Citation Needed - The Irish Holocaust

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór [anˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), also known as the Great Hunger, the Great Starvation, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland),[1][2] was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1852.[3] With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as An Drochshaol,[4] loosely translated as "the hard times" (or literally "the bad life"). The worst year of the period was 1847, known as "Black '47".[5][6] During the Great Hunger, about 1 million people died and more than a million fled the country,[7] causing the country's population to fall by 20%–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1851.[8][9][10] Between 1845 and 1855, no less than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barks—one of the greatest mass exoduses from a single island in history.[11][12]   Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.

Okay, but what's it even gonna be? I don't know man winter soldier Balkan stuff they'll fight bad guys like punch them and stuff I don't know. They don't even have powers though. They're just Bucky as a metal arm and PTSD Oh, no, yeah, that's a great power. able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that.

I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. I was like, I'm not going to be able to do that. So this week's episode is about the Irish potato famine and Eli's being very insensitive about it. Uh Eli, what did we say about mocking heat's heritage?

Exactly. Oh, what did I could stop? Good sir. He told, for I am dying of thirst and I wish I could have something to drink. Taste the green water, famine, debi- Not even historically accurate. Hey, Thurton. Hey, Thurton. What? Come close. I must tell you something. Waterfam and debi- No, not even historically accurate. Hey Thornton! Hey Thornton!

What? Come close! I must tell you something! I hate you so much. Tell everyone forever! That this was the British's fault! Ehh! Gonna be one of those episodes, huh?

Yep. Yeah, I'll go clean out the inbox. You like it, you tie? Yeah, I'll go clean out the unbox. I did you try! Hello and welcome. Citation needed. Podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. This is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and you're I need to toy to toy.

There you go. Great. And with that out of the way, at least until Eli speaks next, yes. I'll introduce the panel. First up, we have an Irish lord and his swarvy Roman enforcer night, Tom and C's. Okay.

You know, being an Irish lord isn't all river dancing. It's also alcoholism and river dancing. It's both of those things together. You know, the Romans say when you hang out with a big Irishman, you got a lot of golf. It's so bad. I was already correct. It is though. The Celts were college. And also joining me, we have two visual aids represent potato and Hey jokes on you. Potatoes have way better coloring.

Usually. And give it my time. But I feel like I need to keep my muscle mass at a minimum for everyone's safety. That is we are. Us. OSHA policy. Yeah. So, Tom, we already gave it away a little bit.

Let's make it official. What person plays thing concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about today? We're going to be talking about the Irish Holocaust just to keep things light on this. Nice. Nice. And you and I are going to like the opposite of an Irish famine. Is that a big topic for the,

the starch. Well, you know, this, I noticed that this episode is going to drop on. Start 17. St. Patrick's Day. And I was originally toying with the idea of writing a SSA about St. Patrick or maybe some fun Irish folklore like the legend of Finn McCool. But when I was talking to Haley about these ideas, she said, well, you should write about the potato fam

and since America wouldn't even have St. Patrick without it. And since she's both 100% right about that and willing to sleep with me, I took her suggestions. I see. Be able to look out for Tom's upcoming essay on how Haley's friends are actually a lot cooler than he gave him. Right.

Okay, not supposed to read ahead Noah. All right, when it takes all the, and even though the topic is very predictably dark, it is, after all, a very terrible famine. It's also a fascinating story with insight and commentary that is distressingly relevant to our current economic systems today, in addition to being a globally influential event responsible for the Irish diaspora that heavily influenced the demographic makeup in the United States.

So I guess I'll concede that her idea for this essay was rather better than a giant once pretended to be a baby to get out of fighting another giant across the ocean and other Irish tales. Really though, that's what 2021 needs though, is a hard dose of realism, a nice hard dose. You need to get your second dose, you get your second dose and then, yeah, you're good. I don't want to say I'd have an easier time making jokes about mythical creatures

this week's, but I definitely get myself in less trouble. I certainly wouldn't have to highlight and cross out quite as many of them. So I want to pause here and I want to say this too, that I genuinely hope that after this essay, you no longer refer to the Irish Holocaust as the potato famine because while the potato blight was involved, the reality is that this horror of an event isn't the story of poor crop yields or agricultural bad luck. This event sometimes referred to as the great hunger, the great starvation, the famine, or in that perfectly characteristically Irish way they have of downplaying harsh realities,

they called it, quote, the hard time. Worth subtle people. Was really, this was, well, that's the trouble. That's the hard time. Worth subtle people. Was really, this was, well, that's the trouble. That's the hard times. This was really the direct result of the purposeful and systematic economic abuse of the Irish people by the British. And his 19th century Irish revolutionary John Mitchell wrote and was later charged with sedition for noting, quote, the almighty indeed sent the blight, but the English created the

famine. Yeah. So calling it that whole thing with the potatoes, that's reductionist. Yes. But I'm good letting the Holocaust have that word to itself. By themselves. Tom, there was actually a Holocaust on my street earlier this week. I mean, everyone was fine with the cars the cars were really messed up. It was all a Holocaust. But yeah, I don't think if anybody has an exclusive claim on that word, it's somebody who just spelled it, Haco Clu Astero. So 40 years before the blight began, the acts of union were passed, which made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. Governing power for Ireland lay in the hands of an began, the Axiv Union were passed, which made Ireland part of the United Kingdom.

Governing power for Ireland lay in the hands of an executive, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, often called device Roy, a position appointed by the British government. The Irish did send representatives to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, but 70% of the representatives were either landowners or sons of landowners. This would prove to be disastrous as these representatives bore no meaningful economic or cultural relationship to the actual Irish people. This fact, by the way, was not lost on the English. And I really do want to emphasize this, the problems that I'm going to articulate here,

these are not like benefit of hindsight-type problems. These were problems that were well known, publicly elucidated, and governmentally investigated. In fact, from 1801 to 1845, no less than 114 commissions and 61 special committees took up the issue of what the fuck to do about the problems of governing Ireland. In 1844, Benjamin, gonna mispronounce it, Benjamin disraily, maybe, described it this way, said, quote,

a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien established Protestant church, and in addition, the weakest executive in the world, all contributed to the consensus of these commissions, which, quote,

without exception, prophesied disaster, Ireland was on the consensus of these commissions, which quote, without exception, prophesied disaster. Ireland was on the verge of starvation. Her population rapidly increasing three quarters of her laborers unemployed, housing conditions appalling, and the standard of living unbelievably low. Okay. Then why would you take it over? Why would you take it over?

You just described the whole country as Brad Pitt's trailer park from Snatch. Don't take it. In Brenton, Sizz and Brexit's on in your wheelhouse. What is that? Leave. What are you good at? What do you do here? To really understand what happened, you have to understand that the bulk of all the land

in Ireland was owned by a combination of a relatively small number of English and Irish aristocrats. 80% of the population were Catholics, the best bulk of whom were landless and terrible poverty. The estates of the land agentry by contrast were sometimes enormous, and the concentration of wealth in a tiny handful of mostly foreign, culturally and religiously intolerant elites who lived lives intentionally estranged from the inhabitants, does not arrest me for great love and affection. Huh, nor did it engender the necessary conditions to empower the locals, or even create a ruling class with a strong sense of paternal obligation toward its charges.

Well, it's a good thing our culturally and religiously intolerant elites with enormous estates who control the vast majority of our wealth and live lives intentionally a strange from the overwhelming majority of inhabitants aren't foreign. Otherwise, they're kind of trouble. I'm being pro-sidentic. This is why you need upstairs downstairs mixers with the help. It's down. It's fun. What? They love to know each other. You can pat him. They love it. They love it.

They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it.

They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it.

They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. They love it. set foot upon the soil they owned, employed literal middlemen to collect rent. Since there was a physical and geographical disconnect between tenants and landlords, the

system was rife for abuse by these middlemen. And the middlemen were judged by their effectiveness in collecting those rents. So you can imagine the lengths these guys would resort to in order to pursue the rent. These rents were payable to the land in English. So these monies didn't even stay in Ireland. They flowed by the millions of pounds right out of the country. Oh, sure, attack the fucking job creators, Tom.

Way to go, buddy. Way to go. There you go. So let me try to express to you just how awful and unfair this system was. In 1843, a commission was established to inquire into this system of land ownership. The commission wasn't formed in an unbiased way.

The commission's members were all themselves landlords. Not a single tenant was on this commission. And still, even with this incredibly biased set of investigators, they concluded that, quote, it would be impossible adequately to describe the privations, which they, the Irish labor in his family, habitually and silently endure. In many districts, their only food is the potato, their only beverage, water, their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather, a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury. And nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property. And and seriously, how would

they know this if they didn't have those upstairs downstairs mixers? They would have no view. Is this your pig? I love this guy. I'm giving a job. Is this your view or pile? So these are the findings of a commission of guys who once they just like fucking looked at what was happening had no choice but to acknowledge like, oh yeah, we're really fucking those guys over. That's. Thank you for touring the Amazon Mega Warehouse with us, Mr. Bezos. I know, long tour, but over in the corner, there are some bottles you can relieve yourself

in. If you want to just go over there, I'm just saying, if you're a menorheap is your only property, I would have been a king among men. I tell you. It goes even deeper than just handing over all the political power and land to the English and forcing tenants to pay rent to hired collections goons, landlords viewed their holdings as a source of income, and as such they sought to ring every penny they could from their land and thus from the Irish tenant farmers.

The landlords leased massive tracks of land to the middlemen. The middlemen in turn subdivided those tracks into ever smaller and smaller rented plots. The more these middlemen described at the time variously as land sharks, blood suckers, and I like this one, the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country. These blood suckers could have picked tenants pretty much for anything. So if you were late on your rent,

or if you were deemed dishonest, or if the landlord just decided to use the land for something else, well then just fuck you, you're evicted now. Using the land for something else feels like an obvious lie. What are you doing? You putting up strip malls? That's right.

I sure remember my'm going to farm. Farmland. So, remember, too, that the rent was definitely too damn high. In fact, rents were set by the middlemen as high as possible so that the middlemen could make as much as possible subletting them while still remitting the bulk of the rent out of the country back to the British. And the law at the time was written in such a way that if the tenant made any improvements to the landlord's property, those improvements were now just fuck you property of that landlord.

So the tenant had no rights of homestead and they did not need to be compensated for improvements that they made. This meant that there was no incentive for tenants to make permanent or meaningful improvements on their rented properties, since they could just be evicted from their newly spruced up property so the improved land could then be re-rented out at a higher rate. Just Keith Scrammo bundled against the cold, as she trudges past the NYU kid who's moving into her place. You know, that's kind of the old gaining weight during a famine dilemma, right? Like how much food can you have before your food?

Guarantee my grandma's beat up an NYU kid. Like I have to guess. And here we come to the part that the potatoes would play in this mess. You're welcome for the famine cycle. So the size of the farms that were rented out to the tenants were artificially, unconscionably small, and the rents were exorbitant. The effect of this was that tenant farmers had to use all, were very nearly all of their arable land to grow crops to sell in order just to make the rent,

leaving none of the farmed crops available for the farmer and their family to actually fucking eat. One of the very few crops that could be grown on small parcels of otherwise unusable land that could feed a family or potatoes. And as a result, the potato quickly became the main, if not the only source of food, for millions of poor Irish-tenant farmers. And again, this was not something that the English were unaware of. The British government at that time was aware that as many as one-third of Irish small holdings were sublet in parcels too small to support the family which farmed them after their rent was paid.

In fact, many Irish farmers were only able to survive at all by hiring themselves out as seasonal or migrant laborers in England and Scotland since the land they rented to live on was too small to sustain their families. Okay, I don't want to see him like unem pathetic, but why didn't they just like get alone from their parents or take your role in building your own? That's what I did when I didn't like my job. It was right. It made a huge difference for me. I wish laborers needed a gap year.

Yeah. There you go. He gets it. So the land in Ireland was all in use though and it was extremely productive. It just wasn't for the benefit of the Irish. Since the English owned the bulk of the land, they could use it for whatever suited them and that often meant just grazing cattle on it. According to Jeremy Rifkin, quote, the Celtic grazing lands of Ireland had been used to

past your cows for centuries. The British colonized the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually cows took over much of Ireland,

leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival. Okay, it's really good that I personally wasn't there for this. I would have been the highly suspect fat kid when everybody else was getting the hype that was around. Yeah, now the cows are just in charge of shin fame. No, a lot of people are gonna get that joke, but I sure hope the ones who do get that joke don't murder me today. So, I put in a word for you with my people.

Yeah. So, look, look, I get that a million people are gonna die and make this story interesting eventually, but I'm just saying half an episode on 19th century British agricultural policy. I just want everybody to keep that in mind next time I need some geology background for the cave episode or whatever. I will remember nothing. Including most of the details of this story. Now, at this point, the stage was set for disaster.

And again, everyone knew it. The English knew exactly what they were doing when they created land ownership laws, expressly tailored to disenfranchise and impoverish the Irish. The story of what's about to happen, it is not the story of a people who loved potatoes to the exclusion of other foods. And it's not the story of what's about to happen, it is not the story of a people who loved potatoes to the exclusion of other foods, and it's not the story of the dangers of an over-reliance on a monoculture food stuff for survival, and it sure as fuck is not the story of an

agracultural blight. The story of what's about to happen next is the perfectly inevitable story of what happens when wealth and power are intentionally and artificially concentrated by powerful systems into the hands of an indifferent, morally bankrupt economic ruling class. Yeah. So terrible for my ancestors, but now we know what to avoid. So close one. Close one. Good lesson in history. So I'm just going to check on my economic mobility yams really quick. That's what he calls Bitcoin That actually would have made Jack now But we're gonna take a quick break for the lot of both nothing Hey, Larry, you got a second.

Oh, sure, Steve, what's up? Well, first off, I just want to say how much I appreciate work here at the Ministry of Naming Historical Things. I mean, numbering the world wars like that, brilliant. Just brilliant. Oh, thanks. It's just, it's as well. There've been some rumblings that some of the names

you've come up with for historical tragedies are just, just like a touch insensitive. Incensative. How so? Okay, like the Irish potato famine. What, I mean, der Irish, they didn't have potatoes. There was a famine. I like, if anything, I'm being oversensitive, I would think or the Armenian who's to say who's right and wrong. But who is to say, though, that's the whole point. Okay. Or one

from World War Two, hungry Jews death time. I mean, that one, hungry Jews death time. Again, that is perfectly accurate. They were hungry. Okay, we feel like maybe it's just better if you didn't aim for concise and with something a little more, I don't know, empathetic. You know, Steve, I didn't want to bring this up, but ever since you got promoted,

it's like you've been on some kind of Christians take a vacation to Africa. For the last time, dude, we settled on crusade. That's what I'm talking about right now. Right now. Right now. Whatever. Right now.

Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now.

Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. Right now And we're back. When we left off, shit was about to get hummed, herrable. So, I'd say.

Alright, so, before the blight of 1841, the potato was already a dangerous and unstable crop to rely upon. Thank you most overrated tuber. You look at the list. Diseases affecting potatoes which caused major damage to potato crops were on record before 1841, five times from 1739 to 1807, localized but severe potato crop failures were also reported in 1821 and 22. So again, it's not like potatoes were like up until the great hunger, a perfectly robust and diseased resistant crop.

They just weren't. They were however a nutritionally dense crop, and since the well-being of the natives of Ireland was not of any established value to the powers which controlled that country, it from time to time some of them went like even hungrier, well, then that was just obviously fine. Yeah. I mean, we didn't have McDonald's ski poor people alive enough to work yet. So, you know, it's actually that that slogan before they started the billion served.

So the blight that finally devastated the precarious Irish population arrived on Irish shores sometime around 1844, although the blight itself originated in Mexico and may have come over from America on board clipper ships. By this time, potato blights had already wiped out crops all over the eastern United States. By August of 45, the blight had begun to spread and affect crops and earnest on the Isle of White. Fields in Belgium were decimated. By September that same year, reports of a cholera in potatoes appeared in papers.

The blight had begun to destroy crops across all of Europe, after already being known in the US and Mexico. The British government, again, with full knowledge of the staggering dependence that they created for the Irish on the potato, it took like a wait and see approach. Remarking that although the news reports were alarming, there was, quote, always a tendency to exaggeration in the Irish news. The Irish exaggerate? Never. Now, back to your story about the Irish news. The Irish exaggerate never.

Now back to your story about the Irish Holocaust arm again. Yeah, that political wait and see approach really came into its own after the decline of the guillotine. It was right after that. Yeah, you can't trust the lame stream media about pandemics. Everybody knows that the real information is on it, YouTuber. Oh, God.

So it was all nonsense, of course. And if all you had to eat was one fucking thing and you learned that maybe there was about to be a lot less of that one fucking thing. It seems actually rather hard to exaggerate how much worry that should create. You don't have to tell me Tom. I just switched mango nectar providers last year because Goya got canceled. It was a real holocaust. Let me tell you. She's joking that about it. The relative insignificance of procedurally exterminating a million human beings because they're perceived in fear of your identity.

Just keep getting better every time you call back to them. I also know I'm leaning on them heavy this week. You know, you could write on the jacks. You could. You could write on the jacks. No, I've written suggestions in a march. I don't read it. He literally did.

So how much the blight destroyed crops as a matter of like many things from this time period, some uncertainty, some estimates put the total loss of crops at one third while many contemporary accounts note significantly higher percentages of loss. And of course, the effects of blight were not linearly distributed. It's not like every third potato just came out rotten. So some areas, 75% or more of all the crops had gone to ruin, leaving the population bereft of

their only source of calories. Just chop off the top third of every. Yeah, we're good. Yeah. Look at bitch about a rainbow, geez. So three million Irish people were wholly dependent, wholly dependent on potatoes for food at this time. Well, eating the cows was against the rules. So yeah, they had no choice. Yeah, I got to start. Well, I mean, you know, being hanged would have killed them quicker. Right. Yeah. There we go. There's another option. So it did not take long for that's from starvation to begin. Citizens of Dublin appealed to the government to open their ports to the importation of

corn and to ban using grain for distillation into spirits. Okay. So when the Irish call for a ban on whiskey, maybe a potential. Yeah. Right. So they also begged the government to provide employment through aggressive public works programs and importantly to prohibit the exportation of their food. Remember Ireland was not low on food.

The Irish were low on food, but that was only because the only food that the land system in place made practical for Irish subsistence was potatoes. Ireland was still exporting the food that was being grown by tenant farmers and those profits from those sales were still being sent out of Ireland to the English Landry. That was still happening. At the very same time that the Irish were dropping dead of hunger. And those very common sense and treaties to the government for help, they would fucking nowhere. Yeah, but Tom, they were essential workers here.

Here, here, here, here, let's just send him a nice thank you card. It'll be, we'll do something nice. Totally clap from every day at seven. That'll, that will do. I mean, like until I get boring, but like a week then, okay. Yeah, it's one thing we're not doing anymore, but like a week then. Okay. Yeah. That's what I was doing anymore.

But it's actually kind of worse than all that because those very reasonable calls for help from the starving Irish were met with more than just the kind of political gridlock that prevents modern day America from accomplishing anything worthwhile. The reluctance to act swiftly by the British government was based in their adherence to laissez-faire economic doctrine. The reluctance to act swiftly by the British government was based in their adherence to laissez-faire economic doctrine. This can be properly summarized, I think, as trying nothing and running all out of ideas. Lazy-faire economics means that the proper response of the government is to allow the

market to sort things out just so long as the problem in question only affects the poor people. Okay, it is what it is. And I'm done with my economics. That was good. I'm not saying that. Economist. In America, that's only the reason for half of our political gridlock at this point. The other half comes from trying to compromise with those assholes. the other half comes from trying to compromise with those assholes.

And it's not like nothing like this had ever happened before either. In 1782 and 83, there were food shortages in Ireland, and the government against the protestations of merchants closed the country for export. This kept the food Ireland produced available for the Irish, which in turn reduced the cost for food and staved off certain disaster, despite having both relatively recent successful experience in dealing with food shortages in Ireland and direct calls from the Irish suggesting that maybe they'd be allowed to buy and eat the food they grew and raised, no exportation ban was put into place during the 1840s. They go, no, we go high to heaven because we starve to death. They'll take the pie.

So in 1845, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel purchased from America a huge shipment of maize, but this is insane. He had to do it secretly. Well, fearing political reprisal from local merchants, Peel had to purchase the emergency rations from America through a series of agents. Hey, you have a maize guy? Just be cool about it. Just be real. I'm the ma a maze guy? Just be cool about it. Just be real about it.

I'm the maize guy. Don't be obvious. I was just scarecrows walking through cunts. I'm not. I was having them there. They're fine. So the maze took months to arrive from America because it was yoldy times.

And once the maze arrived, it was next to fucking useless. American maize had to be milled and processed in ways that Irish mills were not set up for, and the maize had to be cooked in special ways to make it edible. The initiative was of little help. I feel like that must have been an awkward conversation when he had to break the news, right? So you were gonna buy us maize? Maze! Yeah, but it didn't work out, I'm afraid. Wait, what were we even gonna use it for? Oh, I don't know, you know.

Maze stuff, maize, poi or whatever. But you're saying we can't do that then? No, no, we cannot do that. Sadly, our mills can't mill it. Oh, huh. So what are we supposed to do with it? Well, that's the good news.

You see, you can put it in a bowl with some gourds and people who come to your house we'll know you don't have sex anymore. Okay, that does sound nice, that's it. So, peel then try to repeal the corn-llaws tariff, which would have lowered the price of grain and therefore bred, but his party would not support him and that repeal failed. Unable to effectively govern, peel resigned, but the opposition party couldn't get their shit together and so peel was somehow reinstated as prime minister because England is confusing and I don't know how that works. They just went, but they're like, no, no.

We don't have a better option. It's still you. It can't quit. Meanwhile, the famine was getting worse because it turns out Lazy Fair is as stupid as trickle-down economics and doing nothing when people are dying is rarely the solution to that problem. The same thing. It is. Peel put into place some public works programs that starving men could get, you know,

work and buy food, but the measures are both too little and somehow too much. The program did nothing to fix the starvation problem, but it did cost peel his job again this time for Kees. You're going to quit. Okay, you're fired. Yeah. It's a weird, hokey, polkey dance, but since he's Irish, he has to do it with his arms straight down by his side. Yeah.

Let's put in right foot else. So the Wigs took control and they too looked at the problem of mass starvation and chose to err on the side of depraved indifference, canceling the public works projects on prior administration and leaving hundreds of thousands now with neither food nor work Of course, that was a terrible idea. They reinstated some different Public works programs, but then they did not invest in its administration so those programs failed Then just because fuck you. That's why Charles Trevillian for something actually scaled back the government food program because I guess he wasn't hungry

himself. Wow. Okay, wait, still nobody's eating the cows. I feel like you eat the cows at this point. Right. He's like, lots of people were stealing other people's cows and generally speaking, getting killed for it.

Okay, so the authorities were super silly back. people were stealing other people's cows and generally speaking, getting killed for it. Okay. So the authorities were super kill-y back there. Actually, the British, they weren't laws they fair when it came to kill and motherfarkers. By 1847, the English government decided that genocide through inaction was kind of a bad look. So maybe they should try governance. And they created the infamous Irish workhouses through the passage of the Irish poor laws.

If you're not familiar with workhouses in general, redicons. It's like that. No. No. You actually, a bear. Okay, let me, let me rephrase. If you're not familiar with workhouses, skim dickens. And as bad as the workhouses were, it would be hard to overstate how awful that is. What was arguably worse was that the Irish poor laws stipulated that these workhouses

had to be financed by local landlords, which might sound like some kind of justice, but which was, I assure you, in typical 19th century English fashion, simply a compounding of miseries. To see the landlords, they figured out pretty quickly that they didn't want to pay for work houses, which seems rather foreseeable, since this is a group of people who have not to date been subtle about not giving a shit

about the well-being of the poor. But if you're a landlord, and you own a bunch of land with poor people on it, you're pretty certainly going to have to pay for work houses. The solution for the landlords then was to simply evict all the poor people from their land. And then once all the poor people were evicted, then there were no more poor people on your property, and you didn't have to build them any work houses.

Problem solved. Yeah, boss, I did not build the work houses, but I fixed the glitch. Ireland's just going to work itself out in payroll. The fine. Landlords began evicting the poor in cruel and cruel numbers. The numbers for how many families were evicted from their homes are not clear. But from 1846 to 54 estimates are that a half a million people were removed from their

homes. Or one-twelfth of a Holocaust, if you will. Oh, cash. Give it score. I just... I just... I just really understand how this worked. Don't do Eli's math. Consider some anecdotes.

In West Claire, 1000 homes with an average of six people each living in them were destroyed. One land owning family, one family, the Mahon family, evicted 3,000 people in one year. Wow. George Bingham, the third Earl of Locke, and himself owned 60,000 acres, one guy owned 60,000 acres. And he cleared out 2,000 families from their homes so they could turn those homes into grazing land for cattle. In the midst of a famine, 2,000 people

were made intentionally homeless so that cows had food in order to be made into food. And they still didn't eat the cows. Who doesn't steal on the last day of the job? I mean, it's crazy. But the people are so stupid. Okay, thank you, Noah. I knew you'd come around to my session this thing.

There's a guy leaving the office. He's got a stapler under one arm, a cow under the other. He's walking out. Oh, I'm sorry, are you moving out? Don't mess with him, he's got a beef about the whole putters. In 1847 Thomas Nulti. I had it. In 1847 Thomas Nulti described these evictions this way,

quote, 700 human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set a drift on the world Thomas Nalti described these evictions this way, quote, life long, the wailing of women, the screams, the terror, the consternation of children, the speechless agony of honest, industrious men, rung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance.

The landed proprietors in a circle all around and for many miles in every direction warned their ten entry with threats of their direct vengeance against the humanity of extending to any of them, the hospitality of a single night's shelter, and a little more than three years nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their grave. So about that Joseph Mengele assay, you guys won't let me do. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. John. No, no, no, okay, all right, that's fair. That's fair. That's fair. No, no, no, no, that's not the best. But thanks for all the comedy gold, though. Yeah. If you guys had let me act it out, you'd like to get a whole thing and puppets.

We're on Zoom now, so you guys could have seen them. The Gregory Clause of the poor law also prohibited anyone who held his little as a quarter of an acre of land from receiving help. What this meant was that if a farmer sold everything he had to pay his rent and then was left with nothing for himself, he would then be forced to turn over all of the land that he held in order to receive any aid. Land ownership continued to concentrate to the top and those who were poor were rendered not just poor, but destitute. It's pronounced felon, Tom. Fallen.

In 1849, the Incombertist States Act allowed estates with debts to be auctioned off to pay creditors. Wait, what was the poor doing so well? Since so many people were rendered impoverished and indebted, this meant that again, more and more property was snatched up by wealthy British speculators, many of whom evicted the tenant farmers whose fates were tied to the capricious whims of whomever owned the land. They were. Listen, if we don't figure out something with giant spears like that Scottish guy, we're

never going to get a movie. That's going to be the worst. We're going to fucking podcast before we're going to get. Are we worse than Mel Gibson? Yes. I. Now based on this episode, yes. I don't know. A lot. Now based on this episode, yeah. So speaking of all the stories and who started them, we would be like, run the top.

Who had a better accent? Was it Eli or Mel Gibson? Who had a better accent? Oh, me and Mel Gibson are racism off. He's playing Santa and shit now. He's on cameo. Yeah. Just ask him to say something racist back to him.

He's like, two hours for 49.99. He just said you want to as you. Two. He said you like the LAPD video. It's no surprise then that the Irish began during this time the largest mass emigration in their history. While Irish emigration was nothing new, the scale of this Exodus was immense. In one year during the famine alone, a quarter million people fled Ireland.

And the demographics of this migration was different than in any other migration event, while most migrants were primarily men, women and children left Ireland in equal numbers. The leaving of Ireland by young people became such a cultural commonplace event that it actually became something of a right of passive. Wait, but don't worry though, it'll take them almost generations in the US before they start hating immigrants themselves. Remember remember it all last generations. The first mass migrations were to Canada. Since Canada was part of the United Kingdom, Canada could not initially refuse the influx

of migrants. Soon, the Irish were pouring into these overcrowded ships, eventually known as coffinships, where desperate immigrants would face harsh conditions, overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition. Well, if you're in a coffinship, the best place to go is Canada, because you can get coffins syrup there. You can just get this. Oh, shit.

Oh, shit. Come on, shit. No, coffins syrup. I won't have that joke, but you'll be safe on our podcast. Okay, new term for this whole thing. Maybe the Irish slavery? Yeah. That appropriate.

In votes. Eventually the British government worried that the sheer numbers of Irish pouring into Canada might cause them to lose control of Canada, putting a place harsh restrictions on the numbers of Irish immigrants into Canada. This forced more immigration into the United States, and since most of the Irish who arrived in the US were desperately poor, they just settled wherever their coffinships landed. Soon massive Irish populations popped up in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The depopulation of Ireland that began during the Irish Holocaust would continue, though

at a slower pace, for a hundred years before logging off. By 1854, between one and a half and two million Irish immigrants fled their homeland. And that's why the Irish people in my hometown were completely justified in financing bomb stuff in Belfast and London, 140 years later. Huh! That's literally how they would tell the story. These old Irish dads would be like, yeah, so potato famine? Yadayadayada shinfane.

No, that's not so. That's well. As for the death toll from the great hunger, that too is not a well-established figure. And it wasn't just hunger, which killed the Irish during the hard times. Starvation certainly took a toll on the Irish population, but there's just no way to parse out the number of dead from starvation and the even greater number who died from disease

exacerbated by hunger and extreme poverty. Complicating the counting in many cases, entire families were just wiped out. And since most of the data from that time comes from reports of the survivors, the sheer scale of the disaster is what makes this hard to measure. Though estimates are fairly conservative at around a million casualties. Okay, so one sixth of a Holocaust, I'm just saying it's the Irish. Okay, all right. Irish, huh?

All right. There's just, there's like one Jewish guy in the background screaming numbers as they're trying to count, so they mess it up every time. 55, 41. One million people died, another one and a half to two million people who risked their lives and fled their homeland. And this had very little to do with potatoes. This is a cautionary tale, not an agricultural one. This is not a tragedy of circumstance, but a tragedy of the confluence of wealth inequality and the criminally absurd

pretense that market forces absent the guiding hand of a social conscience will yield anything more than blight. All right. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, without the phrase, yo,ititoit, please. I don't like to do that. Ham, okay. Ham stringing me at the outside. Let's see, when it comes to food, never trust the bridge. Good policy.

Good policy. Are you ready for the quiz? Let's do it. All right. So Thomas, a great demonstration of just how little we learn the central lesson of your essay here about how little this had to do with potato famines. My question is this, of all the diseases that potatoes can get, which is the worst. A, tater clots. Right? The other one, the next one is to be spud disorders.

Oh, see, pink guy. Oh, pink guy is really good. Or the tuberculosis. Oh, that's so good. So good. So good. tuberculosis is just a slam dunk. It's just a thumb or a meditator cloth.

It's just a thumb or a meditator cloth. It's just a thumb or a meditator cloth. It is tater cloths. I do a tuberculosis assuming that that was gonna get you, but no, you did your amazing homework. All right, Tom, what will be the topic of my next essay? Oh no. A, when my high school girlfriend,

Holocaust did me right before the death. Jesus Christ. B, Fible goes Holocaust. Or C, that time he's Holocaustust in his pants at the water. All right. All right. It's G. All right.

The pairing size, rude D, none of the above. Don't compare sizes. It's correct. All right, Tom, we learned about the Irish migrant workers. What was the worst paying gig job for Migrant? I read farmers. Oh no. A, short dash. I want to start that. That's so good. Yeah. Shrub hub. Oh, see. Sweatsy.

Or D, tuber. Oh, it's got to be short. Ash. Short ash is so good. I want to actually like we got to open up chordash It is sorry. It is Sweatsy I think you know that it is the format of the essay. I'm right Done you stumped him. You're the winner. All right. Let's go with a Noah essay next week So maybe we can get to the topic before the half next time. See, it's per-

Okay, probably not. Root. All right. Oh, for Tom Noah, Cecil Neely, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week, and by then Noah will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can hear Tom and Cecil

on cognitive dissonance. And you can hear Eli Noah and myself on God-Alpha movies. It's Gating Atheist, Skeptocrat, and D&D Monis. And if you're often shy around new people, but sometimes you're not, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash recitation.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with the Sun Social Media, or take a look at the show notes, and go to citationpod.com. Woo! And another reason I couldn't possibly drink the water that's all over the room, dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot I hate my stripe pajamas man. I'm a dude. Come on, man. Manly.

You know, he, we're friends and we joke around, but they're a lines man. They're a line. Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I was, I was, we're showing what he was going on. How about it? You want to go to the vegan place? You like so much?

You want to go there? I would feel better. Tom, thank you. Yes. It's our treat tonight, buddy. It's our treat. Yeah, let's go. What he was doing.

You guys didn't even, the point I was making, they're gone. Can you do the Irish voice again, Eli? You did tie to D-chut. I just wanna make clear what just happened. It was that, you know, I'm both, I'm, so it's a formula where like, I become a low status character all of a sudden after all your Eli

has been a low status character. And it's after all your e-line has been low status character. And it's just today, the demonstration of how that works conceptually. This is all being edited out right now. This is all has to stay in. It's pretty much out there. Ha ha!