WI There Was No Emigration At Any Great Level From Ireland?

[archaeogeek]

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Not really, disease killed off most of them.
They were no more than 15,000 at their peak so even if the British had ordered their settlers to shoot every single one (they did not) this hardly ranks as one of the worst things in history. And you said it yourself. British settlers. i.e. the ancestors of modern Australians. Without orders from above. Not some monolithic centralised British killing machine.
I'm sick of Brit-bashers constantly digging this one up. The very idea that somehow a crime is worse if the people are seen as some sort of special unique ethnic group is just wrong.
Killing a thousand people is killing a thousand people, equally bad no matter if they're from a group 1 billion strong or 1000 strong.

Cry me a fucking river; in what way are your sentiments of wounded national pride superior to the fact that the british settlers had laws that made killing the natives not a crime.
Though it's true it's not exactly the first time Britain would have had laws declaring open-season on a minority ethnic group.

 

[Tyr]

Cry me a fucking river; in what way are your sentiments of wounded national pride superior to the fact that the british settlers had laws that made killing the natives not a crime.
Though it's true it's not exactly the first time Britain would have had laws declaring open-season on a minority ethnic group.

If you're going to quote me please reply to me rather than making up some bollocks about national pride and superiority

 

[SlickWilly]

Tyr,
you obviously never heard of the penal laws which were put in place in Ireland as punishment for being on the wrong side of the war of the roses. These led to the banning of catholic religious practice and education of catholics and was an establishment attempt to kill of the Irish language. Curiously presbyterians were made suffer uner them as well, leading to their proud record with the united Irishmen in Tone's rebellion in 1798, the aftermath of which saw more natives massacered than deaths recorded due to the French revolution! It's enough to make the Taliban blush!
Also, let's suppose Cromwell's malign activities with his cronies was greatly exaggerated and only a couple of thousand were butchered in Drogheda, hey, the British establishment evil doings in Ireland would still rank them up there with the worst! By the way, Cromwell did have a reputation for religious tolerance eg sanctuary given to European Jews fleeing pogroms, but it did not extend to Irish catholics, for whom he had a frothing at the mouth hatred. Ironically, he is said to have caught an illness in ireland while he was bollockacting here, possibly malaria, which a few years down the road sent this great republican up to his reward! He was disinterred a few years after his death by an irate mob in England!
Re Irish emigration, there is recorded evidence that there were Irish people living in villages all over mainland Britain in Cromwell's time and guess what the locals seem to regard them as somewhat eccentric!
Another old saying is very true - The reason why the sun never went down on the British Empire was because God could not trust British colonialists in the dark!
I have the height of regard for ordinary English people, but I detest to the core of my being the British establishment and two of the reasons for that is the way they have treated ordinary English people and they way they have treated my own race!
Re 'evidence' being conjured up or found years after the event wrt Cromwellian massacres here, hey history is written by the winners, maybe the murder rate was so high, there was nobody left to record them from the defeated!
Actually the settlement of English and Scots people in ireland ie the plantations during Elizabethan times are a parrallel for an ongoing colonisation today ie that of The Zionist State re Palestine it's a very similar thing in many ways, yes, Ireland was indeed the laboratory for colonialism!

 

[Tyr]

you obviously never heard of the penal laws which were put in place in Ireland as punishment for being on the wrong side of the war of the roses. These led to the banning of catholic religious practice and education of catholics and was an establishment attempt to kill of the Irish language.

I think this says more than enough here. We're hardly talking of British rule in Ireland there. That's way back in the depths of history before Ireland was even a kingdom.
Are you sure you're right here though? Banning of catholics...war of the roses?...You're a hundred years too early there at least...

Curiously presbyterians were made suffer uner them as well, leading to their proud record with the united Irishmen in Tone's rebellion in 1798, the aftermath of which saw more natives massacered than deaths recorded due to the French revolution! It's enough to make the Taliban blush!

No way is that true. A lot more than 20,000 people died in the Napoleonic wars. Hell, the Irish rebellion was part of them.

Also, let's suppose Cromwell's malign activities with his cronies was greatly exaggerated and only a couple of thousand were butchered in Drogheda, hey, the British establishment evil doings in Ireland would still rank them up there with the worst!

Cromwell's time in Ireland ranks with the worst things done to Ireland? Probally.
Worst in the world? Nowhere near.

I have the height of regard for ordinary English people, but I detest to the core of my being the British establishment and two of the reasons for that is the way they have treated ordinary English people and they way they have treated my own race!

Actually the British establishment was amongst the best in the world. Historically British and Irish people have tended to have far more rights and freedoms than much of Europe.
Sure, it was a historic government, it was still bad by modern standards. But to single it out for victimisation is just wrong.

Re 'evidence' being conjured up or found years after the event wrt Cromwellian massacres here, hey history is written by the winners, maybe the murder rate was so high, there was nobody left to record them from the defeated!
Actually the settlement of English and Scots people in ireland ie the plantations during Elizabethan times are a parrallel for an ongoing colonisation today ie that of The Zionist State re Palestine it's a very similar thing in many ways, yes, Ireland was indeed the laboratory for colonialism!

Much the same thing has happened all over Europe. Ireland was nothing special. Really there seems to be something very bad in the Irish education system these days, so many Irish people I meet seem to hold this one sided 'if it wasn't for the english we'd be awesome!' victim complex.
I'm Irish myself. I was told much of the same things when being brought up and accepted them. Big nasty foreigners and poor oppressed Irish was just a really convient way to think of things. But I'd encourage you to go and read the history, get a balanced view of things. You'll soon see how very complicated and grey it is.

 

[Maur]

I am tired with the bashing as well and killing 1000 people is as bad if 0.1% of a population or 95% but I do think wiping out an ancient culture is a separate deed which can certainly be placed at the feet of the early settlers. That said the Tasmanians were hardly the only culture to be wiped out and the Brits were hardly the first people to do it.

Oh shut up and take your apologism elsewhere!

(that also applies to Tyr. What's up with you people? Murder and genocide is "not as bad" and justifiable as long it's British who do it?)

 

[SlickWilly]

Penal laws came in post 1690, Ireland was certainly under Britsh control by then! As a general rule it was for 800 years far longer than any other established nation today has ever been! Oh and don't get me started on the at times parallel Vatican colonialism of Ireland which lasted 1600 years and was more psychological in nature! Psycho-sexual abuse mostly in that case!

 

[Tyr]

Oh shut up and take your apologism elsewhere!

(that also applies to Tyr. What's up with you people? Murder and genocide is "not as bad" and justifiable as long it's British who do it?)

err...wha?
Where did you get that from? Its not apologism at all. And where the hell did I say a bad thing isn't as bad if the British do it? Really. Where on earth did I say anything close to that?
Of course killing people is bad. However. Killing a few thousand people hardly counts as amongst the WORST acts in history yet for some reason people always highlight that particular act as somehow special and partciularly nasty. It was bad. That's rather 'well duh'. But there are innumerable examples in history of similar numbers of people being killed. Its quite standard practice as history goes really. Sack a city or burn a few crop fields and you'll get a few thousand people dying.
It really does not compare at all to the true worst events in history where we're talking of hundreds of thousands and millions being killed.
This doesn't mean we should accept it as totally fine and say there was nothing wrong with it. A few thousand people died. Of course that's bad, what kind of person do you take me for? But it does mean constantly talking about it as if its one of the worst things ever is a bit mad and wrong.

Penal laws came in post 1690, Ireland was certainly under Britsh control by then! As a general rule it was for 800 years far longer than any other established nation today has ever been! Oh and don't get me started on the at times parallel Vatican colonialism of Ireland which lasted 1600 years and was more psychological in nature! Psycho-sexual abuse mostly in that case!

Ireland was part of the UK from 1800. Prior to that its situation was variable but it was without a doubt seperate to England (except in the civil war) albeit in personal union for the past 200 years and with a very vague half arsed connection before that.
Really, England had very little to do with Ireland. It was a case of the Irish elites oppressing the Irish poor. The only connection was they had the same monarch and naturally looked to their bigger, richer neighbour as their main trading partner.
This 800 years of English oppression stuff is nonsence, the beginning of the period even overlaps with England's few hundred years of oppression at the hands of the French!

If the laws are post 1690 why say wars of the roses?
I can think of no examples of banning gaelic. Such things just generally weren't done in pre-nationalist times. Language wasn't seen as a big deal.

 

[Maur]

err...wha?
Where did you get that from? Its not apologism at all. And where the hell did I say a bad thing isn't as bad if the British do it? Really. Where on earth did I say anything close to that?
Of course killing people is bad. However. Killing a few thousand people hardly counts as amongst the WORST acts in history yet for some reason people always highlight that particular act as somehow special and partciularly nasty. It was bad. That's rather 'well duh'. But there are innumerable examples in history of similar numbers of people being killed. Its quite standard practice as history goes really. Sack a city or burn a few crop fields and you'll get a few thousand people dying.
It really does not compare at all to the true worst events in history where we're talking of hundreds of thousands and millions being killed.
This doesn't mean we should accept it as totally fine and say there was nothing wrong with it. A few thousand people died. Of course that's bad, what kind of person do you take me for? But it does mean constantly talking about it as if its one of the worst things ever is a bit mad and wrong.

Here. It's basically one big apologist post:

The potatoe famine: The government at the time failed, that is true. However this was out of stupid ideological belief that the market would fix itself rather than a lack of caring for what was going on. Nonetheless the famine ruined them, the whigs collapsed as a political force shortly after.
The British meanwhile made up where their government failed. The British charity effort for the famine was ENOURMOUS and its just attrocious that it is so often forgotten. People prefer to pick and chose their sources and rant about Queen Victoria refusing 2000 quid from the Ottoman sultant out of her own personal snobbery rather than pay attention to her contribution to the campaign which raised £200,000 (contemporary, a hell of a lot more in today's money) from the British people.
Earlier famines: Welcome to the pre-modern world. Ireland is nothing special.

Cromwell: Half the population? Yeah right. As said he was in Ireland nowhere near long enough to do that.
Cromwell in Ireland is quite interesting really for how its looked at in histography. It mostly seems to be the gaelic nationalists who bash him but he actually contributed quite a lot to Ireland still having its Gaelic parts today. Most of the people he killed in Ireland were British settlers.
Cromwell in Ireland is drastically exagerated. 1: Compare it to the 30 years war in Germany, not to the modern day, it was standard practice. 2: Don't forget that he came at the end of a rather long and nasty civil war in Ireland. Often those deaths gets attributed to him too.

Banning of catholocism: err what? The UK was a pretty religiously tolerant nation. Catholics were always free to practice their religion. They also had equal voting rights from 1829.

Banning of Gaelic: Again I do not recall that ever happening. It was the Irish people themselves who decided their kids would be better off in life if they learned English, the language of the world, rather than Gaelic, the language of the soggy potatoe fields. Even purely within Ireland there was a lot more opportunity for a English speaker let alone taking into account the opportunity that lie in Britain and abroad.

Black and tans: Like the IRA were any better! They were murdering fiends who lived to kill people they felt were a bit British. It was a civil war. Civil wars generally bring out the worst in people

Overall when looking at Irish history what you need to do is compare the lot of the average Irishman to that of the average Briton or the average continental. Not to a modern Irishman. History is nasty to common people. This is a fact. The way the Irish were treat may make you simmer with anger but if you compare Ireland to elsewhere in the world you'll see that Ireland really didn't have such a bad time of it.



Not really, disease killed off most of them.
They were no more than 15,000 at their peak so even if the British had ordered their settlers to shoot every single one (they did not) this hardly ranks as one of the worst things in history. And you said it yourself. British settlers. i.e. the ancestors of modern Australians. Without orders from above. Not some monolithic centralised British killing machine.
I'm sick of Brit-bashers constantly digging this one up. The very idea that somehow a crime is worse if the people are seen as some sort of special unique ethnic group is just wrong.
Killing a thousand people is killing a thousand people, equally bad no matter if they're from a group 1 billion strong or 1000 strong.

 

[SlickWilly]

I'm sorry about the war of the roses issues,I was inaccurate timewise, the penal laws came after Willam Of Orange's victory in what was an English civil war hosted by Ireland!
No Irish emmigration means no Newfoundland, which is regarded as the most Irish place in the world outside the emerald isle itself!
By the way it is correct that the penal laws meant that the legal code in Ireland differed from that in England eg the penalty in England for practising homosexuality was hanging was not the case until much later. It was actually brought in under the urging of a high flyer in The Anglican Church of Ireland, John Atherton, who used it as a platform for launching his ambitions. Boy, he succeeded, he attained the prestigious position of COI bishop of Waterford down the road and a few years later became the first man in Ireland ever to be hanged under his own law!

 

[Tobit]

I'm sorry about the war of the roses issues,I was inaccurate timewise, the penal laws came after Willam Of Orange's victory in what was an English civil war hosted by Ireland!
No Irish emmigration means no Newfoundland, which is regarded as the most Irish place in the world outside the emerald isle itself!
By the way it is correct that the penal laws meant that the legal code in Ireland differed from that in England eg the penalty in England for practising homosexuality was hanging was not the case until much later. It was actually brought in under the urging of a high flyer in The Anglican Church of Ireland, John Atherton, who used it as a platform for launching his ambitions. Boy, he succeeded, he attained the prestigious position of COI bishop of Waterford down the road and a few years later became the first man in Ireland ever to be hanged under his own law!

I thought that the POD was only stopping Irish immigration during the 1800's, hadn't the Irish been in Newfoundland for a long time prior?

 

[Errnge]

I thought that the POD was only stopping Irish immigration during the 1800's, hadn't the Irish been in Newfoundland for a long time prior?

I thought it was simply Irish immigration, which is definitely a harder thing to stop than just during the 1800s.

I don't want to draw a line in the sand, and I by no means think any one should divulge this info if they dont want to, but i think it would be interesting to see who here is irish, who is english, and who is something else; how heritage affects opinion. (psst. if you couldn't tell, I'm an Irish-American, btw).

Tyr, I know you are being singled out here, and I'm sorry, but either you hold some vast amount of knowledge no one else here has, or you are wrong. You seem to have been refuted several times by many instances of English oppression over Ireland. You are also verrrrrrry mistaken about when the English began to control Ireland. I do believe there was a Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century. English landlords who pledged fealty to the English Crown ruled over Irish lands (not any worse than the Irish landlords for a long time. Eventually, English nobles DID control all of Ireland, and this was before the War of the Roses. Why else would Cromwell attack Ireland if they weren't trying to get rid of their English rulers. And yes, religious sentiments did play a huge role in all this. Only a fool would argue otherwise.

Ugh... (here comes the hypocracy ) I can't help but feel as if this thread would be more interesting if people focussed more on the premiss of the thread instead of making another argument about how bad/not so bad the english were to the irish.

I think the Irish would be forced to industrialize with PEAT!!!!

 

[Errnge]

I'm sorry, not war of the roses, english civil war

 

[celt]

I thought it was simply Irish immigration, which is definitely a harder thing to stop than just during the 1800s.

I don't want to draw a line in the sand, and I by no means think any one should divulge this info if they dont want to, but i think it would be interesting to see who here is irish, who is english, and who is something else; how heritage affects opinion. (psst. if you couldn't tell, I'm an Irish-American, btw).

Tyr, I know you are being singled out here, and I'm sorry, but either you hold some vast amount of knowledge no one else here has, or you are wrong. You seem to have been refuted several times by many instances of English oppression over Ireland. You are also verrrrrrry mistaken about when the English began to control Ireland. I do believe there was a Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century. English landlords who pledged fealty to the English Crown ruled over Irish lands (not any worse than the Irish landlords for a long time. Eventually, English nobles DID control all of Ireland, and this was before the War of the Roses. Why else would Cromwell attack Ireland if they weren't trying to get rid of their English rulers. And yes, religious sentiments did play a huge role in all this. Only a fool would argue otherwise.

Ugh... (here comes the hypocracy ) I can't help but feel as if this thread would be more interesting if people focussed more on the premiss of the thread instead of making another argument about how bad/not so bad the english were to the irish.

I think the Irish would be forced to industrialize with PEAT!!!!

I think his point is that yes they were oppressed by the English but in the great scheme of things compared to what other countries had to put up with in the same time period it was fuck all!

 

[Arachnid]

Oh shut up and take your apologism elsewhere!

(that also applies to Tyr. What's up with you people? Murder and genocide is "not as bad" and justifiable as long it's British who do it?)

I was bloody agreeing with you!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I said That killing 2,500 people (disease got the rest) is a crime and wrong and wiping out a culture is a separate and arguably worse crime and both can be placed at Britain's feet. FFS read what other people post before you comment attacking them.

 

[Errnge]

casually changes subject

But seriously, Ireland could (and is currently) industrialize with peat! Just replace coal with peat, and you have an industrial revolution in Ireland!!!

 

[Arachnid]

Not really, peat burning Ireland will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to coal burning England. Also Ireland has a much smaller internal market compared to England.

 

[Errnge]

not if the population is larger due to less immigration. that makes for a very large internal market. and yes peat isnt as good as coal, but its there, its something

 

[Arachnid]

Ireland will always be less populous the England prior to the Industrial Revolution, its simply a matter of amount of productive agricultural land. Afterwards Britain is in a much better position to experience the Industrial Revolution earlier and faster and thus outpace Ireland.

 

[Errnge]

I'm not saying Ireland will be greater than Britain, stop dick-measuring.

I'm saying it has the potential to industrialize, and without the Irish diaspora, there is a larger internal market for that industrialization. the cities would grow, and so Ireland might be able to sustain an even larger population

 

[Tyr]

Tyr, I know you are being singled out here, and I'm sorry, but either you hold some vast amount of knowledge no one else here has, or you are wrong. You seem to have been refuted several times by many instances of English oppression over Ireland. You are also verrrrrrry mistaken about when the English began to control Ireland. I do believe there was a Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century.

Which I am well aware of. However these Normans were also foreign occupiers of England and Ireland was taken as a seperate place to England.
To speak of 800 years of British oppression as Irish nationalists are prone to doing is just nonsense. Ireland never actually became part of Britain until 1800.

English landlords who pledged fealty to the English Crown ruled over Irish lands (not any worse than the Irish landlords for a long time. Eventually, English nobles DID control all of Ireland, and this was before the War of the Roses.

French landlords ruled over parts of Ireland and pledged fealty to their French Duke who added the lordship of Ireland to his long list (yes, including king of England) of titles.

Why else would Cromwell attack Ireland if they weren't trying to get rid of their English rulers. And yes, religious sentiments did play a huge role in all this. Only a fool would argue otherwise.

Where did I say religion had nothing to do with it?
But Cromwell attacked Ireland not because it was trying to get rid of its 'English rulers' but because it was trying to keep its 'English rulers'. It was a royalist stronghold. This was the most pressing matter, not the civil war in Ireland.

Ugh... (here comes the hypocracy ) I can't help but feel as if this thread would be more interesting if people focussed more on the premiss of the thread instead of making another argument about how bad/not so bad the english were to the irish.

Aye, the trouble is such threads are usually made just as a screen for English bashing, based on the premise of Ireland would be great if not for England. This is faulty base history though and when such emerges on here a historical discussion is usually inevitable.