Bob Seery: 2015

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Anti-colonial critiques of Irish Home Rulers in Westminister (1880-1882)

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Pre-Famine De-Industrialisation and the Rise of the Lumper

Critiques of government in Ireland since the Union weren't exclusive to Irish Repealers. On the "State of Ireland" debate in the House of Lords, (23rd March, 1846 - a few months after the first potato blight) Earl Grey, son of the Reform PM, Charles Grey, rose to give the following explosive volley. He was appointed Colonial Secretary by Russell in the same year and his initial philosophy at least was to accord the colonies as much self-government as possible as well as attempting to reform the tariff and taxation regimes in such a way as they worked in the interest of the colonies themselves as opposed to the mother country to which they were tied. He seems ultimately to have had a chequered record in this regard suppressing revolts in Ceylon, the West Indies, dismantling the New Zealand constitution and so on .. but on the face of it he certainly appears to have been an earnest reformer. Based at least on the evidence of the following :-

Quote:

The noble Earl opposite, in bringing forward on behalf of Her Majesty's Government the different measures that have been proposed with respect to Ireland, has disclosed to us a state of society which it is indeed awful to contemplate; a state of society in which there is no security for life or property; a state of society in which the usual wretchedness of the population has been so aggravated by the partial failure of the potato crop, that famine and pestilence must stalk through the land, unless those measures which Parliament has adopted to counteract those evils should fortunately arrest their progress.

This is the state of things described by Her Majesty's Government; and unhappily this is no accidental, no extraordinary, no unlooked-for calamity. It is but an aggravation, and perhaps no very great aggravation, of the habitual condition of Ireland. The evils of that unhappy country are not accidental, not temporary, but chronic and habitual. The state of Ireland is one which is notorious. We know the ordinary condition of that country to be one both of lawlessness and wretchedness. It is so described by every competent authority. There is not an intelligent foreigner coming to our shores, who turns his attention to the state of Ireland, but who bears back with him such a description. Ireland is the one weak place in the solid fabric of British power—Ireland is the one deep (I had almost said ineffaceable) blot upon the brightness of British honour. Ireland is our disgrace. It is the reproach, the standing disgrace, of this country, that Ireland remains in the condition she is. It is so regarded throughout the whole civilized world. To ourselves we may palliate it if we will, and disguise the truth; but we cannot conceal it from others.

There is not, as I have said, a foreigner—no matter whence he comes, be it from France, Russia, Germany, or America—there is no native of any foreign country different as their forms of government may be, who visits Ireland, and who on his return does not congratulate himself that he sees nothing comparable with the condition of that country at home. If such be the state of things, how then does it arise, and what is its cause? My Lords, it is only by misgovernment that such evils could have been produced: the mere fact that Ireland is in so deplorable and wretched a condition saves whole volumes of argument, and is of itself a complete and irrefutable proof of the misgovernment to which she has been subjected. Nor can we lay to our souls the "flattering unction" that this misgovernment was only of ancient date, and has not been our doing. It is not enough in our own excuse to say, "No wonder this state of things exists: the Government of Ireland before the Union was the most ingeniously bad that was ever contrived in the face of the world; it was the Government of a corrupt minority, sustained by the superior power of this great country in oppressing and tyrannizing over the great body of the nation; that such a system of government could not fail to leave behind it a train of fearful evils from which we are still suffering at the present day."

To a certain extent, no doubt, this is true. No man has a stronger opinion than I regarding the iniquitous system of misgovernment in Ireland prior to the Union. But the Union is not an event of yesterday. It is nearly half a century since that measure passed. For nearly fifty years, now, Ireland has been under the immediate control of the Imperial Parliament. Since it has been so, a whole generation has grown up, and is now passing away to be replaced by another; and in that time, I ask you, what impression has been made upon the evils of Ireland? It is true some good has been done. I gladly acknowledge that many useful measures have been adopted, which have, I hope, contributed in some respects to the improvement of Ireland; but none of these measures have gone to the root of the social disease to which Ireland is a prey; in the worst symptoms of which no amelioration whatever can be observed: the wretchedness and misery of the population have experienced no abatement.

Upon that point I can quote high authority. I find that the Commission presided over by a noble Earl, whom I do not now see in his place (the Earl of Devon), reported the year before last, that "improvement was indeed beginning to take place in agriculture; but there had been no corresponding advance in the condition and comforts of the labouring classes." By the Report of that Commission we are informed, that the agricultural labourers are still suffering the greatest privations and hardships, and still depend upon casual and precarious employment for their subsistence; that they are badly fed, badly clothed, badly housed, and badly paid for their labour; and the Commissioners conclude this part of their Report by saying— We cannot forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have generally exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country have ever endured. This is an authentic statement, and comes from a Commission appointed only the other day to inquire into the state of the people of Ireland.

It is a Report describing the state of things in that country before the failure of the potato crop, and the Commissioners tell you that the sufferings of the great mass of the people of that country are greater than those of the population of any other country in Europe. This is indeed a fearful statement, coming from such authority. But there is another symptom of the condition of Ireland, which seems to me even more alarming than the prevalence of distress—I mean the general alienation of the whole mass of the nation from the institutions under which they live, and the existence in their minds of a strong deep feeling of hostility to the form of government under which they are placed. This feeling, which is the worst feature in the case, seems to be rather gaining strength than to be diminishing. I am led to that opinion by what I heard two years ago fall from the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the House of Commons. I heard that right hon. Gentleman—and it was a statement which made a deep impression upon me—I heard the right hon. Gentleman, in answer to a speech made by a noble Friend of mine, distinctly admit that we had military occupation of Ireland, but that in no other sense could it be said to be governed; that it was occupied by troops, not governed like England. Such was the admission of the Secretary of State for the Home Department.

And now, my Lords, I ask you, is that a state of things which ought to continue? And I ask is not such a state of things, so clearly established by authorities so high and indisputable, a good ground for inferring that there is something wrong in the policy which has been hitherto pursued towards Ireland; and that some measures different in character, and more effectual than those we have been in the habit of trusting to, are necessary to meet the exigency?"

These are just selected extracts from a tirade that continued for what must have been a couple of hours in like vein.

For the full speech see -

STATE OF IRELAND. (Hansard, 23 March 1846)

Henry Grey, 3rd Earl Grey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Similar themes as touched upon by Earl Grey are explored by socialist UCD lecturer Kieran Allen in an article doubling as a lambast on political rivals the Worker's Party but the part which concerns us is the section I've highlighted in bold which draws attention to the pre-Union manipulation of the Irish economy by the imperial parliament in Westminster -

Quote:

The Workers Party’s attack on the Irish bourgeoisie is entirely a moral one. It provides no explanation as to why the Irish bourgeoisie might be so lazy nor why they “refused” to build a manufacturing base like every other capitalist class in Europe. We are left with the idea that they were lazy because they were Catholic. This explanation leaves Britain out of the history of Irish underdevelopment and is patently one-sided.
In fact the relationship with the British empire is one of the central factors explaining the underdevelopment of Ireland ....

Kieran Allen: Is southern Ireland a neo-colony? (1. Why is southern Ireland underdeveloped?)

As can be seen the vast bulk of the article is concerned with demonstrating how Britain "underdeveloped Ireland" beginning with the Wool Acts of the late 17th c. and the 'mercantilist' trade restricting policies of the 18th c. (limiting Irish exports to the colonies when they competed with British exporters) This was an economic grievance (though he doesn't mention it) which gave rise to Protestant ascendency-led "Colonial nationalism" under Grattan which demanded a fully autonomous Dublin Parliament.

This native revolutionary strain coalesced with the burgeoning United Irish movement and the whole was quashed in 1798 ushering in the Act of Union which he further attacks on at least four grounds for stagnating Irish development; (1) comparatively higher taxation via a disproportionate share of the accumulated war debt with Napoleonic France (2) the reduction of tariffs for imported goods from industrialising mainland Britain which eventually crippled the native textile sector (3) direct remittance of rental to absentee landlords and (4) the re-orientation of the Irish economy to service the consumption needs of a rapidly industrialising Britain ensuring that it remained at base a largely undifferentiated agricultural zone.

He concludes as follows:-

Quote:

Ireland’s underdevelopment was, thus, neither a natural state of affairs nor was it produced by the peculiar psychological weakness of its capitalist class. The problem arose from the relationship between Ireland and the British empire. The colonisation of Ireland by Britain led to the breaking down of many pre-capitalist tribal structures. The cash nexus, the market and petty commodity production were established quicker than they would have been had colonisation not occurred. But the strength of the British economy and the intervention of the British state on its behalf ensured that the Irish economy was shaped in British interests.
When Marx claimed that “every time Ireland was about to develop industrially, she was crushed and re-converted into a purely agricultural land”, he was not referring to the purely political ambitions of British politicians, although this was undoubtedly a factor. [26] Across the globe the British empire forced countries into a limited specialisation that served the needs of Britain’s industry. In that sense it became responsible for their backwardness and underdevelopment.

While overall its not the greatest article I've ever read, as a short summary of some of the economic problems faced by pre-famine Ireland specifically as a consequence of the Union it certainly serves its purpose. It may be added that the every day political consequences of being tied to the Union and being denied a domestic parliament were every bit as damaging; the nature of land tenure & the absence of tenant right, the proliferation of small-holdings were incessantly long-fingered; municipal reform proceeded at a snail's space; representation was grossly inadequate with Catholics only achieving the right to sit in Parliament in 1829; 40 shilling freeholders were disenfranchised wiping out probably 80% of the Irish electorate; the issue of enforced taxation to uphold a minority Anglican Church culminating in the Tithe War of the 30's; the continual frustrations of the Repeal
movement - all of these grievances led to much disillusionment and much hardship.

Emigration rose spectacularly during this period (1800-45) as did agrarian crime with varied combinations of Whiteboys; Ribbonmen, Rockites, Terry Alts etc .. the very disturbances of which initiated by the deteriorating conditions of the countryside (demanding as they did fair rent, free sale and compensation for improvements) all of which actually deterred potential capital investment.

But such was the political importance of the Wool Act (mentioned above by Allen) in the context of what later transpired that I've no option but to flesh out its ramifications in some detail at least.

There had been restrictions imposed on the export of Irish livestock earlier in the century but despite fears this transpired to be a once-off anomaly - for now - so the Wool Act was significant not so much on account of its direct economic impact (which ranges from 'negligible' to 'catastrophic' depending on who you read) but rather that it presaged the long-feared further meddling by the English Parliament in all aspects of the Irish economy.

Basically it entailed a stand-off between English investors, manufacturers & large landholders who had sectoral interests to protect, didn't want competition from exported Irish produce and had sufficient clout in the English Parliament to influence the passing of restrictive legislation via subsidy withdrawal or export tariffs. A nascent & promising glass industry in Ireland was demolished at birth after this fashion for instance but the Irish Protestant ascendency had strong lobbying powers itself at Westminster and so it wasn't all one way traffic.

Grievances came to a head in the early 1780's, when, under the influence of the colonial revolt in America (why not us too? haven't we the same grievances? ... etc), the Irish Volunteers, a largely Protestant militia, who had been mobilised as a defensive force to ward off a potential French invasion, instead allied themselves with 'free trade' radical members of the Dublin Whig party led by Henry Grattan and in effect staged a successful coup d'état - pressing home the advantage of a distracted imperial power fighting a dual war with France and Washington's armies to achieve their goals of economic self-governance, amelioration of some of the Penal Laws (an alliance had been earlier struck with the lobbying Catholic Committee to give the movement extra clout) and the elimination the notorious jobbery and corruption in the Irish executive.

This though was risky brinkmanship and the much feted suspension of Poyning's (the Act which subordinated the Dublin Parliament to Westminster) never became absolute with Pitt still controlling key appointments of the Dublin governing executive - essentially, in other words, the famed 'independent' "Grattan's Parliament" that had been won in 1782 - was little more than a mirage.

As soon as the trans-Atlantic colonial war was over Westminster quickly worked on re-consolidating its power ushering in the second phase of the struggle which this time was influenced by the far more vigorous and distinctively republican principles of revolutionary France. The separatist Protestant Dublin Whigs which wanted political autonomy but yet remain within the Empire (i.e. to retain the connection with the Crown) now dabbled with alliances with both reformist Catholics demanding full relief of the Penal Laws and Dublin and Belfast-based Protestant, Catholic and Presbyterian United Irishmen who, in the event of Westminster not granting the full package of statute reforms, threatened to rise in revolt - which of course they eventually did, were summarily crushed and their leaders scattered to the four corners.

But all of this emerged primarily with the economic grievances of the Protestant "Colonial Nationals" (i.e. the Ascendency) - with the continual interference by Westminster in imposing tariff and trade restrictions on what was largely their capital - it was only when in order to gain extra leverage in their dealings with the British government by momentarily allying with both Catholics lobbying for emancipation and Presbyterians seeking full civil and political privileges that the full extent of the revolutionary hive which the Dublin Parliament had become, became apparent, and so, the only expedient course was to shift the lot, dissolve it, reconstitute it - ship it lock, stock and barrel across the seas and under its nose where it could better monitor and control it - and so, amid record-breaking bribes and inducements Irish MP's voted their native parliament out of existence & were now dispatched overseas to represent their constituencies where their minority status could safely assure their quiescence.

Thus ended the saga which arguably commenced in force with the Wool Act for it inspired William Molyneaux's The Case of Ireland Being Bound by Acts of the English Parliament, (publ.1698) which was written during the debates on that legislation and though it did not prevent the Act being passed it became a touchstone document for later reformers of Grattan's generation who happily rehearsed its arguments ad infinitum (as indeed did a young Thomas Jefferson)

Quote:

Early in 1698, Molyneux published The Case of Ireland's being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated. This controversial[5] work—through application of historical and legal precedent—dealt with contentious constitutional issues that had emerged in the latter years of the seventeenth century as a result of attempts on the part of the English Parliament to pass laws that would suppress the Irish woolen trade. It also dealt with the disputed appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords. Molyneux's arguments reflected those made in an unpublished piece written by his father-in-law Sir William Domville, entitled A Disquisition Touching That Great Question Whether an Act of Parliament Made in England Shall Bind the Kingdom and People of Ireland Without Their Allowance and Acceptance of Such Act in the Kingdom of Ireland.[8]
Following a debate in the English House of Commons, it was resolved that Molyneux's publication was 'of dangerous consequence to the crown and people of England by denying the authority of the king and parliament of England to bind the kingdom and people of Ireland'.[9] Despite condemnation in England, Molyneux was not punished but his work was condemned as seditious and was ceremonially burned at Tyburn by the public hangman. His arguments remained topical in Ireland as constitutional issues arose throughout the eighteenth century, and formed part of Swift's argument in Drapier's Letters.[10] The tract also gained attention in the American colonies as they moved towards independence. Although The Case of Ireland, Stated was later associated with independence movements—both in Ireland and America—as one historian points out, 'Molyneux's constitutional arguments can easily be misinterpreted' and he was 'in no sense a separatist'

William_Molyneux

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...page&q&f=false

Grattan, Flood et al. had a labyrinthine knowledge of all acts and statutes pertaining to the Crown's connection and jurisdiction over Irish affairs - again, with the principle bone of contention being the restrictions on trade and industry - and Molyneaux was in effect their lodestar. The most widely cited contemporary indictment of these restrictions came from the pen of John Hely-Hutchison who anonymously published Commercial Restraints in 1779:-

Quote:

He continued to occupy a prominent place in parliament, where he advocated free trade, the relief of the Catholics from penal legislation, and the reform of parliament. He was one of the very earliest politicians to recognize the soundness of Adam Smith's views on trade; and he quoted from the Wealth of Nations, adopting some of its principles, in his Commercial Restraints of Ireland, published in 1779, which Lecky pronounces one of the best specimens of political literature produced in Ireland in the latter half of the 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_He...son_(statesman)

Quote:

Although this work was published anonymously, there never was any question as to who was its author. It was always known to be the production of Provost Hely Hutchinson, and its first appearance was greeted with two different sorts of reception. It was burned by the Common Hangman so effectually, that Mr. Flood said he would give a thousand pounds for a copy and that the libraries of all the three branches of the legislature could not produce a copy[108]—and at the same time it “earned Mr. Hely Hutchinson’s pardon from Irish patriotism for his subserviency to the Court and Lord Townshend.”[109] The book was the outcome of the stubborn inability of English rulers to interpret the face of this country; and the first sketch of the publication was the papers which the author contributed to Lord Lieutenant Buckinghamshire in 1779 as to the cause of the existing ruin here and as to its cure. The purport of the Letters was to exhibit, calmly and seriously,[Pg c] and as by a friend to both countries, the grievous oppressions which the greedy spirit of English trade inflicted on the commerce, industries, and manufactures of Ireland during the century and a quarter that extended from the Restoration of Charles II. to the rise of Grattan. The author draws all his statements from the Statute Books and Commons Journals of both kingdoms, while he does not fail to support his own conclusions and comments by State Papers and Statistical Returns that possess an authority equal to that of the Statutes. He lays the whole length and breadth of the position steadily and searchingly before the Viceroy’s eyes. He shows him that the then state of Ireland teemed with every circumstance of national poverty, while the country itself abounded in the conditions of national prosperity. Of productiveness there was no lack; but land produce was greatly reduced in value; wool had fallen one half, wheat one third, black cattle in the same proportion, and hides in a much greater. There were no buyers, tenants were not to be found, landlords lost one fourth of their rents, merchants could do no business, and within two years over twenty thousand manufacturers in this city were disemployed, beggared, and supported by alms. All this was after a period of fourscore years of profound internal peace—and the question was, what was the cause of it?
This is what the author sets himself to investigate in the Letters, and in regard of sweep of survey, historic retrospect, statistical quotation, and close economic comment, the investigation leaves little to be desired. The Provost is anxious, in the first place, to point out that it was not absentee rents, salaries, profits of offices, and pensions that caused the decline—and this forestalling admonition is no[Pg ci] more than what might be expected from a man who was such an insatiable trafficker in places, and salaries, and profits, and pensions. He admits that these things made the decline more rapid, but a “more radical” cause was to be assigned for a malady that arose out of the constitution itself. He maintains that Ireland was flourishing, prosperous, and wealthy under James and Charles I., and that after the Restoration it was one of the most improved and improving spots in Europe. This is a somewhat poetical view, especially when we remember how Strafford ruined the landowners and destroyed the wool trade; but wretched as was the condition of the people under the Stuarts, it may have been less unendurable than the condition under “a succession of five excellent sovereigns.” In truth, talking about the perpetually developed prosperity of the Irish people under the several successions of English misrule is the very irony of pharisaism, although the recital is a stereotyped phrase of English officials from the Tudor employés down to those of our own days,[110] none of whom ever fail to find “the strings of the Irish harp all in tune.”[Pg cii] In some periods the distress may have been more intense than in others, and in all periods there were not wanting instances of individual aggrandisement—but the general[Pg ciii] wretchedness remained fast fixed. England has been a constant source of woe to Ireland, and suffering is the badge of all our tribe. In any strict assize Hutchinson would be laughed out of Court for essaying to plead the wealth and prosperity of Ireland directly after the devastations of the Carews and Mountjoys, after the Desmond and Ulster confiscations and evictions, and after the Cromwellian atrocities. Hutchinson knew quite well what the condition of the people was all through; but it suited him, rhetorically, to cut out a corner of the picture and to colour that corner very highly. Graziers used to make a good thing of their cattle and of their wool, and economic returns of their exports showed pleasant balance sheets; but graziers were not the Irish people any more than Manchester is England now. In fact, they were chiefly English landowners here, and the extent of their exports is only the measure of the misery which they left unpitied and unrelieved. This, however, was not the philosophy which Hutchinson wanted to preach; and he was far too clear-headed a man to make a mistake as to what he wanted to say. He accordingly lays hold on the figures that set off his argument, and out of fancy premises he draws a solid conclusion which in no sense needed such controvertible data. What was certain was that Ireland possessed the conditions of prosperity, and that it teemed with actual poverty. The question was, what caused this contradiction? The answer was, England caused it; and this is the answer which Hutchinson plainly and nakedly gives. In all the rest of his book—i.e. from Letter III. to the close—he sustains this thesis with a directness that cannot be gainsayed or resisted. Having related the efforts[Pg civ] of Strafford—one of the most malignant enemies that Ireland ever encountered—to crush the wool trade here in the time of Charles I., Hutchinson comes to the acts of the English under Charles II. and William III.

The Commercial Restraints Of Ireland, by John Hely Hutchinson—A Project Gutenberg eBook

This is why the question of de-industrialising is continually brought up (or should be!) in the context of famine studies as the burden of agrarian sub-division wasn't being soaked up by cottage industries (textiles) or a tertiary processing sector. This weakness was possible to over-ride up until 1815 when buoyant grain prices caused by the Napoleonic War sustained a strong Irish agricultural sector but once the prices drop amid constant rental prices, rise of population in the cottier, conacre and labouring classes, and the absence of tenant security, you now have the conditions for a "perfect storm" - already in 1820.

One of the focuses among famine specialists should be upon the failures of the administration to address the issue of the pressing land problem in the decades preceding the famine bearing in mind that an increasing proportion of the population were dependent on a solitary food item which was given to successive (non-blight related) failures - thus the (increasing) vulnerability of the small-holding farmers and their actual (well-documented) precarious hold on life even before phytophtora infestans arrived. The potato, though it had a good reputation as a solid reliable food source was not indestructible - Peel himself oversaw the effects of a partial failure in the West in 1816-17 followed by another far more serious in 1822; all of which should have prompted action on land reform years before the Devon Commission inquiry of 1844.

'Industrialisation' or simply 'development', however you define them (which is in itself part of the problem as ideological differences as to what this entails announce themselves immediately) is a complex multi-variable issue which in Ireland's case clearly doesn't hinge merely on the possession of coal and iron deposits - its related to creating the conditions for capital investment, the development of a tertiary processing sector, nurturing of domestic cottage industries and overall, primarily with finding satisfactory employment for the huge swathes of landless labourers and struggling cottier households who happened to starve each year whether there was a famine or not - while yet balancing the pressing indigenous claims of tenant right, i.e. finding a solution which didn't entail forced emigration schemes, mass evictions or punitive workhouse corrective "regimes", accentuated in the Irish case by long-standing garbled notions of native indolence.

The notorious "Whiteboy Problem" of the post-Union decades and the successive Coercion Acts which it spawned are a by-product of deteriorating rural conditions themselves directly related to monopolistic industrial policies carried out throughout the 18th century, as laboriously illustrated by Hely-Hutchinson and the combat of which underpinned the life's work of Protestant Patriots such as Grattan and Flood.

Essentially, the agrarian agitation groups can be likened to rural trade unions which enforced the Irish peasantry's conception of land use rights over and above that of the law of the Crown which was upheld by the local magistrate; himself often a landlord. Some avoid the term, but peasantry may be defined as holders of tenancies or (sub-tenancies) of 30 acres or less and its within this class where you'll find the ringleaders and recruits of the 'Whiteboy' movements. The terms themselves are a little misleading as both 'Whiteboyism' and 'Ribbonism' are used by the policing authorities as generic labels attached to the committal of all 'agrarian outrages' from the turn of the 18th century. Properly speaking, Whiteboyism should refer specifically to outbreaks of rural unrest focused on tenant grievances in the midlands and Munster in 1761-62 and from 1765 (sporadically) up until 1798, whereas Ribbonism evolved from the (mainly) Catholic, agrarian-based Defenderism which sprang up as a product of sectarian clashes in Armagh (from 1785-1798).

While Whiteboyism is fine as a generic to describe all agrarian unrest from 1800-1850, "Ribbonism" is unsatisfactory as it evolved from its original agrarian sectarian context to become an urban-based artisan trade unionist type movement often carrying within its tow disaffected former United Irish republicans who kept a respectable (and respectful) distance from the Catholic Emancipation type politics of the O' Connelite movement of the 1815-183 era. Ribbonism may be described then as more nationally aware politically than the traditional agrarian movements and diverged from O' Connellism (in its local objectives but not nationally as regards Repeal). As said, both Ribbonism and Whiteboyism were now used almost interchangeably by the authorities to describe all forms of rural unrest.

Now as to the rural agitation in the pre-famine period (1800-45) each outbreak had its own distinctive goals, characteristics and geographical location but ultimately all centred on one or other of the perennial land grievances; land-jobbing (when an evicted family's plot was settled by 'outsiders'), rack-renting (when the landlord, middleman, or over-tenant raised the rent), simple eviction, non-compensation for improvements or payment of tithes to the Anglican Church. The Threshers (1806-7) emerged in Leitrim, Longford, Mayo and Sligo. The Shanavests and Caravats (1809-11) in Tipperary, Limerick, Kilkenny and Waterford.

The Carders (1813-16) all over the Midlands and Munster and what were termed 'the Ribbonmen' in Connaught and Westmeath (1819-20). The Rockites (1819-23) were exclusive to Munster and the Midlands, the Whitefeet (1830-34) to Kilkenny and Queen's County (in the so-called Tithe War) and the Terry Alts during the same period (1830-34)encompassed Clare, Tipperary, King's County, Westmeath and Limerick only to revive again in 1836 and stay active till at least 1848. Finally, we had the Molly Maguire outbreaks in 1844-47 which centred around Leitrim, Longford and Roscommon - added to which there were perhaps dozens of localised struggles which were too small or sporadic to warrant any label at all other than that of a general outbreak of 'Whiteboyism'.

For each of these movements anywhere between a dozen and a few hundred men could be mobilised for a nightly operation which was nakedly terroristic in intent - cattle could be 'houghed' (i.e. have their tendons severed), horses have their ears chopped, dogs hung etc.. but mainly the intent was to instil terror in the victim to reverse whatever decision that so aggrieved the Whiteboys (rack-renting, jobbing, tithes, evictions etc). It was a secret oath bound association which drew wide support from the surrounding peasantry using rituals and dress-codes which corresponded to many key events in Gaelic cultural consciousness; the straw attire of the May wren-boys were used and names like Queen Sibh evoked. O' Connell and the Repeal movement consistently denounced all such actions as did the Catholic Church but despite this leaders and suspected members were looked after and protected by the wider community - for example, if on conviction someone was transported or hung their family would be cared for via a pooled fund. In one instance, The Poor Inquiry Commissioners (1834) once asked a Tipperary peasant what feelings he would have for the family of a man hanged for 'beating a man to death' to which he replied;

Quote:

"Under such circumstances, his wife and family would be regarded; and why not? I would take the bit out of my wife's or children's mouth before I would see his, the poor things, want it; because didn't he lose his life for the good of the people, and die in the cause?"

Obviously, there are other things to touch on here as to why particularly these "outrages" escalated to the extent they did in the period 1815-45. The principle reason was the downward pressure exerted on the bottom rung inhabitants of the pyramidal land structure; i.e. those with holding of 1-30 acres (but especially the 1-15 acre category).

First, the post-Napoleonic collapse in grain prices (some 30%) which was the constant rent currency of the small-holders and which wasn't ameliorated by corresponding reductions by landlords, middlemen or over-tenants.

Secondly, the perceived need by large farmers (30 acres plus) to switch from a deteriorating grain market to a more buoyant sector of pig, poultry and cattle export taking advantage of newly introduced steam shipping which kept livestock in far better condition after the cross-channel journey - which entailed abandoning tillage (labour intensive) for pasture. This also meant estate clearances for the wide open spaces required and its at this point (c. 1820 onwards) that we see a significant upsurge both in emigration and evictions.

Third, the absence of any direct government intervention in the escalating problems centred around the enhanced premium required to pay for ever smaller allotments of land. A large under-tenant or middle-man may have the lease of 5,000 acres; sub-let the lot to a hundred tenants at a profitable price who would all be classed as large farmers (non-peasantry) and these farmers in turn would sub-let to a subsidiary strata of peasants (again at a net profit) and so on down the line until you have a hundred thousand desperate souls renting conacre (quarter of an acre) at a price multiple times the land's actual valuation. The only thing on earth that could grow on such a small patch of land and sustain a family of five was the potato - answering as it did all the base nutritional requirements.

Finally, and what possibly constitutes the greatest scandal, sporadic potato failures which were always a feature of rural life initiated a switch to the more reliable "lumper" variety after the 1822 partial famine; a large watery spud resistant to inclement weather and formerly used as pig feed - this is merely an index of desperation and fear of actual starvation in my view.

There were actually dozens of potatoes varieties each with their own characteristics and the fluctuating fortunes of these from the 17th c. onwards tells its own story - particularly the scandal of eventual dependence on the 'Lumper' (the cheapest and nutritionally worst of the lot), increasingly seen from 1820 onwards among the "lower orders". The best source for the role of the potato is Austin Bourke's "The Visitation of God: The Potato and the Great Irish Famine" which is a compilation of Bourke's essays on the subject over a long career by Cormac O' Grada.

Bourke identifies four main varieties which predominated in different periods; (1) the 'Black' from around 1700 which was immediately regarded as a superior variety and remained in wide usage for over a hundred years. Its main advantage over the varieties it supplanted was that it kept longer which was of huge importance when we consider the planting cycle. Seeds would be sown in April/May and about a sixth of the crop pulled up in early August with "the people's crop" harvested in October. This meant potatoes had to be kept for 6-8 months as the principle source of food; if it was perishable, as many varieties were, the 'hungry months' could begin as early as March/April. In the decades before the famine June/July were always the periods of greatest distress.

Formerly, the practice had been to keep the potatoes in the ground and pull them out as required but after the Great Frost of 1741 which destroyed much of the crop by rendering them irretrievable the practise had been to keep them in storage in specially dug pits or mounted inside the cabins themselves. During this period the potato had yet to become the main staple (oatmeal still predominated) but by about 1770 the potato was firmly established as the main food source gaining increasing importance as each decade went by. (2) Next came the "Apple", 'the aristocrat among potatoes', which flourished from about 1750, likewise on account of its staying power, taste, nutritional qualities and high yield; "a richly flavoured mealy potato - a little loaf in fact", as one observer called it.

The yield of the Apple degenerated over time rendering it uneconomical for small-holders but it retained its other appealing qualities which meant it increasingly became the reserve of the well to do. (3) The "Cup" (also known as the 'Minion') next came to the fore from about 1800 to 1820 and though it didn't have the longevity of either the Black or the Apple, "according to the poor folk, it stayed longer in the belly". (4) Finally, came the reign of the notorious 'Lumper' described early on by the agriculturalist Dutton (1808) as;

Quote:

"much used, as they are more productive with a little manure than any other kind, but they are a wretched kind for any human creature; even pigs, I am informed, will not eat them if they can get any other kind".

Two lines of a satire after the collapse of grain prices after "Bonie went down" and dating from 1815 went as follows;

Quote:

"Our gentry who fed upon turtle and wine, M

Quote:

ust now on wet Lumpers and salt herrings dine".

This was of course an exaggeration as the class of farmer now forced to eat the Lumper were the peasantry and especially the small cottier and conacre holders (i.e. the vast bulk of the population who now depended almost exclusively on the potato - that is to say, some four and a half million). And this is directly related to the pressures on the land outlined above in the discussion of the Whiteboys and related to the struggle to squeeze out every drop of productivity that could be had from ever-decreasing land allotments and poorer quality soils as when hillsides and mountains were now being desperately colonised;

Quote:

A species of potato called the Lumper has been brought into general cultivation, on account of its great productiveness, and the facility with which it can be raised from an inferior soil and with a comparatively small portion of manure. The root, at its first introduction, was scarcely considered food enough for swine; it neither possesses the farinaceous qualities of the better varieties of the plant, nor is it as palatable as any other, being wet and tasteless, and, in point of substantial nutriment, little better, as an article of human food, than a Swedish turnip.

from R.McKay, An Anthology of the Potato (Dublin, 1961), pg.24.

Davidson in "History of Potato Varieties" tells us that;

Quote:

"by the year 1838 the cultivation of Lumpers was universal in Ireland"

While the contemporary Drummond Report observed;

Quote:

"in many counties of Leinster, and throughout the provinces of Munster and Connaught, the Lumper now constitutes the principal food of the labouring peasantry".

The differential quality can be also be observed in the market price quoted per cwt in Dublin in June 1845 (before the blight) -

Apples - 2s 6d - 3s
Cups - 1s 10d - 2s 2d
Lumpers - 1s 4d - 1s 6d

Bourke wrote;

Quote:

"The Lumper went down most fatally and heavily of all varieties in the first blight attacks of 1845-46".

Simple words, bearing a loaded charge within.

Zimbabwe's land redistribution - decoupling from the IFI's.

It's impossible to interpret what has occurred in Zimbabwe without looking at the whole conflagration as the combined actions of opposing aggregates of ethnically aligned groups (Shona, Ndebele & White Rhodesians) which takes us well beyond the inference that a solitary individual, even one as powerful as Mugabe, could have consistently shaped policy in any deeply pre-meditative fashion.

Post-independence, there has only been one major issue in Zimbabwe for both the Ndebele (black minority Russian-backed ZAPU fighters in the Bush War) and the Shona (black majority Chinese-backed ZANU fighters) - and that was to receive compensation and/or land entitlements pursuant to the agreements laid down under the Lancaster provisions at independence.

The "willing-seller-willing buyer" clause was always considered a momentary stopgap to placate reluctant white commercial farmers, 4,500 of whom still controlled 70% of the country's most productive arable land while six million blacks eked out an increasingly precarious living, surviving on an average of 3 hectares a piece. Conditions in these former Tribal Trusts Lands, the most useless soils in the country, and into which the indigenous population were trundled at gun-point, first by Rhodes opportunistic brigands and secondarily in the 1920's by the apartheid regime, had been the subject of several concerned WHO and FAO reports during the 80's, all of which pointed to the need for mobilisation on land reform, lest the burning fuse in the countryside should find a suitably volatile powder-keg.

Already, in 1982 the Ndebele faction (ZAPU) of the post-independence leadership made a de facto split with ZANU over agrarian outrages committed on white farmers which brought a temporary alliance of sorts by Mugabe with "Old Rhodesia" as the Gukuruhundi campaign to expel these "terrorists" (essentially disaffected land-hungry Ndebele) was mobilised in the Matebeland and the Midlands. The fall-out of this well documented ruthless suppression (a vigorous shop-clearing exercise fully supported at the time by a broad spectrum of white Rhodesians) is interesting to reflect on - there was none.

Mugabe, as he upheld 'the rights of property' in defence of minority white commercial rule was shortly received into the Queen's honours list and regularly appeared on the BBC passing learned commentary on sundry African-related issues (Mugabe accumulated seven degrees most of which came from spending ten years in Smith's jails during the independence struggle). What's more, he fully subscribed to the IMF/World Bank led neo-liberal "structural adjustment' programmes and enacted placatory policies to ensure white Rhodesians received a goodly portion of high-ranking advisory government positions, receiving in this instance the advice of Samora Machel, the neighbouring Mozambique president who confessed to Mugabe that "turfing out white expertise" from key sectors was a prodigious mistake.

So Mugabe waited patiently and played ball with the British Government and the international institutions for the ten year expiration date on the Lancaster House provisions which would insure him against the burgeoning expectations of his land-hungry Shona rural base, rolling out in the meantime extensive health and literacy programmes. The usual raft of neoliberal "re-trenchment" policies however exerted a squeeze on all sectors birthing a new political party (Movement for Democratic Change) under the leadership of trade unionist Morgan Tsvingarai (a Ndebele who now became head of a de facto new ZAPU party) who disingenuously attributed the economic downturn to specific policies pursued by the ZANU leadership - they weren't, they were macro-economic measures dictated to ZANU by the IMF/World Bank.

After the Fast-Track Land Reform initiative was rolled out (c.1992) by ZANU, the MDC were feted in the internationalist press as a type of spontaneous grass-roots indigenous black Zimbabwean opposition party pining for democracy with widespread public support which simply opposed the increasingly "dictatorial policies of Mugabe" when in actual fact it was being bank-rolled and directed behind the scenes by key white Rhodesians themselves fronting for a white commercial sector panicking at the prospect of compulsory purchase - the Gukuruhundi alliance had split and reversed. Now the War Veteran's Association (WVA) took matters into their own hands forcibly settling themselves on farms just as Mugabe had warned a Donor's Conference in Harare they would do - if the terms and condition of Lancaster were not met.

When Mugabe, tired of jumping through hoops to satisfy the brood of vampires collated in the IFI's and harried by MDC and the Commercial Farmworker's Union (CFU), finally gave the green-light to land seizures which were at any rate almost impossible to reign in without destroying for all time his core Shona rural support base in the deteriorating former Tribal Trust territories - he transmogrified almost overnight from "our kind of guy" (i.e. a neo-colonial Mobuto clone) into a universally reviled African despot (shunted on by a shameless internationalist press incapable of contextualising the whole sorry affair) - who simply reduced the whole complex saga of the imbalances of colonial era plundering and inter-ethnic strife into a simplistic "tin-pot dictator" narrative.

All of the suffering which the Zimbabwean people have endured could have been easily avoided had the Lancaster stipulations being met and land reform was somehow funded incrementally - but the gathered collective of IMF mandarins and foreign deputies from the US, Britain etc .. chose to ignore Mugabe and his warnings that the WVA "would settle themselves" if the necessary funds were not forthcoming; and so an unavoidable racial melting pot has been set alight un-necessarily creating at its worst peaks unprecedented inflation, massive cholera outbreaks and a refugee crisis spilling over the borders into South Africa - but the good news is that the worst of it is over - and while there has been some eye-brow raising large allotments among party cadres (inevitably) the fundamental goals of provisioning realistic and socially just land opportunities for a previously ignored colonially displaced indigenous population has been successfully met - and, by all informed accounts they seem now to be at last thriving.

Good luck to them.

"Land redistribution (the so-called Third Chimurenga) has only benefitted Mugabe and his cronies. One privileged elite has merely replaced another .. "

This is the most widely peddled myth about Zimbabwean land reform and completely mischaracterises what has actually happened in the country. You can call them "land grabs" if you want and there's been no shortage of brutality deployed but over a quarter of a million new farming households have been created in the prime agricultural regions amounting to the re-location of over a million people. The vast bulk of them are the land-poor drawn from the communal areas; re: former Tribal Trusts Lands where farming conditions have been long deteriorating - and what's probably more pertinent, resentments festering. This is quite simply classic land redistribution, and on an epic scale.

The widespread perception among indigenous blacks (irrespective of what spin on the matter is being put forward by the international press) is that the land is theirs by birth-right, that it was stolen from their ancestors at gunpoint and that they themselves are the descendants of the original victims of this policy. You and I may disagree over this construction and you may point to what use the land was put once forcibly appropriated and how this benefitted "Rhodesia" as a whole, but the reality is that argument has never washed with them as by and large they've seen very little of the wealth that has been created in the country - the "trickle-down effect" has been illusory; if it wasn't you wouldn't have had an agrarian revolution on the scale of what has occurred in the first place. They didn't rise up because Mugabe clicked his fingers and de-coupled from the IFI system, they rose up because their conditions were intolerable; as was forewarned (and ignored) - "they will re-settle themselves".

At independence, Zimbabwe inherited grossly unequal, skewered patterns of land ownership and the only thought since that day among the restless and impoverished in the degraded communal areas has been how and when they are to receive "back" the lands of their ancestors. This isn't my construction or Mugabe's or ZANU's or anyone else's - this is their construction of their history - and via the War Veteran's Association - and the political manoeuvrings of ZANU they have succeeded in converting their wishes into reality; while the agonised death throes of the creaking economy are the paroxysms of dis-engagement from an outmoded feudalism reminiscent of "Roots" or Tsarist Russia. The real wealth of Zimbabwe lies in its land and that wealth has been monopolised by a tiny proportion - its 4,500 mainly white commercial farmers and the associated business networks caught up in the chain of supply and demand. This whole commerce has been up-ended - hence the hyper-inflation, shortages, plummeting GDP and refugee-ism.

Such is the epic scale of this transformation that the whole economy of necessity has to be re-orientated to accommodate the sheer bulk of beneficiaries and the different farming practices being introduced while the so-called "Fast-Track Initiative" is here to stay irrespective of SADC court rulings to the contrary. The large-scale commercial farming sector has been almost completely dismantled and in its place stands an entirely new agricultural landscape based on non-subsistence small-scale market farming. While the West whines about 'Mugabe the dictator' Zimbabwe's government with far more sober heads are actually attempting to micro and macro-manage all the complexities associated with this epic transition - as I say, I wish them luck.

'No Man's Land': The Limbo Years of Irish Asylum-Seekers

When it comes to immigration the UK at least has the advantage of the long-standing presence of ethnic minorities so past mistakes in integration policy (if there ever was such a thing) can at least be built upon and addressed. Ireland, on the other hand, was so insular that the first time I ever laid eyes on a black man was in the Luton markets in the 70's as a kid.

Along with our 'boom' in the early 90's which made us an attractive place to "locate", there was a loophole in the Good Friday Agreement pertaining to the nationality entitlements of any child born in the Republic, giving rise to a rapid influx of asylum applicants, mainly from West Africa. Any refugee who gave birth in the Republic could automatically claim residency status on account of the citizenship rights of their child thus circumventing the Geneva conventions.

The early response was predictable and 'illegal immigrants' (which they weren't) were pilloried in the press for exploiting our lenient immigration laws while the far right painted hysterical doomsday scenarios of Irish culture and identity being submerged, our exchequer being exhausted through the misplaced good-will of our 'bleeding heart' pinko liberals, as well as the usual rabble-baiting hype over international criminal gangs setting up base here. While test cases trundled their way slowly through the European Courts vis-à-vis the GFA loophole (which the government was anxious to close down) the Office of Refugee Applications Commission (ORAC) was tightened up and the asylum-process "rationalised" to ensure as narrow a filter as possible.

Michael McDowell, an anti-immigration conservative from the Progressive Democrats (a full-throttled neo-liberal party), as Minister of Justice, appointed his own man on the three member adjudicating panel of the ORAC which led both to a spike in deportations and the slowing down of asylum processing as claims were now attempted to be assessed according to far stricter criteria which couldn't in fact ever be definitively established.

The "joke" even went around that prior to this PD-inspired money-saving 'rationalisation', ORAC officers would check the bona fides of asylum claimants under Geneva by browsing the internet CIA country factfile! - You'd think the keystone cops, through their incompetence, had been unwittingly diluting the Irish gene pool, starving our exchequer by doling out "fantastic sums" on international 'spongers' via child support and rent allowance and ultimately permitting the Irish nation to be submerged in an exploitative, multicultural invasive sea - and all this when we had record budget surpluses, 10% annual growth, 2.5 cars a piece and owned half the Bulgarian property market!

A woman I'd known all my life turned to me once and nodding towards "one of them" (an African woman in a supermarket with her two kids) told me that "we" (the Irish) had "worked so hard" it would be a shame to have to give it all away (to them) - a mixture of unadulterated greed, ignorance and an astonishing lack of empathy. Thankfully, we could cite the famine and mass emigration from our shores historically, how the Irish were allowed settle and thrive all over the world and how they eventually grew to contribute to all these host countries, crucially, once given the chance to do so - an argument at once irrefutable and incapable of shallow rejoinder which at least took some wind out of the sails of the Fortress Ireland Camp.

Now that we've had our bust and the illusion that markets grow interminably has been shattered (nicely deregulated banking sector PD's!) there's been something of a recoil - many Irish who wouldn't otherwise have experienced it now know first-hand what's it like to actually struggle to get by on a pittance, are forced into considering emigration themselves and with 14% unemployment are surviving on government hand-outs; and all, largely through no fault of their own - victims of economic circumstance, just like the individual Africans who have been coming to our shores for assistance.

There is also the inevitable feedback loop of Empire to be considered where former colonial powers who have 'made themselves at home' in over half the globe historically, experience either by design or otherwise, a strong migratory reflux; the French of course, and in the British case it is a process further facilitated by Commonwealth ties. The one thing that the Irish government actually did right (when they're not making it difficult to 'get in' in the first place that is) was take advantage of the examples of how "integration" should not be pursued; and the ghettoization 'models' of Britain and France were foremost in their minds here.

But we had a different process insofar as the direct locating of immigrants (who were in the main refugees & asylum-seekers under Geneva & 'loophole' applicants under the GFA ruling) was under government control. Unlike France and Britain (in the early days of immigration from the former colonies at least) where the influx was that of economic migrants with bona fide working visas or having genuine citizenship claims where they settled themselves into their own communities - inevitably where previous ethnic minorities had taken root and amidst low-cost housing - the Irish government instead had an opportunity to actually control the level of dispersal ensuring there was no concentrated 'pockets of poverty'.

In practice though, many areas have become 'overly-concentrated' (Blanchardstown, Clondalkin, Tallaght) while the situating of hostels for asylum-seekers is a perennial political hot potato for local TD's and councillors - the usual shower of NIMBY's objecting to such 'foreign implantations' as though such would inevitably 'diminish the neighbourhood'. The Irish obsession with 'property prices' too - the unwritten bottom-line for many of these location decisions.

One of our local councillors recently tried to highlight the conditions in one these hostels, the weekly pay allowance (19 euro) and the length of time for applications to be processed but was shot down in a hurry by a facebook avalanche of begrudgers who wanted our own homeless problem to be sorted out before we start worrying about "foreigners" who at least have a roof over their head. Actually, under Geneva, they are "our own", insofar as they are our responsibility and are in effect for the most part transitioning to citizenship and are getting no more or less than they're entitled to under international law.

The other point is that instead of having them forced to sit about twiddling their thumbs waiting for the interminable bureaucracy of ORAC to do its job they could be allowed take up voluntary work -even manning soup kitchens or hostels for the Irish homeless. I know several families in this position who have been waiting up to eight or nine years for their applications to be processed; they've watched their kids go through primary and secondary and even up to university level while they're stagnating in limbo not knowing whether they'll ever be entitled to stay in the country; its pretty absurd.

As always, the bottom line is funding and resources not it seems the substantive case of their being entitled to refugee status (which in many cases Irish authorities have no way of proving). Once an asylum-seeker has a positive review on their case they're entitled to benefits (rent allowance, child support, a weekly cheque) but they're also entitled to work and pay taxes. So the thinking seems to be that if they're allowed leap the first hurdle they will automatically become "a drain" particularly if their language skills, job experience and qualifications are not up to European norms.

There are "integration programmes" available which are part-funded by the government which do offer basic language, computer, hairstyling, cookery courses and so on .. but despite this I've known asylum-seekers who have done all these top-up training programmes for years and still have had no progress in their applications ... yes, up to ten years.

Effectively the best years of their lives as the bulk arrived in their twenties -

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/76034

I was there at St. Patrick's that day and the biggest crowds weren't fellow refugees or asylum-seeker support groups but a right-wing anti-immigration platform which cobbled together protestors from the adjoining working-class flats (some still in their pyjamas/others horsing back tins of cider) bearing banners that read "asylum-seekers out" and "Ireland for the Irish"!

Fall of the Ancien Regime - From Spinoza to the Bolsheviks

It was the fiery sword of the Enlightenment which slashed to ribbons the pretensions of the ancien regime to hold sway over all our lives, tearing apart the multi-millennial stranglehold of hereditary privilege and monarchical right. Different authors will emphasise the varying importance of
individual thinkers and regions; for example the relative impact of the Scottish Enlightenment over the British or the Dutch, or even the Italian - which produced some innovative thinking in regards to jurisprudence and law reform.

Roy Porter for example emphasises the early British contribution (Hume, Locke) while Jonathan Israel prioritises the relative freedom of the press and the open circulation of ideas in the Dutch Republic which created a conducive (though far from ideal) milieu for the spread of Enlightenment ideas, particularly Spinoza's - a thinker he incidentally regards as the cornerstone of the Radical Enlightenment as his republicanism ultimately drew from a monistic philosophy which repudiated all biblical authority and was moreover regarded as logically irrefutable by many even of his fiercest critics.

Most modern historians though, irrespective of their preferences for pin-pointing the ultimate regional origins of Enlightenment thought would regard the French philosophes of the mid to late 18th century (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d' Holbach, Condorcet etc.) as the crowning point and locus of most intense engagement of 'the movement'.

As to what "they believed" it was more a case of what should we be required to believe; scepticism towards established "truths" was encouraged (particularly of religious claims), empirical evidence-based research was promoted not just in the domain of the hard sciences but in trying to understand social and political structures - the Scottish Enlightenment in particular (Kames) is associated with the birth of anthropological-type inquiries with various progressive models of the growth of civilisations (so-called 'stage-ism') which was picked up and developed by Rousseau (drawing on critiques of Hobbes and influenced by Lockean contract theory) which became very influential in France and helped stir revolutionary discontent.

A type of progressive relativism was the natural by-product of questioning the justifying narratives of the established order (the ancien regime) which, broadly speaking, and usually in tandem with Church authority, suppressed calls for liberal, democratic reforms (press freedom, wider franchise etc.). So in France, Voltaire's deism led him to sympathises with oppressed Protestants while on similar grounds Raynal's Philosophical History of the West Indies berated the assumptions of European colonial powers to possess any kind of infallible template for correct or responsible governance & naturally critiqued slavery and exploitative economic relations built on such.

More than anything else the same confidence in the powers of the individual reasoning mind to discover new "truths" and displace old ones built on superstition, prejudice, monarchical "divine right" or aristocratic 'privilege' was to turn the microscope of inquiry towards inherited systems of governance and propose novel, more equitable solutions for the management of human affairs; so in America the egalitarian discourse of Paine and the intense engagement with theories of republican governance that we witness in the Federalist papers, not to mention France where the Revolution spurred on in the main by the distillation of all this type of thought announced itself must completely and irrevocably.

In terms of an earth-shattering relevance as viewed from the perspective of contemporaries clearly the French Revolution was both seminal and epoch-breaking.

For Wordsworth;

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--

While for Goethe after the battle of Valmy no superlatives could satisfy;

"From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say that you were present at its birth."

The entire world was caught up in the drama of what was happening in France; arguably the most powerful and influential nation on earth. It was one thing for the Thirteen Colonies to revolt from a sliver of land on the eastern seaboard of a yet to be explored New World but to see revolution spring up from within Europe's continental powerhouse was a different matter entirely - this had ramifications for the entire planet and every monarchy in the Old World shuddered in its acknowledgement.

As de Tocqueville later observed America (and the Russia with whom he prophetically compared it) was principally about 'potentiality' at this point - which is not to say that Paine's anti-monarchical, republican and egalitarian framing of the debate, Washington's Cincinnatus-like laying down of arms, the Declaration, Federalist Papers or US Constitution were unimportant; they clearly played an incendiary role - but rather, that the ideas of radical Enlightenment (Lockean social contract, Spinoza's monism, Rousseau's discourse and the rationalistic levelling principles of the philosophes) were finally filtered down, aired and broadcast while the "crowd", the "mob" or "the people", palpably took control of world-historical events, arguably for the first time in history, sending shockwaves everywhere in the process, nowhere more so than Haiti whose slave population, in one fell swoop, rose up in revolt to claim their "Rights of Man" effectively banishing that institution forevermore as a viable economic concern.

Via frantic Parisian printing presses the genie was thoroughly out of the bottle; "the people" had spoken and they haven't stopped gabbering since. What could possibly be more revolutionary? As W.B. Yeats once put it (though in a different context); "All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born".
Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit was an attempt to address the profundity of what had occurred in philosophical terms, polished off just as Napoleon's cannonballs were pounding the walls of Prussian Jena. In his journal he wrote;

"I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . ."

Note the language; all local or nationalist sentiment (which scarcely existed at this time as a motor agency compelling human events) is here suppressed in favour of the obeisance to this simple revolutionary ideal; the "Rights of Man" - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - because the French Revolution, principally in order to protect itself, presumed to make its ideals universally valid, thereby nurturing domestic discontent everywhere, automatically (especially after the Flight from Varennes) setting itself against the traditional conservative forces of the ancien regime.

As we know, the somewhat abortive Napoleonic creature it became, was quashed finally with the Congress of Vienna while Metternich and Castlereagh re-aligned the cosmos in tune with the demands of Old Monarchy; a "forest of bayonets" was installed, a Pan-European spy network set in place while Mazzinni and fellow revolutionaries plotted relentlessly to retrieve promised liberal and democratic reforms. Such was the post-revolutionary atmosphere of false dawn in which Marx re-wrote Hegel, turned the master on his head and converted his dialectic of the spirit into a fable of class antagonisms.

And how could this be surprising given the conservative backlash, the glacial pace of reforms, the ubiquitous arms of state suppression and the crushing inequalities exposed by rapid industrialisation? Marx being the last great Enlightenment thinker who sought a totalising, all-encompassing conceptual framework to address the "failures" of the French Revolution, he now saw the peasantry, the bourgeoisie and petty nationalisms consume the hopes of the 1848 revolutions - deeper, underlying conditions had to be identified; the "true" animating forces of history exposed, and their logic dissected and explicated if ever the revolution were to succeed.

So, the Russian Revolution became to a large extent the by-product of the tenacity of the ancien regime to resist democratic change, the concomitant growth in nationalism which it encouraged, and the second, more aggressive Age of Imperialism which it spawned - all grist to the mill and perfect recruiting material for the "Golden Age" socialists and European radicals on the eve of the Great War; a conflict in which that Old Order so thoroughly consumed itself.

Representing the Famine: The Lacunae of Revisionism

First of all let's banish the idea that there are Irish history teachers nowadays frothing at the mouth attributing all Ireland's ills to successive waves of British colonisation. While this may have been the case in the past - particularly the first few decades after independence - times have changed and such stuff is seldom if ever seen today.

Ireland's earliest post-independence history teachers would have been products of the Gaelic Cultural Revival, invariably members of Sinn Féin, possibly War of Independence veterans and by and large Republicans of one hue or another perfectly content with the severing of the Act of Union - and moreover, quite satisfied to justify that stream of events in classrooms to the upcoming generation.

For the bulk of the population, decolonisation and the final evacuation of British forces was greeted with a generalised euphoria. Why would it not? We had finally secured the right to draft our own laws and set up our own parliament.

To expect in turn that the secondary school history syllabus and the teachers delivering it, would in such circumstances, cast anything but a critical eye on the whole tortured relationship between Ireland and the English monarchy is to engage in the wildest fantasy - scarcely a family was left untouched by the upheavals of the revolutionary years (1913-1922) for one thing and emotions were still understandably raw.

If you've ever read any of John Mitchel's work you can form a reasonable impression of the tone in which Ireland's history was presented in our classrooms during the inter-war period - which is to say not at all favourable to the English connection.

A woman I know in her 80's told me she was bid to learn whole passages of "Jail Journal" off by heart - which is Mitchel's account of his banishment to Van Diemen's after his trial for treason in 1848, protesting ultimately at the government's famine-time policies. That, if nothing else, will tell you how the "classical nationalist" interpretation of Irish history was passed on to a generation which are today the grandparents of Ireland's current school-going ages.

The "thaw" only began in earnest with the succession of Séan Lemass, the eclipse in power of De Valera, Ireland's opening up to FDI in the late 60's, entry to the EU and the outbreak of the Troubles - all of which for various reasons led to a "toning down" of the way in which history was taught; jettisoning the perennial 'blame-game' narrative in favour of more "disinterested" and "dispassionate" "objective" analysis - my own take on this is that we've gone too far and have in fact by adopting this approach done an even worse disservice to our past.

No doubt we will all settle on some satisfactory medium - but the above is the bare outlines of how to "square it all and make sense", i.e. what the generalised "feel" is among Irish for the former colonial connection, at least among their parents and grandparents generation.

"Genocide" is an un-satisfactory descriptive as its carved out of the human rights discourse of the UN derived post-Holocaust era and carries with it all those loaded connotations, which it obviously sought to address, of post-Darwinian racially inspired notions of "fitness to govern" which permeated and poisoned the thinking and actions of statesmen everywhere in the first half of the twentieth century; many of whom "in the West" were happy to set up fanciful hierarchies of the world's races based entirely on colour - the "yellow peril", the "white man's burden" etc.

It is not used in secondary schools here as a descriptive category for the famine years, nor remotely as any term of reference as it amounts to an anachronistic insertion of one era's value system atop another thus skewering and occluding the real nature of the relationship between Westminster and Ireland and in fact, the whole tenor of the times.

The only way to understand this period and to critically assess the nature of the British government's response is to immerse yourself in the primary documentation; see how the world looked from the vantage point of all participants, what concepts were deployed, what justifications used - some are happy to use the word "genocide", personally I find it unhelpful; jarring, surreal and context-scrambling.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to detach the famine from the political history of the country or indeed pass intelligible comment on it today without inevitably making some kind of political statement.

The politics of Repeal itself changed drastically during its course leading to a split which would define the nature of nationalist sentiment in the country for the next two generations; only resolving itself (arguably) at independence.

The constitutionalist politics espoused by O' Connell were repudiated by the Young Ireland Confederates over disillusionment with the Whig policy responses to mass starvation culminating in an abortive rebellion plot which was nipped in the bud but from which sprang the Fenian movement while the millions who emigrated to the United States provided the financial backbone for the Land League, the IRB, the Gaelic Revival, the 1916 Rising and De Valera's War of Independence fund-raising.

O' Connelite parliamentarian tactics were continued via Parnell and the Home Rulers and while often Fenian goals, tactics & membership would overlap with this type of constitutionalism the essential bifurcation between the physical force and political wings of Irish nationalism had their origins in differing famine-era legacies and interpretations.

It was an absolutely central defining point in the creation of Ireland's political culture apart from its other obvious economic, social and demographic ramifications.

Some may find this surprising but British historians are in general far more critical of government policy during the famine than their Irish counterparts. Roy Jenkins Gladstone & Douglas Hurd's Robert Peel were both unsparingly critical I found (certainly more so than the average Irish fare) while A.J.P. Taylor (most famously) referred to it as a de facto genocide in the midst of a glowing review of Woodham-Smith's Great Hunger - a book that was castigated by Irish academics and likened to "a great novel".

There's a long tradition of this in British historiography beginning in the immediate aftermath with J.S. Mill (England and Ireland), the speeches of Earl Grey (son of the Reform PM) and even the late 19th c. Conservative backbencher historian W.E.H. Lecky who reasoned that Balfour's policy of 'killing Home Rule with kindness' would be best served by "being honest about past oppressions" as only through such could you entice the Irish to stay in the Union.

Additionally, while out of office, in the 19th c. at least, there was always the electoral gambit of wooing Irish MP's into an unofficial pact by promising reform in support of parliamentary votes - cranking up the ante by publishing literature on the scandal of previous Tory/Whig mismanagement of Ireland was par for the course; "Justice for Ireland", in fact, was the out of office battle cry of the Whigs throughout the 1830's and 40's - so there was no shortage of British writers critical of their own government's policy. The "Condition of Ireland" question was a millstone around Westminster necks for the entire duration of the Union - "our national scandal" as Gladstone often referred to it, and when independence came, no surprise it was greeted with a sigh of relief in many quarters.

On the other hand, if you pick up a general treatment of the British Empire, invariably Ireland will be dealt with very cursorily as though it were an unproblematic extension of such - the "kingdom not colony" treatment, which is reflected in many of the contemporary attitudes of non-Irish commentators who seldom view these events through the prism of a teleological nationalist struggle.

Conversely, when it comes to the basic question of representation, Irish historians are so chronically hamstrung ideologically by the "anti-nationalist" tenets of revisionism that even a right-wing Thatcherite like Douglas Hurd sounds positively Fenian by comparison. This is why I've been gravitating more and more towards British biographers of key English statesmen during this period - as, unlike Irish revisionist historians, they're not affected with the (perceived) domestic need here to put a lid on contemporary separatist republicanism; the "Troubles" has simply re-defined history writing here for over a generation.

We've had classic "flip-flops" since the Arms Crisis, Bloody Sunday and internment in the early 70's, with F.S.L. Lyons and Conor Cruise O' Brien (to name but two) radically altering the tone of their presentation when it comes to adjudicating on key periods in Irish history. The general thrust of "revisionism" has evolved from its 1930's (Trinity College based) "values-free" objectivism to a far more strident expunging of nationalist sentiment wherever it may be found. When Christine Kinealy (herself married to a northern Unionist) bucked this trend and produced what she called a "post-revisionist" re-evaluation of many key areas of famine policy (i.e. one broadly sympathetic with 1840's Irish nationalism) she was publically lambasted by an orthodox revisionist from Queens, Belfast (L. A. Clarkson) in the following scandalous manner -

A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland | Reviews in History

There are needless to say multiple gaping lacunae left over from over-exposure to this type of "critical" lens -

Serious question marks remain primarily over the lack of emphasis on -

(1) land issues in the immediate post-Union period (generally diverted into the false problem of Malthusianism; i.e over-emphasis on population pressures);

(2) the dearth of proper research on Whiteboy movements and their grievances (Beames work published over thirty years ago now);

(3)nothing of real substance produced on the tithe question in the late 30's;

(4) the relationship of British radicals & the Chartists with the politics of Repeal is always studiously avoided, particularly, and most scandalously by Nowlan;

(5) the continual misrepresentation of the actual criticisms of Mitchel, simplistically atomising him as an Anglophobe who cried "genocide" which he didn't exactly (he was a self-confessed proud Saxon);

(6) no analysis to speak of re: Sharman Crawford's Tenant League which sought to deliver the three F's down south;

(7) the conversion of O' Brien and "1848" into a figure of parody;

(8) the complete absence of Gaelic language sources or a general sympathy with the world-view of Irish-speaking cottiers;

(9) the continual misrepresentation of rundale clachans as outmoded and inefficient examples of small-scale farming - they were the last vestiges in fact of the Gaelic order derb fine system;

(10) the studious ignoring of sympathetic British voices (Mill, Bentinck) which in many cases were more radical than mainstream middle-class Catholic Repealers & finally ..

(11) the mysterious inability to see how industrialisation in Britain with its subsequent loss of grain sovereignty (supplemented by the Irish market) & expansion of the manufacturing base pressured bread prices to such a degree that the period (even before the blight struck) was known as the "hungry 40's" giving rise to ferocious Chartist unrest and rendering it politically untenable for Peel to discontinue Irish grain exports into English ports - for fear of a revolution (half an English labourer's wages could be spent on bread at this time).

All these questions and more, studiously avoided by Irish researchers despite a plethora of new titles since the 150th anniversary - all, by and large, with the odd notable exception (Gray, Nally, Scally & Kinealy) following the same jaded formulae of exposition as outlined & carved in stone by Moody, Williams, Daly, Konnell & Bourke et.al.

The Phantoms of Necessity

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”

- Soren Kirkegaard

When you consider that no matter how refined our thinking can become in terms of building up myriad philosophical, sociological and moral justifications for generalised non-violence; preserving a peaceful orderly society via well thought out equitable laws and maintaining as best we can socialised redistributive tax mechanisms - erasing that is, if not in fact, at least in aspiration, all the imbalances bequeathed us by nature and opportunity, we still are confronted with the ineradicable facts of our 'tooth and claw' evolutionary progress from shrew-like primaeval swamp-dwellers to canny ultra-competitive hominid hunter-gatherers.

Granted, 'the selfish gene' thesis is over-stated when you come to consider man as social animal; how language evolved as a communal enterprise; how primary infant care and a burdensome nine months gestation could only devolve and be supported by a tightly knit co-operative group responsive to reciprocal needs and how intra-group selection oftentimes works heavily in favour of those endowed with high degrees of empathy and the capacity for unconditional regard for their neighbour - yet still, lurking beneath the surface, is the in-wired propensity for savagery, scarcely tamed by a (to a great extent) artificially embossed code of morality (either normative ethics, faith derived or traditional law and order orientated) which is apt to unravel like an unwanted skin, once undue "stress" is imposed on the social fabric.

You need only look at the ready hysteria for blood and revenge which was whipped up during the Great War to see how quickly a formerly (long-lasting) placid condition of the body-politic can be transformed almost overnight into a generalised jingoism and thirst for warfare. We see it here every July at 'marching season' when the Lambeg drums are pounded and perceived territorial space is encroached upon; 'reason' is abandoned en masse via a descent into mutually polarised and atavistic, quasi-tribal "subject-positions" and the whole on each side swept along dutifully by the biggest pair of lungs mouthing the most extreme and intractable effusions imaginable.

Hence the focus should be on this unfailing human capacity to reduce "the Other" to the exact specifications of a ready-made hatred - "ready-made" because its always there even in a completely pacifist society where reductive, stereotypical categories are constantly mobilised and dispersed via media and word of mouth, hanging in the air and waiting to be plucked and used against its target by the first opportunistic ideologue who happens to see before anyone else the first rifts and tears in the social fabric.

This process has occurred in history countless times, where a party interest sweeps to power on the back of a promised ass-kicking to some designated 'enemy other' and human nature being the fickle thing she is always finds it easier to rest in the bosom of a mutually shared dislike - it clears the tables, sweetens the voice, and allows us to carry on the illusion that at base our intentions are good, if only we were allowed a clear object of our wrath.

Secondarily, this is most likely a hormonal (adrenaline and testerone) related phenomenon, which is again ineradicable, and simply an index of "what we are" - the beings that need to expound a due quotient of bile; baseball, soccer, boxing, spectator sports in general, soak up the electricity much like you assume ancient Rome humoured the plebs with exotic animals and gladiators.

Each generation produces its own "wild energy consuming" solutions (Chuck, Sly, Arnie), displacing and re-channelling the barbarism, tapping it and fruitlessly attempting to contain and control it - but its the biological substrate that underlies it, which makes it irredeemably and unalterably "ours" and not something that can be phantomed away by abstract metaphors of God, Justice and Order.

Civilisation at the end of the day rests on a very few key fundamentals; food, water, heat, light and shelter; in half the world, not even that.

Eventually you would think, a generalised pacifism will spread itself out over the human race - perhaps in a thousand years or so - and on foot, in the future, of colossal international co-operative efforts to tame runaway resource stress; freshwater, soil, grain, energy and the wars which deficits of such inevitably produce.

Computer apps providing universal translators should make us all instantly intelligible to one another while robotics research should throw up new-fangled ways to make all our lives easier. A new UN-derived supra-international democratically devolved government with myriad protective checks & balances with a pan-global super-informed citizenry voting instantly via mobile attached PC visors on sundry issues - will represent the logical communist end-point of human political development as the formerly capitalist derived competitiveness of transnational corporates is jettisoned in favour of a 'global commons' ideology.

Individualism will become stronger and more pronounced as hidebound parochial and nationalist ideologies are discarded; the world will melt into one, while ineradicably disagreeable facets of human nature will be properly displaced and re-channelled into suitable alternative diversions - the compunction to make war; the projection of hate into readily bottled stereotypical reductions of the "other"; the cultural misunderstandings which blighted our past and led to mind-numbingly unnecessary conflict, all vanquished with the slow progress of an ever increasing "common sense" fuelled by greater appreciation and empathy for the human condition.

Barriers will dissolve between us, exposing only the raw common humanity we share, while reasons to hate and fear and bang the war drums will disappear into the forgotten mists of time, aided naturally by the as yet unthinkable aforementioned technologies which will have eradicated the world's most basic wants - conflict such as we have known, becoming only a footnote of awe and consternation for our bewildered descendants who wonder how we had ever come to live in such a comparatively violent and savage age.

But this is all a complete pipedream in today's world ... my guess is that we'll have obliterated ourselves ten times over before any of it can get off the ground.