing that happened in Africa or Asia but not on our own doorstep! Thankfully we were very fortunate to have moved from London to Kilkenny a couple of years ago and I love it here and cannot ever see myself moving back to London or even England, and no, I'm not a hand-wringing apologist, just pragmatic and logical.
@@yaboi925 How does that read as calling them dumb? He described how they were actively and deliberately kept locked up in biting poverty with only the most barebones of options. And then how even meager soup and literally their own clothes on their backs were taken away. He was very clear so much was deliberately caused and maintained first and foremost by the bigoted English-dominated upper rungs of society and government. A lot of detail about what the starving people tried to eat to survive was left out, I agree, but the details included are still clear evidence of last-resort desperation, not stupidity.
Gotta love the British exporting record amounts of wheat out of Ireland while simultaneously arguing the Irish died purely from their own inherent laziness.😒
I live in Ulster / Northern Ireland. The very back end of my local (former) hospital site has a mass grave from this era, it was a workhouse. Mass grave for all the nameless, poor workers. Extremely sad and it has such a dark and tragic aura about it (i dont like being there at night, it is 100% haunted). At the very least, out of respect, the NHS has not built over it. Just a big memorial stone on a very large patch of grass.
Might as well build over it. 100 years later. The families of those very people were fighting to stay with the British empire, the empire who tried to starve their ancestors out of existence.
The town had a population of over 60k, Lowtherstown ( Irvinestown ) over 20,000, if we are talking about the same place there's a much more positive future being crafted on that site now.
My great-great-grandmother came to Canada through Ellis Island in the 1840s with 9 children. None of them ever became rich, but they made lives for themselves and in 1852 my great-grandfather married and soon owned land and raised his own large family. Thank goodness they were able to emigrate!
And now so many of the richest nations are against immigration. It is so sad that one group of people have the power to arbitrarily deny the same opportunities and freedoms to others that they value so highly themselves. :(
Part of my ancestral line is similar as they landed in New Finland and over the years and decades worked their way across Canada and into the U.S. where they ultimately settled in California.
Just a note some of those soup kitchens required catholics to convert and anglicised their names many converted back afterwards but it still did alot of damage look up the term t'aking the soup'
This explained so many of the facets of this complex period of history. This controversy over “famine or human-influenced disaster” you mention at the end is why so many call it The Great Hunger. The phrase encompasses so much more than famine does.
Thank you for covering this . I live in Australia, but when I was home last I visited 2 famine grave yards with a friend. These were only a few miles outside our town in the county . There was a notice on the ruined walls of an old stone church. It said for every one headstone you see here there are probably 50 other un marked graves ... it was a very large derelict grave yard only a few minutes walk off the current main road...
I'm an Englishman who married an Irish lady and when she first told me about the famine I was stunned and shocked. We were never taught anything about this at school and for me, famine was something that happened in Africa or Asia, not on our own doorstep. There's a great song by The Dubliners called The Fields Of Athenry which uses the famine as its subject matter and is well worth a listen to. A few years ago we were very fortunate to be able to move from London to a beautiful spot in Kilkenny, Ireland and I doubt I'd ever move back to England as I love it here so much. Funny thing is, with my accent the only anti British /English comment I've ever had was from a German!
I think most Irish people are happy to let bygone be bygones, so long as the legacies left are wholly acknowledged. They doesn't mean that ordinary English people need to apologise or otherwise make amends on a daily basis but a frank acceptance of what happened. The truth is that many ordinary working English people were brutalised by their own government and that's a point that isn't lost on most Irish people. As you said, you weren't told about any of this in school and I'd wager that was a deliberate oversight in order to preserve a carefully curated version of the legacy of the British empire.
My father's family left Ireland during this time and fled to Spain. From there they made their way to America, eventually settling in Cajun country in Southern Louisiana. Crazy to think I'd be in Ireland if not for this event. Or more likely not born at all.
If you add in the almost 2 million people in Northern Ireland, the total population of the entire island is just shy of 7 million. And I think they should be included in the total as until 1921 and the Government of Ireland Act, which separated Ireland and Northern Ireland, the island of was one cohesive population.
Simon says Ireland grew corn to sell to England. Corn defined as a general term for cereal grains, is what they grew. Video shows sweet corn 🌽, which was not grown in Ireland at that time.
Also they didn’t “sell” it. They were tenant farmers that were paid farm for the English. The only profit they saw was from their labor not the actual value of what they grew.
@@tripplefives1402 " the others being dent corn, flint corn, pod corn, popcorn, and flour corn" Adding that to help support what you're saying, although it should be noted that sweet corn is one of the six categories of maize.
Questionable. The single use of one type of potato made the spread of blight even worse, and the reliance on too little type of vegetables . Westminster taking the corn just made everything even worse.
The true casualties were those whose crops were shipped off to England whilst the Irish starved. They did so directly under the bootheel of English lords. So yes the British caused the famine
Did you not watch the video? It was rich people not caring about poor people, seeing as even Irish Catholics did the dirty. Also, Peel clearly was trying to help at the start. So instead of the usual anti British sentiment to deny that people tried to help, responsibility lies with a select few.
@@ghollidge I love it how videos like this bring out the racists/revisonists such as yourself. No doubt you'll play the usual RUclips card and suddenly claim to be a historian working in Trinity whose sole expertise is the Potato Famine and how the Brits didn't do anything wrong.
My grandad was from Connemara and you can still see the effects of the famine out there. Famine walls everywhere and the area is still emptier now than it was pre famine.
A third of the population here in Connemara died or emigrated and the cholera epidemic hit right after. We didn’t stop dying off until around the end of the Victorian era.
@@CharlesRexElizabethRegina Connemara is next to the Atlantic Ocean. The peasants kicked off their land went as far West as possible. They literally stacked walls in little squares and filled the inside with sand and seaweed to try and grow food. These plots are often shown in Irish Calendars, people don't know their bleak origins. Now they are full of grass.
@@michaelhogan9053 I’m so fascinated yet saddened to hear this (especially as an English guy), this isn’t something I’ve ever heard of despite being very interested in history and appreciate the comment man. Best Wishes.
Use your words...starvation means you died from lack of food Starving means you are dying from lack of food... Hopefully you are now eating a bit more...
@@codymoe4986 I looked it up, starvation is defined as suffering from malnutrition that can lead to permanent organ damage or death. While by definition I used the word correctly, I could have used a better word like malnutrition. It's a good reminder that the English language is far more complicated than it appears on the surface
there was a condition on the soup kitchens: to get soup you must be Protestant - to represent this you would remove the "O" from your surname (which is why O'Mahony and Mahony are both surnames) To "take the soup" is still an insult in Ireland
One of my friends family name was changed from O'gannon to Gannon because of this. Then when the soup kitchens disappeared they had to keep the name. They emigrated to America in 1850.
@@ArchangelAva That's because you've only ever seen the English translation of most Irish names, some kept the 'O' in the translation, others haven't - in Irish the 'O' means "son of" (a daughter would have 'Ní' and a wife would have "Uí") take my surname "Buckley" for example; In Irish it's O'Buachalla to mean "son of the cowboys" - my sister would be Ní Bhuachalla and my mam would be Uí Bhuachalla - therefore converting to Protestantism and removing the 'O' would be renouncing your family line (the "h" in Ní Bhuachalla is a gramatical rule called the séimhiú that is really complicated and I won't go into)
My grandmother's grandmother was from Ireland. My grandma always said that she was a hard woman. I asked her, "Didn't half of her children die in the potato famine? That would make me a hard woman, too." She lost 4 out of 8 children before coming to the US.
My cottage is surrounded by an abandoned famine village of small cottages sometimes I remind myself either the people escaped or they are under those cottages
As an Irish person, I’m glad you covered this topic. Almost all my ancestors on my dad’s side were Irish immigrants who left Ireland during the famine. We don’t even know what part of Ireland they were from. The famine caused them to lose everything and miraculously, a few made it to Ellis Island, and later Wisconsin, alive. We’ve been trying to research our family for the past three generations but we still don’t know anything. Our last name got changed to an American version when they came here and because of all the native Irish variations, we don’t even know what it originally was. My ancestors lost their homes, their friends, their family and even their lives in hopes that they could have a better life in America, and they didn’t even get that
I understand exactly what you’re saying. My family emigrated quickly from Germany when “he” became chancellor but not all who were regular Germans left. They were not Jews and were never heard from again.
It wasn’t just corn that was exported from Ireland during the famine. There were all sorts of vegetables that were grown there and they were all exported by money hungry English businesses.
Two hundred shades of green my mam told me . That island is so lush there is no way you could have a famine. I spent three weeks there in 94 . As soon as I got off the boat at Dun Laoghaire it struck me . I was born in Yorkshire but have lived in Canada since 69 and I was treated with respect the whole time . It's a Magic island .
My ancestors survived the famine, barely, and as soon as were able to afford passage to N.A. they took whatever ship was crossing the atlantic and ended up in Canada only to sharecrop for another British landlord here.
Now that is heart breaking. Imagine leaving your home, broken and bent by the British gentry, people dieing on the streets while the lord's in their mansions threw parties. The only solace that your going somewhere you can make a fresh start away from all that awful just to end up in pretty much the same situation =[
So many of the atrocaties that occurred during that period didnt make the vlog but overall a decent telling of some of what transpirred . To this day there are entire old towns marked on maps that no longer exsist, a couple of stacks of heaped rocks in the corner of a field are the remains of houses where small villages used to be. the 1840's when more food was exported from a nation than the previous 100 or following 100 years, boats packed with prisoners taken from work houses for the supposed non compliance of work house rules and deposited in every corner of the world, and to this day the population hasn't even reached 75% of pre famine levels. currently there are 138million people globally you can claim irish ancestry and through all our strife we continuely give more to the needy and hungry than any country on the planet.
I'm Scot-Irish, and my Irish ancestors would come to America and become cotton and tobacco farmers. Many others weren't fortunate enough to be able to emigrate.
Not like he can sit there and give you some 12 hour sob story about Irelands greatest disaster. All these videos are this length, as sad as this was, much worse things have happened, he isn't going to sit there and talk about those things for hours either. Stop sniffing your own farts.
@@rezarfar None, not because we were kinder or more compassionate, as I'm sure my ancestors were products of their time like everyone else. We simply weren't here until the late 19th century. The other half that came in the 18th century didn't own slaves either. They had small family farms and very little money (but lots of kids😆). Most of the people who owned slaves were people with some wealth, and lots of land. We've been able to access land records to find out exactly where we settled and what our holdings were. Through these records you can find out whether your ancestors had servants or slaves as they were accounted for. Oh dear, did you think everyone owned slaves?😳
My Irish Father could have written this - it's exactly how he described it to me when I was younger… Simon is awesome and really knows how to tell a story with the perfect delivery. Kudos to the entire team
Tim Pat Coogan is a charlatan and that book was complete and utter shite. It got torn to shreds by just about every prominent Irish historian. Something which Coogan isn't.
As a person who was born and educated on the english side of the Irish Sea, it's always amazed me the severe lack of education I received about Irish history, especially the potato famines. Well written videos like this should be compulsory in uk secondary schools, the only time that I personally found out about any Irish history was when I moved to the south of Ireland.
Sometime when your family has a personal connection to the story these videos are hard to get through. I always appreciate Simon telling the stories straight and without bias. Ver well done.
The British establishment at its most horrific. "Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown." Freyne
Simon: “Experts believe the soup kitchens disprove British committed genocide.” Also Simon: “The British deliberately stopped the soup kitchens.” It’s genocide.
In fact, the soup kitchens themselves were a form of genocide. The vast, vast majority of those suffering in the famine were Catholic, and the soup kitchens required any who availed of them to convert to Protestantism, which is actually a form of cultural genocide as defined by the UN.
I went onto Wikipedia to see just how bad it was. Not only did the famine decimate the population, but it still continued to drop for the next 100 years. As late as 1960, the population was still only a bit over 4 million. Even with a large influx of immigrants, many from Poland or other Eastern European countries, the country's population is still only around 6.5 million as of 2016, or still 20% below what pre-famine Ireland was.
That is because there was still continual net emigration occurring all the way into the 1960s. Ireland has been a place of emigration for many centuries. 10 million Irish in total have emigrated in its history, a figure higher than the current population of the island of Ireland
Personally the denial of aid, the refusal to get rid of the laws surrounding food, shutting down the soup kitchens, and the stripping and leaving people to freeze I feel is a crime right below genocide since it comes after the knowledge and there was intent behind it and I think are the reasons people say it was a genocide
My mom’s side of my family came over to the States after 1850 from all over Ireland. AFAIK, they had no stories about the famine that they wanted to pass down to their descendants, so I have to guess at what their lives were like over there.
Great video. It’s worth mentioning that foreign aid could not exceed that given by queen Victoria. Charity and the great hunger in Ireland is well worth a read. Sadly most irish people know very little of it, particularly the amount of food that was being exported. We brushed it under the rug and never dealt with the effect it had on us, particularly the phycological effect it had. This was wonderful. Keep the great videos coming.
Do Irish people know what caused the famine, or will they continue to blame the British people and the fungus or will they understand that it was British politicians and the restrictive laws they made which are very anti capitalist and restricted trade so much the people could not innovate or work their way out of the famine. America had several crop plagues in its history and even during the Great Depression, starvation was hardly an issue. Not to mention the Great Depression was caused by government doing dumb things but the desire to work and innovate is what kept mass starvation from happening.
As mentioned, it wasn't just the Irish that had famine issues (although they were hit incredibly hard). My Partner's family also had to leave Italy because of this - They walked from the Veneto/Venice region all the way to Genoa (nearly 400KM/250 Miles) before they got a boat to spend 8 weeks travelling to Brazil.
This is what brought my family to the US. My great great great was the son of a wealthy Irish land owner. After the second year of the famine when it was truly getting terrible he brought several of his Cottiers and their families to the USA and settled in North Carolina.
By a lonely prison wall I heard a young girl calling "Michael, they have taken you away For you stole Trevelyan's corn So the young might see the morn Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay" Low lie the fields of Athenry Where once we watched the small free birds fly Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry By a lonely prison wall I heard a young man calling "Nothing matters, Mary, when you're free Against the famine and the crown I rebelled, they cut me down Now you must raise our child with dignity" Low lie the fields of Athenry Where once we watched the small free birds fly Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry By a lonely harbour wall She watched the last star falling As that prison ship sailed out against the sky For she lived in hope and pray For her love in Botany Bay It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry Low lie the fields of Athenry Where once we watched the small free birds fly Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry
1:30 - Chapter 1 - The eve of disaster 4:55 - Chapter 2 - Coming from America 9:05 - Mid roll ads 10:40 - Chapter 3 - The man who starved Ireland 15:10 - Chapter 4 - Social collapse 19:15 - Chapter 5 - Escape valve
Despite growing up in an area with a large population of people (including myself) descended from Irish emigrants who fled the potato famine, it wasn't until I was an adult that I truly understood that the whole thing wasn't 'famine' so much as genocide.
Hello, as a Turkish and Ottoman historian, I write the truth of the story based on concise Ottoman records. The period when the Irish people were deliberately left to genocide by England. The Ottomans were not interested in this at first. They did not want to confront the British and Ireland was not a Muslim country. At that time, the Ottomans were busy suppressing the rebellions in the conquered regions. There was also a power struggle within the palace. Celtic soldiers and officers serving in the Ottoman Empire did not remain silent any longer about the genocide committed in Ireland and reported this situation harshly to the sultan. The Sultan had to accept the offer of help. In addition, Celtic people living in Anatolia also supported the aid campaign. It is estimated that the Celtic population living in Anatolia today is 9 million. When the Ottoman Empire ended, the Celts living in Anatolia were not shown as a minority at the Lausanne meeting of the newly established Turkish state because they lived in a Muslim state. When you go to Anatolia, you can see people with red hair and green and blue eyes. Celts living in Turkey are educated, polite and mostly atheist. In my opinion, those who helped you are the Celts living in Anatolia. What I said is available in official documents. Thank you.
My family were Irish immigrants. It's horrible the conditions they suffered through. I'm glad they survived the journey and came here, because without them, I wouldn't be here.
My great grandma didn't leave Westmeath for Pennsylvania via Canada until 1895, but I think my gg grandparents were traveling in England when she was born, so I'm wondering how the family was 50 years earlier. Bonus points to the author for making Simon use a Star Wars line.
Good video. One thing to add, in order to use the temporary soup kitchens, Irish people had to give up their faith and convert to Protestantism. To this day there is a saying for traitors in Ireland, 'taking the soup'. It wasn't the altruistic endeavour it seems, although it shows soup kitchens would have helped
I grew up on a famine road in Limerick. My great great grandmother told my granny she saw a dead woman lying in a ditch holding her baby( I think the baby was dead too) on the road when she was going to school one day. There has been a lot of strange sitings around the area at night too, one which I saw. I dont believe in supernatural stuff though, lol.
Part of my family came to the US during the famine. I remember my grandmother calling them "lace curtain Irish", an American term for those who could afford passage. They settled in the Midwest as farmers, intermarried with the locals, and had good lives. Thank you for telling their story. It would be nice to have one from the American Irish farmer's perspective, please.
In some USA states, including NY State, there is a mandate that public school history classes must teach about the Irish Famine. In October 1995, I visited the 'Famine Museum' at Stokestown, ROI. One interesting story as to the estate is is located on is that the owner during the famine paid for part of the fare for some of his tenants to travel to the USA. Related issues causing the famine was overpopulation with family plots getting too small to support sufficient crops on poor quality land, the demands from London for tax and other payments of landowners even if broke them financially, economic class and religoius discrimination, lack of ability to develop or desire to bring industry to much of Ireland but in the Dublin, Belfast and other coastal areas.
17:40 it's such a haunting tale to go with such a gorgeous valley. Though it's actually worse when you realize the inspectors came to the village for the inspection, but for unknown reasons the inspection bever took place. So the inspectors moved on to a private hunting lodge 12 miles down the windswept boggy valley. Starving people were forced to appear at the lodge at 7am the following day if they wished to continue to be qualified for famine relief. That night a cold rain set in across the valley. 7 died from starvation and all its related ailments on the 12 mile trek to the lodge. 10 more died before they could make it the 12 miles back home. Women and children were amongst the deceased.
probablye the most scary aspect is that majority of those affected didnt even have enough to LEAVE! I witnessed countries fall into civil war and my first instinct is to leave specially having small children. but the fact that there is no chance to even leave broke my heart.
Being on a big ass island surrounded by an ocean; next to the very entity sought to kill you off -- even if indirectly -- and no money, is quite possibly the biggest middle finger to an ethnicity as I have ever seen one
@@MarloSoBalJr Well not that their coming to USA is safe. Few make it and found job other force to become soilder for a civil war on both side if they want citizenship. I really wonder why what was other country think of this or they busying with their own object.
@@nerysghemor5781 it always kinda unnerves me when people say “I hope you enjoyed the video, please like subscribe and ring the bell for more!” Or “I hope you found this video entertaining!” after just talking about the most horrible and sad stuff out there. That’s one thing I like about Simon (and his writers) is he’s actually pretty sensitive, and in case of his true crime shows really doesn’t try and glorify the perpetrators
Learning about history really makes you hate people in general. Every now and then you hear about a historical figure who wasn't a complete a-hole, and they seam like real heroes in comparison.
Hmmm.. If there was no Famine, you would never be interested if it was called the great Potato crop Failure with little death. As for the Famine yes there were some folks that bad very poor decision causing millions deaths. You go back further in history was it part of the cause is the dependence of the Potato. The Potato prior 1500 did not exist in Ireland, so Famine was in the making long before those who made poor decisions were even born.
Hate them, but also LEARN from them so as to not make their mistakes/decisions again. Our present is built on the shoulders of those in the past and so it's our responsibility to continue building a better future.
"Corn" in this context is equivalent term to grain, a general term for wheat, barley etc , not maize which is what we think of as corn today (and as pictured).
The 1729 satirical essay "A Modest Proposal" by Johnathan Swift gives some perspective into the callous and inhumane attitude of many English towards the Irish.
@@nlwilson4892 The difference being they didn't let about a quarter of the English lower classes starve to death in about six years. That's actually a significant difference.
@@johnmckiernan2176 In my town about a quarter of the poorer areas were wiped out each year with cholera, typhoid etc. for much of the 1800's. The fundamental problem in Ireland was the blight coupled with the over-reliance on one single crop. The English handled it badly, not disputing that at all but the reluctance to help was very similar to the reluctance to help the poor in England, there was some added reluctance with it being not on their doorstep, Irish and Catholic, but there was a general attitude that the poor of any society were not "proper people" they were looked down on as a subclass that served a purpose of providing labour but weren't seen as having right to life or decent living conditions.
@@nlwilson4892 you say the “fundamental” issue was an over-reliance on one crop and I would encourage you to ask why there was a reliance on one crop. Then we may get closer to fundamental issues. I understand if you’re British that you may be reviled by your colonial past and may want to deflect the egregious behaviour deploying a “not all” argument but it would behoove you not to infer the Irish had chosen to rely on one crop.
@@PeterCarroll83 It explains in the video, the potato was very much suited to the ground and climate in most areas. It perhaps doesn't explicitly say that better farming land was used for other crops that were farmed commercially (ie. sold) and much of that was exported to England. It wasn't that the poor farmers had much choice. You can look back to further if you want to analyse into British colonisation with the British and sympathisers taking land into their ownership and pushing others from the land and right back to Cromwell with him persecuting Catholics and driving them west and south. But equally you could go back to Normal invasion of Britain and the Normans that became the aristocracy taking the land into their ownership and making the natives landless serfs, and also the Highland clearances, pushing Scottish crofters off the land and forcing them into Ulster. Or you could summarize and say that those with power have generally abused that power to abuse those with less power and used it to gain more power. It is a repeating pattern and unless we accept that and that divide and conquer is part of that strategy then it will keep happening.
My grandmothers family came to Chicago from Ireland during the famine. I’m not sure how my first Irish relative came to the US but I was always told that he was essentially deported from Ireland
There was plenty of food in Ireland. Although potatoes were plentiful for the poor. We grew many many different types of crops. A substantial amount of cattle and livestock were on the land too. There was even a small fishing industry. It was all shipped to Brittan. The Irish were left to starve while trains and boats of food were shipped to the UK. Even some english landlords in Ireland were horrified and contacted British authorities but little was done and the poor of Ireland effectively starved or were forced to emigrate. Over half a century later the Irish had enough of poor British rule in Ireland and effectively pushed the British out by every means possible.
If there's anyone with the balls to cover this then it's you fact boi. Seriously, to anyone criticising this video ask yourself this, if you were an English youtuber and you had a choice to go here or not, would you? He could have done anything else but he put his neck on the line out of respect for the truth. I think he's done a service to all of us by putting this well put together, balanced and by all accounts as unbiased as possible account of an unimaginable horror out there 👏 well done Simon, you deserve respect. You didn't have to but you did. Of course you're gonna get some hate for it, it's obviously a delicate, painful part of history.
Queen Victoria turning down help from Turkey regarding it as an insult. What a horrid person of course she wasn't dying of starvation and she was probably eating food that came from Ireland!!!!!!!
Simon and crew... well done! Being of Irish descent (my GGreatgrandfather got out on a famine ship) and also a trained historian, this video takes a very complex topic and breaks it down in a way that most people can begin to understand. Of course, the full complexity can never be handled in less than 12-15 hours of video documentary. One thing I could wish you would have been able to touch on was how the Famine (and related mindsets) laid the ground work for The Troubles. In any event: very, very well done!
To this day, this is still not talked about in history classes in school. Most English people grow up not understanding why there's some lingering animosity towards them from Irish people. I'm sadly one of those people, though I had heard that the English were not kind to the Irish, I never knew the full extent of it or why conflicts/tensions that continue to present day are such delicate issues. I hope one day Reparations can be made and I Hope in time England does or continues to to the right thing to repair the bridges with our Celtic neighbors and cement the positive relationship that should have been, learned from the lessons of the standing historical examples on how not to do it.
This is pretty good, but Simon leaves out one very important tidbit of information. The Potato blight didn't just affect Ireland. Britain's lower classes while not super dependent on the potato did find that their regular grains shipped in from outside were suddenly more expensive. Europe was severely affected by the blight. This didn't lead to famine, but to severe shortages. And when there were severe shortages all over Europe it meant each nation horded the food it did have. This caused the price of grain from those nations that could afford to sell it get even more expensive. The supply was now down, and the demand increased. Britain had to not only fulfill the decrease of grain available for its own population, but also to help Ireland. And Ireland got hind tit. Does it mean Britain didn't mismanage this? Oh god no. It did a ton and helped to cause this. But, when we add the addition to a world fighting the blight, it isn't so isolated. Britain was a part of an international trade. And it Ireland wasn't in isolation. It is the worst case scenario in a world of other sufferers. To leave that out is to leave out a major piece of context. And I forget if he has mentioned 1848 the year of Revolutions. Which could be tied to the European Potato Crop Failure.
fun fact: most famines in the medieval period were caused not by lack of food, but by merchants speculating on rising food prices when a harvest was slightly smaller than the previous one. they would stockpile the food such as grain in warehouses to sell it later at exorbitant markups to hungry people. this obviously wasnt a great idea because the grain would spoil, get eaten by rats, or lost in fires which may or may not be set by the angry hungry people, which then caused the actual famine. humans are nuts.
It's quite crazy how despite how beloved and significant the potato is to the Irish, the potato is originally from Peru. Regardless, I imagine how Irish people nowadays hold potatoes near and dear to their hearts because of the famine that their ancestors had to go through while Peruvians feel proud that something from their country is so widely beloved by a group of people
It was a steady and durable crop that could grow in varied terrain. The British barred the Irish from farming or owning land so it became overly relied on by poor tennants.
@@tripplefives1402 Have you ever grow potatoes? "You dont even have to replant them because the tubers can resprout in the spring" If you don't "replant" the tubers (potatoes), does that means that you leave them underground instead of harvesting them? What's the point of growing potatoes if you don't harvest them? And how do you fertilize the land without ruining them? I'm not throwing hate here, it may well be that in different countries there are different processes to grow potatoes and yours could be more efficient. Just curious as the method I know and have used has been a constant for centuries.
@@All_Hail_Chael they also wouldnt have had a giant famine, the likes of which the nation still hasnt recovered in terms of population, and had their whole culture lost and or stolen, haha so hilarious.
It’s really upsetting because it didn’t have to be that way. We, Britain, could have helped, and it could have done great things for the relationship between Britain and Ireland for us to have helped them when they were at their lowest. I’m English, but I’ve always loved Ireland and Irish culture. I’m a huge fan of Irish music and every time I’m over there, the people are nothing but lovely to me. And I have to say, every time I’m there, nothing softens the heart more than an Irish girl - nothing but charming. But yeah, really sad moment in history that didn’t have to be.
AKA history proves how unreasonably cruel people can be. A dark day in history when Britain had the Irish export a majority of the food while letting them starve in the thousands...truely evil stuff.
I appreciate your honesty and modesty in telling this story. I'm lucky to have descended from a family of "fortunate" (Meaning of O'Shea, (Séaghdha)) Although that doesn't necessarily mean that my grandparents, parents nor myself are/were actually wealthy. Im sure it definitely plays a roll in our families survival during the great famine.
Thank you for this informative video. I never knew the precise details of the famine, only that my ancestors suffered terribly and death rates were high.
Sooo my great x 5 grandfather Sir Richard Cobden founded (with John Bright) the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838 and successful repealed them in 1846. He also fought for land access and ownership laws for farming tenents, some of which are now, in a way, implemented in Scotland with community owned islands and freedom of access to the land.
Thank you for covering this the way you have. I am half Irish half English, raised in England. My "education" here in England incredibly lacking in the true context here or of similar events across the globe under their empire, the brutalities etc. I have seen this bias in so many forms from professional documentaries on British major TV channels, "respected" historians and a general public who would make jokes and poke fun at situations they dont understand. I am sure many of them wouldnt make light of some of these situations had they known the truth rather than seeing is as a minority view or made up story or something exaggerated. I saw a channel I love which is UK based and a food channel have a potato expert or whatever cover the history and relation to the episode, the Irish history was mentioned sans any mention of the British involvement in the deaths and mass migration. Unsurprising to me. I am under no illusions that there are aware Brits and those who share my view regarding sharing the truth, warts and all. I also dont want to introduce a low bar haha. But thank you.
Very interesting as I know English history is truly vast yet the stuff that is missed is interesting. Another channel I follow hrun by an Englishman had in a live stream where a super chat that referenced the War of 1812 was give. The channel host didn't get the reference so we in the chat and his American counterparts explained it to him and we all had a laugh as he admitted yeah that war and the American Revolutionary war aren't really talked about or taught in England which even he found odd from a history standpoint.
I had an AMAZING Gaelic language professor named Brendan Dillon in Waterloo, Iowa.🤎🤍💚 He was originally from County Cork in Ireland and was extremely passionate about his beautiful homeland!🇨🇮 In addition to our language lessons, he also integrated classes about Irish history, which helped us immensely to understand more about the country whose language we were learning & how important it was. I remember distinctly in our class about the potato blight he explained that there was still enough food in Ireland, it was just that the land owners took it from the poor farmers & shipped it over seas. He explained that NO ONE in Ireland calls it a famine, instead it's known as 'The Great Hunger'.😢
The oldest ancestor I find was in London in 1688, sentenced to 5 year's indenture in the Virginia colony. If he had been sent to Barbados sugar-cane fields, I wouldn't be here.
@@aWILDsomethingCAME Often there was none. About 70,000 such indentured servants were sent to Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean in the 1650s. Their crime? Defeat in battle. Or having land the Cromwellian troops desired.
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Genuinely one of the finest videos on this channel. Please do the Highland clearances next 🙏
@@fncfantv2006 drink the things under the sink.
If you ask,"did England help the Irish during the potato famine", you never get a straight "NO"!.
Simon, you handle Irish history so respectfully!!! Go raibh maith agat!!!
14:28 As an Irish person, that's exactly how I feel about the Famine. Excellent analogy, Simon. Thank you.
Thank you Simon and the writers for telling this story. One interesting fact was the donation made by a native American tribe called the Choctaw. This tribe heard about the famine in Ireland and sent money to the people of Ireland. It was an amazing gesture of kindness.
The Irish remembered this act of kindness and helped out the Choctaw many years later when they were in dire straits.
I never knew about this, thank you for sharing it.
@@AndrewSmith-gn1nq and everyone lived happily ever after
Potatoes are an indigenous food developed in Mesoamerica over thousands of years. There is a common link because potatoes were taken back across the Atlantic and cultivated.
@@paulwoida8249 Many years later being 2020 when they sent food and money to help during the lockdowns.
My father was born in county Cavan in 1920. He distinctly recalled the start of WWII and how for the first time in history a foreign enemy had taken a war to the British soil. He described the feeling in Ireland as mixed - in one sense they knew if England fell, Ireland would be next. On the other hand he described a strong sentiment of satisfaction amongst many irish as “after 800 years of having the boot on someone else’s throat how does it feel when it’s on yours?”
My father wasn’t a vindictive or overly political man (in fact the only thing he ever said about politics was “wherever you go be against the government”) he was just sharing his experience during yet another challenging time in Irish history.
As an Irish person this hits very close to home. Our language and culture were decimated, people left home never to see it again, anti Irish sentiment was worse than ever. The lasting effects of the famine are still felt to this day and the Irish population still hasn’t recovered from the deaths during the period
I feel terrible that my ancestors had to go through that experience, especailly because it wan't just a natural event, but worsened by poor English actions. However, some fortunately managed to escape America and start new lives here. Many of my Irish ancestors fled Ireland before or during the famine and have made great lives for themselves as farmers in America.
Must be a weak nation then!
This and other atrocities committed by the British government was never taught in school, at least in England it wasn't. I feel ashamed of what my countrymen did to your ancestors and I've nothing but admiration and respect for the people of Ireland. I've lived and worked with people from all over the place and I've never had anything short of good relationships with you guys even after all the awful shit in the past.
@@Autisticwanderer may i add we still brought the British empire to it's knees... Tiocfaidh Ar La
@@Autisticwanderer quality come back ya spunk rag
There was a Native American tribe that sent Ireland money during the famine to the equivalent of like $100k in todays money I think. And a when that tribe hit hard times a few years ago, the Irish government paid them back by sending money and medical assistance. The Irish and that tribe have a great relationship with each other because of it.
There is so much more between us. We are the Choctaw, and we are now Kindred Spirits until the next changing of worlds.
That's how it is taught to us, to you its more like, my ancestors are your ancestors. Any Irish born is also considered Choctaw for how much Ireland has helped us over the years. How all of us can afford college, preserve our Native tongue. Ireland helped us during Covid. We continue to take in any Irish as our own.
@haleyguthrie3113 what you wrote was lovely! As an Irish person it makes me very proud of my country. 🇮🇪
@ruralliving3024 from us to yours. No difference. Our council sent that very little bit of money as a token of goodwill after the US forced us on the "trail of tears" in the middle of winter. You can look that up to understand more if you would like.
But just after this trail, on unfamiliar land with no money or supplies, no livestock, no nothing....there was a family of Irish trappers who had immigrated to the US years before. He saved what few of us were left, his wife taught our leaders to read and write, his family helped feed us, taught us to build bigger homes. The story is still told us that his people, like our people were persecuted by invaders.
When the famine hit Ireland, our council opened our borders for all Irish, a "safe place". Then sent what little money we could. Oh and potato seeds. LOL 😆
Kindred Spirits we will always be. There is a monument in Ireland dedicated to it. Many of us go to visit.
I doubt the Choctaws were hurting for money a few years ago. Do you know how many casinos they own? Just in Oklahoma?
@maggiemae7539 of course now we are better. But right after the trail of tears...when we donated money to Ireland, we most certainly had no money. Besides...gambling became our only way to support ourselves after we weren't allowed to work the land or keep livestock for any kind of trade. No one ever likes to mention that bit of history....
In Ireland when we're taught about this it's unequivocally described as a genocide, I always find it so interesting other countries don't. The intentional shipping of all sorts of food from the island to systematically weaken the country, the blight killed the potato but the British created the famine
As adult and talking with my relatives about my ancestry this part of Irish history does hit hard as both of the main branches at least on my moms side can be traced to this time. However while one ancestor does very much remember the famine as he watched people leaving the Irish shores while sitting on his father's shoulders. The other major one was forced to leave during the protestant migration into Ireland as he was burned out of his home and force to flee to America. Nearest I can figure as to maybe why some don't call the famine a genocide is the death in some regards was an unintended consequences of the loss of potatoes. Vs the force migration of Irish familes from their homes because of how they chose to identify. Not saying either interpretation is wrong but from my own experience it seems to boil down how you view the event as a whole.
I can’t say much as an American (we mostly learned about the effects the exodus had on American culture and populations in school) but the more I learn about the British rule of Ireland, the more I’d consider the Great Hunger a form of genocide, mostly because the decades before seemingly follow the steps of genocide, although with the killings done by cruel negligence (although there probably were some sort of purposeful killings done by British forces during that time, because...yknow, the British did that a lot to people they didn’t like even if the reason was a stupid one) especially in the way the Hunger ultimately ended up devastating the population and the oppression lived under British rule - it almost reminds me of the forced colonization & genocide of the Native American populations here in the US.
My great great great grandparents came over due to the famine. My GGG Grandma and her brother were put on a coffin ship by her parents. Her mom and dad had to stay behind in Ireland and starved to death but their kids were able to survive in the US and carry on the family line
that is insane!
Why didn't they eat animals? If you have grass and a steady supply of manure, you have meat.
@@cornstar1253 They probably did
@@cornstar1253Livestock is expensive, even more so back then. Also, you need land to raise livestock, which they had been evicted from, as stated in the video.
God wish we had people like that today.
It must've been incredibly horrifying, imagine nearing your harvest only for every potato in your field to be hollow, infected...realizing you and your entire community may very well starve.
couldn't they just hunt some deers instead or something?
@@zaubermaus8190 No, most woodlands were off limits to peasants.
@@zaubermaus8190 Not many survive via hunting alone, notice hunter gather's still existing have very low population densities, it was agriculture that allowed millions off ppl in a modest size land.
The biggest take away here IMO is *be diversified* even if just multiple types of tuber, likely sweet potatoes (much healthier anyway) for example, would not be so susceptible to same disease, multiple types of potato, etc.
The best eating shippable banana's went extinct half a century ago, what we typically have today is not as good and also threatened bc bananas are *all clones* , near zero biodiversity. Naturally there are 'hundreds' (at least dozens) of other types consumed in the tropics but not so suitable to transport.
@@Mrbfgray Ireland was exporting food at the time. The Irish were only allowed to keep the potatoes
Fun fact: Turkey offered to send Ireland food aid to get them through the famine but queen Victoria turned the offer down
But the ottoman empire did send aid in secret. Boats landed in Drogheda. Their football club s badge has the crescent moon and star as tribute to the generous act.
Dang. Victoria was nothing like Queen Elizabeth. What a bitch.
@@malachymccloskey7839 wow…I was never taught a word of this in school. Things like this restore my faith in humanity
Funner fact. A Native American tribe sent all the money they could to Ireland so they could import food. There's a monument to it and everything
The British government took all the grain out of Ireland that was the Real cause of Famine Victoria was Scum Heartless Bitch
To get soup in some of the soup kitchens you'd have to give up your Irish name for an Anglican one. And those road work projects are known as Famine Roads where many were worked to death and thrown into the ditch.
I dunno, kinda sounds like genocide to me. Weird distinction this dude makes without an effective difference.
Lots of whitewashing in this video
@@surpriseandterror9698 genocide is maliciously intentional, most of these atrocities came simply out of ignorance and sudden necessity . . .
don't get me wrong, what the English did was an unforgivable mass violation of human rights . . . however, they weren't gassing people for being irish
not a genocide
@@NymbusCumulo928 The English hated the Irish, wanted to remove their culture, saw them as subhuman workers at best and a pest at worse. They were *very* clear about this, and their half-hearted attempts at alleviating suffering that were mixed with Means Testing of all things are pretty clear examples. Even when they were starving to death or dying of disease the English saw them as moochers and parasites.
If the Irish Famine wasn't an active act of genocide, then neither was the Holodomor, or the Bengal Famine of 1943 (the latter also commited by Great Britain). You don't need a gun or a gas chamber to commit genocide, all you need is to control the food supply. It's demographically-biased mass murder which, I'm sure we can find a shorter name for.
Sadly, this is occurring in Eastern Ukraine as we speak, the 'ability' of humans to wish to eradicate a different thought process, is as old as the dawn of civilisation itself, we all have evil within us, yet we claim to be 'civilised', even worse, America claims to be the leaders of the 'Free World', yet their Foreign Policy is often anything but 'civilised'.
China is doing exactly this to the Uighurs right now, and has being doing so for many years.
When will we humans actually learn?
I've been waiting for this one. Wanted to see how an Englishman would tell the story. You did quite well to be fair, couple of little things glossed over like having to revoke your religion and become protestant to have the soup in some of the soup kitchens. Many god fearing people would choose death before doing something so blasphemous. I'd be interested to hear how much of this information, if any, is taught in schools in the UK.
i think something incredibly disgusting he did was continually try to make the irish look dumber than they were, like saying we lived in mudhuts and that the starvation dysentery was the irish eating blight potatoes, when it was actually improperly prepared corn, as the english didnt show us to actually make the corn edible
Simon didn't write it. He has writers who send him the script and he reads and records it. He also has editors who get it ready to post. As he has writers from many countries, the script could be from anywhere.
@@maryhildreth754 literally no excuse, what he reads is on him, you wouldnt say biden or trump or exempt from judgement because all of their public addresses go through team. stop making excuses were there doesn't need to be any
I'm an Englishman who married an Irish woman and when she first told me about the famine I couldn't believe it. We were never taught about it at school, it was the sort of thing that happened in Africa or Asia but not on our own doorstep!
Thankfully we were very fortunate to have moved from London to Kilkenny a couple of years ago and I love it here and cannot ever see myself moving back to London or even England, and no, I'm not a hand-wringing apologist, just pragmatic and logical.
@@yaboi925 How does that read as calling them dumb? He described how they were actively and deliberately kept locked up in biting poverty with only the most barebones of options. And then how even meager soup and literally their own clothes on their backs were taken away. He was very clear so much was deliberately caused and maintained first and foremost by the bigoted English-dominated upper rungs of society and government.
A lot of detail about what the starving people tried to eat to survive was left out, I agree, but the details included are still clear evidence of last-resort desperation, not stupidity.
Gotta love the British exporting record amounts of wheat out of Ireland while simultaneously arguing the Irish died purely from their own inherent laziness.😒
West is trying to do the same thing in Ukraine now while waiving their morally bankrupt finger at Russia
And then blaming the free market for the result of those government exports.
THESE PEOPLE DONT KNOW HISTORY THEY THINK IRISH WERE JUST DUMB THIS WAS GENOCIDE
Just like Stalin did to Ukraine in the Holodomor.
@@nerysghemor5781 So are you suggesting that the Irish famine was a politically manufactured ethnic cleansing similar to the Holodomor in Ukraine?
I live in Ulster / Northern Ireland. The very back end of my local (former) hospital site has a mass grave from this era, it was a workhouse. Mass grave for all the nameless, poor workers. Extremely sad and it has such a dark and tragic aura about it (i dont like being there at night, it is 100% haunted). At the very least, out of respect, the NHS has not built over it. Just a big memorial stone on a very large patch of grass.
Spoiler, it's not haunted.
Might as well build over it. 100 years later. The families of those very people were fighting to stay with the British empire, the empire who tried to starve their ancestors out of existence.
The town had a population of over 60k, Lowtherstown ( Irvinestown ) over 20,000, if we are talking about the same place there's a much more positive future being crafted on that site now.
@@billabong9215 It's almost like times and politics shift over time and you should eventually let the past go, or something...
@@billabong9215Descendants of Scots and English you mean. The native Irish Catholics tend to lean Republican.
My great-great-grandmother came to Canada through Ellis Island in the 1840s with 9 children. None of them ever became rich, but they made lives for themselves and in 1852 my great-grandfather married and soon owned land and raised his own large family. Thank goodness they were able to emigrate!
And now so many of the richest nations are against immigration.
It is so sad that one group of people have the power to arbitrarily deny the same opportunities and freedoms to others that they value so highly themselves. :(
Now they couldn't do that even now WITHOUT FUNDS N FOOD
Part of my ancestral line is similar as they landed in New Finland and over the years and decades worked their way across Canada and into the U.S. where they ultimately settled in California.
Just a note some of those soup kitchens required catholics to convert and anglicised their names many converted back afterwards but it still did alot of damage look up the term t'aking the soup'
A woman I knew from County Galway called it "taking the porridge".
Also if you took the soup they dropped the o from your name
Example o Sullivan/Sullivan
This explained so many of the facets of this complex period of history. This controversy over “famine or human-influenced disaster” you mention at the end is why so many call it The Great Hunger. The phrase encompasses so much more than famine does.
Thank you for covering this . I live in Australia, but when I was home last I visited 2 famine grave yards with a friend. These were only a few miles outside our town in the county . There was a notice on the ruined walls of an old stone church. It said for every one headstone you see here there are probably 50 other un marked graves ... it was a very large derelict grave yard only a few minutes walk off the current main road...
Stop calling it a famine, it was a genocide it was the culmination of 700 years of oppression
I'm an Englishman who married an Irish lady and when she first told me about the famine I was stunned and shocked. We were never taught anything about this at school and for me, famine was something that happened in Africa or Asia, not on our own doorstep.
There's a great song by The Dubliners called The Fields Of Athenry which uses the famine as its subject matter and is well worth a listen to.
A few years ago we were very fortunate to be able to move from London to a beautiful spot in Kilkenny, Ireland and I doubt I'd ever move back to England as I love it here so much.
Funny thing is, with my accent the only anti British /English comment I've ever had was from a German!
England not teach about the failings of the British Empire!? You don't say!?
@@ApocTank66 nor the successes either
@@bushmanPMRR
What "...successes..." would those be?
Concentration camps?
Two Bengal famines?
One of my favourite songs! It’s eerily beautiful.
I think most Irish people are happy to let bygone be bygones, so long as the legacies left are wholly acknowledged. They doesn't mean that ordinary English people need to apologise or otherwise make amends on a daily basis but a frank acceptance of what happened. The truth is that many ordinary working English people were brutalised by their own government and that's a point that isn't lost on most Irish people. As you said, you weren't told about any of this in school and I'd wager that was a deliberate oversight in order to preserve a carefully curated version of the legacy of the British empire.
My father's family left Ireland during this time and fled to Spain. From there they made their way to America, eventually settling in Cajun country in Southern Louisiana.
Crazy to think I'd be in Ireland if not for this event. Or more likely not born at all.
It was so preventable, which is probably the saddest thing.
Genocide usually is, considering it's done with 120% malice and intention.
,
Seems like it was intended, so much could have been done rice , bead , beans.
Something wild to note: Ireland's population still hasn't recovered from the Irish potato famine and the exodus that resulted.
True
I thought it recently had. Like, just in the last couple of years.
Sure, I'd say FF/FG have sent nearly as many abroad, myself including myself!
@@aaronring4704 From what wiki has to say, it reached 8 million before the famine, and they just crossed 5 million recently.
If you add in the almost 2 million people in Northern Ireland, the total population of the entire island is just shy of 7 million. And I think they should be included in the total as until 1921 and the Government of Ireland Act, which separated Ireland and Northern Ireland, the island of was one cohesive population.
Simon says Ireland grew corn to sell to England. Corn defined as a general term for cereal grains, is what they grew.
Video shows sweet corn 🌽, which was not grown in Ireland at that time.
Also they didn’t “sell” it. They were tenant farmers that were paid farm for the English. The only profit they saw was from their labor not the actual value of what they grew.
@@tripplefives1402
" the others being dent corn, flint corn, pod corn, popcorn, and flour corn"
Adding that to help support what you're saying, although it should be noted that sweet corn is one of the six categories of maize.
Nearly as egregious a tragedy as the maize itself...
Also, the photo they had was not of maize / "Indian corn".
Corn is used to refer to crops such as wheat and barley. It can also be used to refer to the seeds from these plants.
[British]
The blight killed the potatoes the British caused the famine
Makes sense
Questionable. The single use of one type of potato made the spread of blight even worse, and the reliance on too little type of vegetables . Westminster taking the corn just made everything even worse.
The true casualties were those whose crops were shipped off to England whilst the Irish starved. They did so directly under the bootheel of English lords. So yes the British caused the famine
Did you not watch the video? It was rich people not caring about poor people, seeing as even Irish Catholics did the dirty. Also, Peel clearly was trying to help at the start. So instead of the usual anti British sentiment to deny that people tried to help, responsibility lies with a select few.
@@ghollidge I love it how videos like this bring out the racists/revisonists such as yourself. No doubt you'll play the usual RUclips card and suddenly claim to be a historian working in Trinity whose sole expertise is the Potato Famine and how the Brits didn't do anything wrong.
This video could easily be on the Into The Shadows series.
I thought the same lol
So did I.
My grandad was from Connemara and you can still see the effects of the famine out there. Famine walls everywhere and the area is still emptier now than it was pre famine.
A third of the population here in Connemara died or emigrated and the cholera epidemic hit right after. We didn’t stop dying off until around the end of the Victorian era.
What's a famine wall?
@@CharlesRexElizabethRegina Connemara is next to the Atlantic Ocean. The peasants kicked off their land went as far West as possible. They literally stacked walls in little squares and filled the inside with sand and seaweed to try and grow food. These plots are often shown in Irish Calendars, people don't know their bleak origins. Now they are full of grass.
@@michaelhogan9053 I’m so fascinated yet saddened to hear this (especially as an English guy), this isn’t something I’ve ever heard of despite being very interested in history and appreciate the comment man. Best Wishes.
Having suffered from starvation I find it hard to watch this without getting emotional when you talk about how the government let them down so badly
Use your words...starvation means you died from lack of food
Starving means you are dying from lack of food...
Hopefully you are now eating a bit more...
@@codymoe4986 I looked it up, starvation is defined as suffering from malnutrition that can lead to permanent organ damage or death. While by definition I used the word correctly, I could have used a better word like malnutrition.
It's a good reminder that the English language is far more complicated than it appears on the surface
I hope you are doing well now Steve. Take care bro 🍻
@@codymoe4986when a person is recounting a hard time in their life, that is hardly the time to be so pedantic.
@@codymoe4986 Step #1 of correcting someone is making sure they're wrong.
Step #2 is making sure you're right.
there was a condition on the soup kitchens: to get soup you must be Protestant - to represent this you would remove the "O" from your surname (which is why O'Mahony and Mahony are both surnames)
To "take the soup" is still an insult in Ireland
One of my friends family name was changed from O'gannon to Gannon because of this. Then when the soup kitchens disappeared they had to keep the name. They emigrated to America in 1850.
Much as to why there is still a divided Ireland, and probably always will be
Most Irish names don’t have an ‘O’ before they. We’re hardly all covert Protestants!
not all of the soup kitchens
@@ArchangelAva That's because you've only ever seen the English translation of most Irish names, some kept the 'O' in the translation, others haven't - in Irish the 'O' means "son of" (a daughter would have 'Ní' and a wife would have "Uí")
take my surname "Buckley" for example; In Irish it's O'Buachalla to mean "son of the cowboys" - my sister would be Ní Bhuachalla and my mam would be Uí Bhuachalla - therefore converting to Protestantism and removing the 'O' would be renouncing your family line
(the "h" in Ní Bhuachalla is a gramatical rule called the séimhiú that is really complicated and I won't go into)
My grandmother's grandmother was from Ireland. My grandma always said that she was a hard woman. I asked her, "Didn't half of her children die in the potato famine? That would make me a hard woman, too." She lost 4 out of 8 children before coming to the US.
My cottage is surrounded by an abandoned famine village of small cottages sometimes I remind myself either the people escaped or they are under those cottages
As an Irish person, I’m glad you covered this topic. Almost all my ancestors on my dad’s side were Irish immigrants who left Ireland during the famine. We don’t even know what part of Ireland they were from. The famine caused them to lose everything and miraculously, a few made it to Ellis Island, and later Wisconsin, alive. We’ve been trying to research our family for the past three generations but we still don’t know anything. Our last name got changed to an American version when they came here and because of all the native Irish variations, we don’t even know what it originally was. My ancestors lost their homes, their friends, their family and even their lives in hopes that they could have a better life in America, and they didn’t even get that
We have some ancestry unknowns as well. It can be difficult
I understand exactly what you’re saying. My family emigrated quickly from Germany when “he” became chancellor but not all who were regular Germans left. They were not Jews and were never heard from again.
It wasn’t just corn that was exported from Ireland during the famine. There were all sorts of vegetables that were grown there and they were all exported by money hungry English businesses.
Two hundred shades of green my mam told me . That island is so lush there is no way you could have a famine. I spent three weeks there in 94 . As soon as I got off the boat at Dun Laoghaire it struck me . I was born in Yorkshire but have lived in Canada since 69 and I was treated with respect the whole time . It's a Magic island .
Do when most of the food is taken away from you
My ancestors survived the famine, barely, and as soon as were able to afford passage to N.A. they took whatever ship was crossing the atlantic and ended up in Canada only to sharecrop for another British landlord here.
Now that is heart breaking. Imagine leaving your home, broken and bent by the British gentry, people dieing on the streets while the lord's in their mansions threw parties. The only solace that your going somewhere you can make a fresh start away from all that awful just to end up in pretty much the same situation =[
'No matter where you go, you can never escape the British quo'
So many of the atrocaties that occurred during that period didnt make the vlog but overall a decent telling of some of what transpirred . To this day there are entire old towns marked on maps that no longer exsist, a couple of stacks of heaped rocks in the corner of a field are the remains of houses where small villages used to be. the 1840's when more food was exported from a nation than the previous 100 or following 100 years, boats packed with prisoners taken from work houses for the supposed non compliance of work house rules and deposited in every corner of the world, and to this day the population hasn't even reached 75% of pre famine levels. currently there are 138million people globally you can claim irish ancestry and through all our strife we continuely give more to the needy and hungry than any country on the planet.
I have Irish blood. Both were convicts after doing their 7 years they married & had 9 children.
I'm Scot-Irish, and my Irish ancestors would come to America and become cotton and tobacco farmers. Many others weren't fortunate enough to be able to emigrate.
Not like he can sit there and give you some 12 hour sob story about Irelands greatest disaster. All these videos are this length, as sad as this was, much worse things have happened, he isn't going to sit there and talk about those things for hours either.
Stop sniffing your own farts.
@@RowanWarren78 and how many of them kept slaves... lol
@@rezarfar None, not because we were kinder or more compassionate, as I'm sure my ancestors were products of their time like everyone else. We simply weren't here until the late 19th century. The other half that came in the 18th century didn't own slaves either. They had small family farms and very little money (but lots of kids😆). Most of the people who owned slaves were people with some wealth, and lots of land. We've been able to access land records to find out exactly where we settled and what our holdings were. Through these records you can find out whether your ancestors had servants or slaves as they were accounted for. Oh dear, did you think everyone owned slaves?😳
You forgot to mention the Choctaw and the quakers. But you did well within the time restraints.
My Irish Father could have written this - it's exactly how he described it to me when I was younger… Simon is awesome and really knows how to tell a story with the perfect delivery. Kudos to the entire team
I've been waiting for this kind of video for years now the topic of the video has finally shown... Thank you Simon and to all who made it possible...
The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy
Tim Pat Coogan is a charlatan and that book was complete and utter shite. It got torn to shreds by just about every prominent Irish historian. Something which Coogan isn't.
Can't imagine why Ireland wanted independence..
Tim Pat Coogan, right?
Bastards
Easy now, it’s a fact channel. No politics please. Makes it degenerate into a slagging (slanging) match where everyone is right.
As a person who was born and educated on the english side of the Irish Sea, it's always amazed me the severe lack of education I received about Irish history, especially the potato famines. Well written videos like this should be compulsory in uk secondary schools, the only time that I personally found out about any Irish history was when I moved to the south of Ireland.
Sometime when your family has a personal connection to the story these videos are hard to get through. I always appreciate Simon telling the stories straight and without bias. Ver well done.
A song that came to mind was Fields of Athenry, my favorite version being sung by The High Kinds. Beautiful yet crushing sad song
My dad loved that song.
The British establishment at its most horrific.
"Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown." Freyne
Simon: “Experts believe the soup kitchens disprove British committed genocide.”
Also Simon: “The British deliberately stopped the soup kitchens.”
It’s genocide.
In fact, the soup kitchens themselves were a form of genocide. The vast, vast majority of those suffering in the famine were Catholic, and the soup kitchens required any who availed of them to convert to Protestantism, which is actually a form of cultural genocide as defined by the UN.
just isn't tho, pal
If it was genocide, the British would not have paid for 800,000 Irish people to emigrate to America and 300,000 to Great Britain.
English were so despicable might as well be
@@tobyjohnson1239whatever you say brit
Thank you for telling it the way that you did. My family is from south of Dublin. I’m not sure how they survived.
They are/were Catholic.
Gods Church will never fail my friend, Ave Maria.
What's their religion got to do with it?
So it was punishment for being Catholic??
Cos ur on the south
@Kerrie Wilson Aye. Magic eh?
The famine is why I live in Canada and not Ireland right now. Those poor people, it breaks my heart to think about all the suffering.
My ancestors left Ireland during the potato famine. I'm so thankful they survived this tragedy.
9:01 “What happened next would be all too inevitable…”
*SQUARESPACE*
Almost perfect that they released this on Bloomsday.
It’s pretty staggering that even today the population hasn’t recovered to pre-famine levels as per the video.
I went onto Wikipedia to see just how bad it was. Not only did the famine decimate the population, but it still continued to drop for the next 100 years. As late as 1960, the population was still only a bit over 4 million. Even with a large influx of immigrants, many from Poland or other Eastern European countries, the country's population is still only around 6.5 million as of 2016, or still 20% below what pre-famine Ireland was.
Especially as half of the states thinks they are proud Irishman. But no one has wanted to move back.
Russia hasn’t recovered from ww1 ww2 and communism
@@tomhenry897 *Surely* you're including the horrible, devastating effects of Putin, right?
... right?
That is because there was still continual net emigration occurring all the way into the 1960s. Ireland has been a place of emigration for many centuries. 10 million Irish in total have emigrated in its history, a figure higher than the current population of the island of Ireland
Personally the denial of aid, the refusal to get rid of the laws surrounding food, shutting down the soup kitchens, and the stripping and leaving people to freeze I feel is a crime right below genocide since it comes after the knowledge and there was intent behind it and I think are the reasons people say it was a genocide
11:17 had to be one of the funniest things I've ever heard from Simon.
My mom’s side of my family came over to the States after 1850 from all over Ireland. AFAIK, they had no stories about the famine that they wanted to pass down to their descendants, so I have to guess at what their lives were like over there.
Great video. It’s worth mentioning that foreign aid could not exceed that given by queen Victoria. Charity and the great hunger in Ireland is well worth a read.
Sadly most irish people know very little of it, particularly the amount of food that was being exported. We brushed it under the rug and never dealt with the effect it had on us, particularly the phycological effect it had.
This was wonderful. Keep the great videos coming.
Do Irish people know what caused the famine, or will they continue to blame the British people and the fungus or will they understand that it was British politicians and the restrictive laws they made which are very anti capitalist and restricted trade so much the people could not innovate or work their way out of the famine. America had several crop plagues in its history and even during the Great Depression, starvation was hardly an issue. Not to mention the Great Depression was caused by government doing dumb things but the desire to work and innovate is what kept mass starvation from happening.
In Canada 🇨🇦 we have a national holiday to Queen Victoria: Victoria Day. I wonder how many more years before we repurpose the day...
@@funveeable It wasn't the Chinese people.
Proud of my Irish heritage the 1st of our clan my great great grands and their 13 children came to the USA in 1850.
As mentioned, it wasn't just the Irish that had famine issues (although they were hit incredibly hard). My Partner's family also had to leave Italy because of this - They walked from the Veneto/Venice region all the way to Genoa (nearly 400KM/250 Miles) before they got a boat to spend 8 weeks travelling to Brazil.
This is what brought my family to the US. My great great great was the son of a wealthy Irish land owner. After the second year of the famine when it was truly getting terrible he brought several of his Cottiers and their families to the USA and settled in North Carolina.
By a lonely prison wall
I heard a young girl calling
"Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay"
Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry
By a lonely prison wall
I heard a young man calling
"Nothing matters, Mary, when you're free
Against the famine and the crown
I rebelled, they cut me down
Now you must raise our child with dignity"
Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry
By a lonely harbour wall
She watched the last star falling
As that prison ship sailed out against the sky
For she lived in hope and pray
For her love in Botany Bay
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry
Low lie the fields of Athenry
Where once we watched the small free birds fly
Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing
It's so lonely 'round the fields of Athenry
1:30 - Chapter 1 - The eve of disaster
4:55 - Chapter 2 - Coming from America
9:05 - Mid roll ads
10:40 - Chapter 3 - The man who starved Ireland
15:10 - Chapter 4 - Social collapse
19:15 - Chapter 5 - Escape valve
Are you the chapter guy then
Despite growing up in an area with a large population of people (including myself) descended from Irish emigrants who fled the potato famine, it wasn't until I was an adult that I truly understood that the whole thing wasn't 'famine' so much as genocide.
Hello, as a Turkish and Ottoman historian, I write the truth of the story based on concise Ottoman records. The period when the Irish people were deliberately left to genocide by England. The Ottomans were not interested in this at first. They did not want to confront the British and Ireland was not a Muslim country. At that time, the Ottomans were busy suppressing the rebellions in the conquered regions. There was also a power struggle within the palace. Celtic soldiers and officers serving in the Ottoman Empire did not remain silent any longer about the genocide committed in Ireland and reported this situation harshly to the sultan. The Sultan had to accept the offer of help. In addition, Celtic people living in Anatolia also supported the aid campaign. It is estimated that the Celtic population living in Anatolia today is 9 million. When the Ottoman Empire ended, the Celts living in Anatolia were not shown as a minority at the Lausanne meeting of the newly established Turkish state because they lived in a Muslim state.
When you go to Anatolia, you can see people with red hair and green and blue eyes. Celts living in Turkey are educated, polite and mostly atheist. In my opinion, those who helped you are the Celts living in Anatolia. What I said is available in official documents. Thank you.
My family were Irish immigrants. It's horrible the conditions they suffered through. I'm glad they survived the journey and came here, because without them, I wouldn't be here.
Another wonderful well written piece.
My family are from the Donegal coast. I think they may have coped better, as they were mostly fishermen.
Not a chance. Donegal is mountainous and poor soil. The famine killed many. Every town or village in the county has a famine graveyard and a soup pot
My great grandma didn't leave Westmeath for Pennsylvania via Canada until 1895, but I think my gg grandparents were traveling in England when she was born, so I'm wondering how the family was 50 years earlier. Bonus points to the author for making Simon use a Star Wars line.
Good video. One thing to add, in order to use the temporary soup kitchens, Irish people had to give up their faith and convert to Protestantism. To this day there is a saying for traitors in Ireland, 'taking the soup'. It wasn't the altruistic endeavour it seems, although it shows soup kitchens would have helped
I went to a catholic school in England with many Irish girls like myself, i have never been taught a word of Irish history
I grew up on a famine road in Limerick. My great great grandmother told my granny she saw a dead woman lying in a ditch holding her baby( I think the baby was dead too) on the road when she was going to school one day. There has been a lot of strange sitings around the area at night too, one which I saw. I dont believe in supernatural stuff though, lol.
from an irish viewer to and english gent. Thank you for a tuthful and honest video.
Part of my family came to the US during the famine. I remember my grandmother calling them "lace curtain Irish", an American term for those who could afford passage. They settled in the Midwest as farmers, intermarried with the locals, and had good lives. Thank you for telling their story. It would be nice to have one from the American Irish farmer's perspective, please.
For saying that nobody serious calls it a genocide, the facts definitely make it sound like genocide
In some USA states, including NY State, there is a mandate that public school history classes must teach about the Irish Famine.
In October 1995, I visited the 'Famine Museum' at Stokestown, ROI. One interesting story as to the estate is is located on is that the owner during the famine paid for part of the fare for some of his tenants to travel to the USA.
Related issues causing the famine was overpopulation with family plots getting too small to support sufficient crops on poor quality land, the demands from London for tax and other payments of landowners even if broke them financially, economic class and religoius discrimination, lack of ability to develop or desire to bring industry to much of Ireland but in the Dublin, Belfast and other coastal areas.
17:40 it's such a haunting tale to go with such a gorgeous valley.
Though it's actually worse when you realize the inspectors came to the village for the inspection, but for unknown reasons the inspection bever took place. So the inspectors moved on to a private hunting lodge 12 miles down the windswept boggy valley.
Starving people were forced to appear at the lodge at 7am the following day if they wished to continue to be qualified for famine relief. That night a cold rain set in across the valley. 7 died from starvation and all its related ailments on the 12 mile trek to the lodge. 10 more died before they could make it the 12 miles back home. Women and children were amongst the deceased.
probablye the most scary aspect is that majority of those affected didnt even have enough to LEAVE!
I witnessed countries fall into civil war and my first instinct is to leave specially having small children. but the fact that there is no chance to even leave broke my heart.
Being on a big ass island surrounded by an ocean; next to the very entity sought to kill you off -- even if indirectly -- and no money, is quite possibly the biggest middle finger to an ethnicity as I have ever seen one
@@MarloSoBalJr Well not that their coming to USA is safe. Few make it and found job other force to become soilder for a civil war on both side if they want citizenship. I really wonder why what was other country think of this or they busying with their own object.
Simon just refused to say "so I hope you enjoyed today's video" 💕
He usually doesn't say it on the darkest videos.
Could you imagine? He's British
He generally doesn't say anything like that in videos like this.
@@nerysghemor5781 it always kinda unnerves me when people say “I hope you enjoyed the video, please like subscribe and ring the bell for more!” Or “I hope you found this video entertaining!” after just talking about the most horrible and sad stuff out there. That’s one thing I like about Simon (and his writers) is he’s actually pretty sensitive, and in case of his true crime shows really doesn’t try and glorify the perpetrators
Learning about history really makes you hate people in general. Every now and then you hear about a historical figure who wasn't a complete a-hole, and they seam like real heroes in comparison.
Hmmm.. If there was no Famine, you would never be interested if it was called the great Potato crop Failure with little death. As for the Famine yes there were some folks that bad very poor decision causing millions deaths. You go back further in history was it part of the cause is the dependence of the Potato. The Potato prior 1500 did not exist in Ireland, so Famine was in the making long before those who made poor decisions were even born.
Hate them, but also LEARN from them so as to not make their mistakes/decisions again.
Our present is built on the shoulders of those in the past and so it's our responsibility to continue building a better future.
There's a reason, why Simon always says "The past was the worst."
@@sicily7220 And who exactly are you?
IKR???
"Corn" in this context is equivalent term to grain, a general term for wheat, barley etc , not maize which is what we think of as corn today (and as pictured).
Thank you for covering this topic. You did a good job of retelling this time in an honest way.
Great vid. Was particularly unusual to hear all this is Simon's British accent.
The 1729 satirical essay "A Modest Proposal" by Johnathan Swift gives some perspective into the callous and inhumane attitude of many English towards the Irish.
To be honest, the English ruling classes had nothing but contempt towards the English lower classes.
@@nlwilson4892 The difference being they didn't let about a quarter of the English lower classes starve to death in about six years. That's actually a significant difference.
@@johnmckiernan2176 In my town about a quarter of the poorer areas were wiped out each year with cholera, typhoid etc. for much of the 1800's. The fundamental problem in Ireland was the blight coupled with the over-reliance on one single crop. The English handled it badly, not disputing that at all but the reluctance to help was very similar to the reluctance to help the poor in England, there was some added reluctance with it being not on their doorstep, Irish and Catholic, but there was a general attitude that the poor of any society were not "proper people" they were looked down on as a subclass that served a purpose of providing labour but weren't seen as having right to life or decent living conditions.
@@nlwilson4892 you say the “fundamental” issue was an over-reliance on one crop and I would encourage you to ask why there was a reliance on one crop. Then we may get closer to fundamental issues. I understand if you’re British that you may be reviled by your colonial past and may want to deflect the egregious behaviour deploying a “not all” argument but it would behoove you not to infer the Irish had chosen to rely on one crop.
@@PeterCarroll83 It explains in the video, the potato was very much suited to the ground and climate in most areas. It perhaps doesn't explicitly say that better farming land was used for other crops that were farmed commercially (ie. sold) and much of that was exported to England. It wasn't that the poor farmers had much choice. You can look back to further if you want to analyse into British colonisation with the British and sympathisers taking land into their ownership and pushing others from the land and right back to Cromwell with him persecuting Catholics and driving them west and south. But equally you could go back to Normal invasion of Britain and the Normans that became the aristocracy taking the land into their ownership and making the natives landless serfs, and also the Highland clearances, pushing Scottish crofters off the land and forcing them into Ulster.
Or you could summarize and say that those with power have generally abused that power to abuse those with less power and used it to gain more power. It is a repeating pattern and unless we accept that and that divide and conquer is part of that strategy then it will keep happening.
If it was just the potatoes that were affected, at the end of the day, you will pay the price if you're a fussy eater.
Alan Partridge.
My grandmothers family came to Chicago from Ireland during the famine. I’m not sure how my first Irish relative came to the US but I was always told that he was essentially deported from Ireland
My great grandfather was an Irish immigrant, I vaguely recall stories of the potato famine as a child. Thanks for covering this.
I was half expecting Simon to stand up and walk away at the end ... This felt more like an 'Into the Shadows' video.
There was plenty of food in Ireland. Although potatoes were plentiful for the poor. We grew many many different types of crops. A substantial amount of cattle and livestock were on the land too. There was even a small fishing industry. It was all shipped to Brittan. The Irish were left to starve while trains and boats of food were shipped to the UK. Even some english landlords in Ireland were horrified and contacted British authorities but little was done and the poor of Ireland effectively starved or were forced to emigrate. Over half a century later the Irish had enough of poor British rule in Ireland and effectively pushed the British out by every means possible.
If there's anyone with the balls to cover this then it's you fact boi. Seriously, to anyone criticising this video ask yourself this, if you were an English youtuber and you had a choice to go here or not, would you? He could have done anything else but he put his neck on the line out of respect for the truth. I think he's done a service to all of us by putting this well put together, balanced and by all accounts as unbiased as possible account of an unimaginable horror out there 👏 well done Simon, you deserve respect. You didn't have to but you did. Of course you're gonna get some hate for it, it's obviously a delicate, painful part of history.
Queen Victoria turning down help from Turkey regarding it as an insult. What a horrid person of course she wasn't dying of starvation and she was probably eating food that came from Ireland!!!!!!!
Simon and crew... well done! Being of Irish descent (my GGreatgrandfather got out on a famine ship) and also a trained historian, this video takes a very complex topic and breaks it down in a way that most people can begin to understand. Of course, the full complexity can never be handled in less than 12-15 hours of video documentary. One thing I could wish you would have been able to touch on was how the Famine (and related mindsets) laid the ground work for The Troubles. In any event: very, very well done!
To this day, this is still not talked about in history classes in school. Most English people grow up not understanding why there's some lingering animosity towards them from Irish people. I'm sadly one of those people, though I had heard that the English were not kind to the Irish, I never knew the full extent of it or why conflicts/tensions that continue to present day are such delicate issues. I hope one day Reparations can be made and I Hope in time England does or continues to to the right thing to repair the bridges with our Celtic neighbors and cement the positive relationship that should have been, learned from the lessons of the standing historical examples on how not to do it.
We don't want reparations. We just wish the British government would stop supporting ultra unionist parties who deny the genocide in Northern Ireland.
This is pretty good, but Simon leaves out one very important tidbit of information. The Potato blight didn't just affect Ireland. Britain's lower classes while not super dependent on the potato did find that their regular grains shipped in from outside were suddenly more expensive.
Europe was severely affected by the blight. This didn't lead to famine, but to severe shortages. And when there were severe shortages all over Europe it meant each nation horded the food it did have. This caused the price of grain from those nations that could afford to sell it get even more expensive. The supply was now down, and the demand increased. Britain had to not only fulfill the decrease of grain available for its own population, but also to help Ireland. And Ireland got hind tit.
Does it mean Britain didn't mismanage this? Oh god no. It did a ton and helped to cause this. But, when we add the addition to a world fighting the blight, it isn't so isolated. Britain was a part of an international trade. And it Ireland wasn't in isolation. It is the worst case scenario in a world of other sufferers. To leave that out is to leave out a major piece of context.
And I forget if he has mentioned 1848 the year of Revolutions. Which could be tied to the European Potato Crop Failure.
fun fact: most famines in the medieval period were caused not by lack of food, but by merchants speculating on rising food prices when a harvest was slightly smaller than the previous one. they would stockpile the food such as grain in warehouses to sell it later at exorbitant markups to hungry people. this obviously wasnt a great idea because the grain would spoil, get eaten by rats, or lost in fires which may or may not be set by the angry hungry people, which then caused the actual famine. humans are nuts.
Yet a 3rd of the Irish died of starvation
It's quite crazy how despite how beloved and significant the potato is to the Irish, the potato is originally from Peru. Regardless, I imagine how Irish people nowadays hold potatoes near and dear to their hearts because of the famine that their ancestors had to go through while Peruvians feel proud that something from their country is so widely beloved by a group of people
It was a steady and durable crop that could grow in varied terrain. The British barred the Irish from farming or owning land so it became overly relied on by poor tennants.
Hilariously, they wouldn't even have the potato to eat if it wasn't for England.
They (Irish) actually produces other crops. But they export most of it to the Brits except potatoes since the Brits didn't want it.
@@tripplefives1402 Have you ever grow potatoes?
"You dont even have to replant them because the tubers can resprout in the spring"
If you don't "replant" the tubers (potatoes), does that means that you leave them underground instead of harvesting them? What's the point of growing potatoes if you don't harvest them? And how do you fertilize the land without ruining them?
I'm not throwing hate here, it may well be that in different countries there are different processes to grow potatoes and yours could be more efficient. Just curious as the method I know and have used has been a constant for centuries.
@@All_Hail_Chael they also wouldnt have had a giant famine, the likes of which the nation still hasnt recovered in terms of population, and had their whole culture lost and or stolen, haha so hilarious.
It’s really upsetting because it didn’t have to be that way. We, Britain, could have helped, and it could have done great things for the relationship between Britain and Ireland for us to have helped them when they were at their lowest. I’m English, but I’ve always loved Ireland and Irish culture. I’m a huge fan of Irish music and every time I’m over there, the people are nothing but lovely to me. And I have to say, every time I’m there, nothing softens the heart more than an Irish girl - nothing but charming. But yeah, really sad moment in history that didn’t have to be.
Thankyou for telling a story that should not be forgotten. This mattered to me for personal reasons, thankyou again.
AKA history proves how unreasonably cruel people can be. A dark day in history when Britain had the Irish export a majority of the food while letting them starve in the thousands...truely evil stuff.
The more I learn about English aristocracy and the British Empire...
I appreciate your honesty and modesty in telling this story. I'm lucky to have descended from a family of "fortunate" (Meaning of O'Shea, (Séaghdha)) Although that doesn't necessarily mean that my grandparents, parents nor myself are/were actually wealthy. Im sure it definitely plays a roll in our families survival during the great famine.
@Kerrie Wilson Dark warrior has a menacing ring to it. That's cool
HONESTY
H O N E S T Y
Change your surname. You aren't Irish.
Thank you from the bottom of my Irish heart.
Thank you for this informative video. I never knew the precise details of the famine, only that my ancestors suffered terribly and death rates were high.
Sooo my great x 5 grandfather Sir Richard Cobden founded (with John Bright) the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838 and successful repealed them in 1846. He also fought for land access and ownership laws for farming tenents, some of which are now, in a way, implemented in Scotland with community owned islands and freedom of access to the land.
Thank you for covering this the way you have.
I am half Irish half English, raised in England. My "education" here in England incredibly lacking in the true context here or of similar events across the globe under their empire, the brutalities etc. I have seen this bias in so many forms from professional documentaries on British major TV channels, "respected" historians and a general public who would make jokes and poke fun at situations they dont understand. I am sure many of them wouldnt make light of some of these situations had they known the truth rather than seeing is as a minority view or made up story or something exaggerated.
I saw a channel I love which is UK based and a food channel have a potato expert or whatever cover the history and relation to the episode, the Irish history was mentioned sans any mention of the British involvement in the deaths and mass migration. Unsurprising to me.
I am under no illusions that there are aware Brits and those who share my view regarding sharing the truth, warts and all. I also dont want to introduce a low bar haha. But thank you.
Very interesting as I know English history is truly vast yet the stuff that is missed is interesting. Another channel I follow hrun by an Englishman had in a live stream where a super chat that referenced the War of 1812 was give. The channel host didn't get the reference so we in the chat and his American counterparts explained it to him and we all had a laugh as he admitted yeah that war and the American Revolutionary war aren't really talked about or taught in England which even he found odd from a history standpoint.
I had an AMAZING Gaelic language professor named Brendan Dillon in Waterloo, Iowa.🤎🤍💚 He was originally from County Cork in Ireland and was extremely passionate about his beautiful homeland!🇨🇮
In addition to our language lessons, he also integrated classes about Irish history, which helped us immensely to understand more about the country whose language we were learning & how important it was. I remember distinctly in our class about the potato blight he explained that there was still enough food in Ireland, it was just that the land owners took it from the poor farmers & shipped it over seas.
He explained that NO ONE in Ireland calls it a famine, instead it's known as 'The Great Hunger'.😢
The oldest ancestor I find was in London in 1688, sentenced to 5 year's indenture in the Virginia colony. If he had been sent to Barbados sugar-cane fields, I wouldn't be here.
what was his crime
@@aWILDsomethingCAME being Irish and Catholic, i reckon.
@@aWILDsomethingCAME Often there was none. About 70,000 such indentured servants were sent to Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean in the 1650s. Their crime? Defeat in battle. Or having land the Cromwellian troops desired.
The whole situation can be summed up in one word, Evil. The decisions made were evil, as were the consequences.
My great grandma left Ireland during that terrible time and settled in Canada.