If you see this I know it might be long, but please read it. I’m reblogging this again because people need to know that during the Irish famine there was no food shortage. The Irish famine was not a real ‘famine’, it was a genocide. Ireland did not run out of food. We couldn’t eat the potatoes sure, but it’s always portrayed as if the potato was the only thing ever grown here at that time. It wasn’t. Wealthy British landowners, as their name suggests, owned all of the land at the time. All of it. The British forcibly took the land off of the Irish people and then forced the Irish to work the land for them, often for close to nothing in return. They grew crops, kept livestock, food was plentiful here. But only if you were British. Any and all food grown here in Ireland, by Irish workers, on Irish land, was immediately shipped back to mainland Britain to be sold for profit. Profits kept by who? The British of course. Grain yields each year were more than enough to feed the Irish population, but grain was a ‘cash crop’ and not a ‘food crop’. While a nation of 8 million starved to death, the British government and its people grew fat off of the spoils of Irish labour. The British forcibly took their houses from them, and then charged extortionate rents for the Irish people to live in them. During the famine evictions were commonplace, with the staple crop failing and nothing to sell people had no means of earning a living and so had to go and live, work and eventually die in workhouses.

Workhouses were the closest thing a Famine-era Irish person came to hell on Earth.

Families who had been evicted walked to these workhouses along the ‘Cosan na Marbh’, the Road of Death. Many died on the side of the road and were left to rot where they fell as coffins and grave sites were too expensive for the majority of the population. So feared were these workhouses that it was common for families to resort to eating grass before they would look for food in a workhouse. Those that did make it there were segregated immediately; men and women were punished if they were caught communicating. They were worked to death, fed animal grade food, given a hole in the floor as a communal toilet and owned nothing except the shirt on their back (which, if you died, was given to the next occupant of your bunk, unwashed, even if you had died of disease). By the time the famine had ended here, a nation of 8 million people had been decimated to under 4 million in the space of about 7-8 years due to death and emigration. This brief overview is the backdrop of the show that the British-run Channel 4 hope to turn into a comedy. Just fucking consider that for a minute and then sign that petition please.

SIGNAL BOOST NOW.

Just to say, the British ‘people’ didn’t grow fat, the British ruling class made a profit.

Fuck Channel 4.

Exports of food from Ireland increased during the famine.

Exports. Of. Food. Increased.

Like, that’s all you really need to know about how fucked the Irish (especially Irish Catholics) were by the British back then. A million people starving? Hey, rather than use the excess food to idk feed them so they don’t die, let’s just ship it off. Money matters more than Irish lives, amirite?

Oh and don’t forget the Turkish Sultan wanted to send money to Ireland but he wanted to send more than the British Queen had and was pressured into sending less because otherwise it would make Queen Victoria look bad. (And – I can’t find a definite source of this, but it’s a very well-established-to-the-point-of-damn-near-being-accepted-as-fact rumour the Sultan tried to send ships of food, and said ships had to work their way around a fucking British blockade keeping him from just donating food to make up for the lesser financial donation.)

And also the ‘Irish potato blight’ hit Europe as far East as Poland, but no other country lost nearly as many lives. So it’s pretty fucking obvious this wasn’t a matter of ‘well, any country might have been affected this badly by such a blight’. England didn’t technically cause the blight itself but their policies are what turned it from ‘disease which affects one crop’ to ‘full-blown famine’, their policies are what moved it from ‘crap the Irish have no food’ to ‘crap the Irish are all dying’, so a British channel considering a comedy of this? No. Nope. Y’all can go fuck yourselves.