Part One: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Air horns, air horns, airhorns, pull a lot of airhorns
and straight residence right and yours. I love this one thing.
I have not been to a club in a while,
so I do miss uh that that reggaeton sound. Prop.

(00:23):
How you doing today? This is behind the bastards. I
feel like my Marty going through stuff. But I feel
like you're about to make it increasingly works, so I'm well, yeah,
this is I'm anticipating being very sadden. This isn't gonna
be a happy one. Prop. How do you feel about Ireland?

(00:47):
I have a lot of feelings about Ireland, Like like,
I feel like Ireland probably got the greatest slang in
the whole wide world. Concredible slang, you know, like y'all
just y'all just hate everybody, you know. I like the pissiness.
I like that you don't take irreverence, you don't take
nothing serious, you know. Yeah, it's the yeah, you know,

(01:10):
when you're doing a contest of like islands where a
lot of bad things have been done to them. Um,
there's a lot of competition, you know. But but but boy,
Ireland really up up up in the let's say, the
top quarter of that pack. They're pretty up there, especially
because like they they wouldn't drafted into white people until

(01:32):
much later. You know, it did take get to be
white too, Like that's cold, that's cold as ice, you know,
saying like we'd the northern part of the same island
and we can't get to be white people. You know
what I'm saying. It's it's it's quite a quite a tale. Um. Now,
how do you feel about the English? Well, I will

(01:54):
say this, they have a track record of just shipping
on the rest of the earth for just the most
efficient just with the greatest efficiency. Like I'm never like,
I don't know how that little island was able to
shoot on the whole earth as they It'd be fair
to say they're like the New England Patriots of nations.

(02:16):
It really is just the Tom Brady of country. Just
can't lose, I will say, though, you know, yes, I
am in the in the midst of finishing, uh top boy.
So as of right now, I'm like East London, isn't it,
you know what I'm saying, like selling the food. So
right now I'm like, now, granted, I will say this,

(02:41):
I've noticed what made London cool is what made everything
else cool, which is the presence of black people, because
why Top Boy is so dope, it's the Jamaican immigrants
that like created this whole type of slaying. It's calm, bro,
It's that. Yeah, Don'tason, I'm joining is because I'm just like, hey,

(03:01):
black people make everything cool. That's It's a big part
of why London Calling is such a good album. Um.
Now prop today. First off, I'm glad you've been scoping
that because we're really going to need to lean on
the English accents here for comedy relief, because yeah, yeah,

(03:23):
we're gonna have to do a lot of that. I've
been practicing my my posh, so we'll give that a shot. Um.
We're talking today about the thing that is most commonly
called the potato famine. UM. One thing that Irish people
will point out is that there was no such thing
as a potato famine. Um. And the argument that will
make is that, like, well, there was a potato blight,

(03:44):
but Ireland had plenty of food. The famine was entirely caused,
but there it was. It was a famine caused by
English people, right. It was a famine caused by the
the the the ruling class of the British Empire was
not a famine caused by a potato bug and that
is accurate. Um, yeah, yeah it is. Yeah. No, No,

(04:07):
they don't leave it to the Brits to like do
a genocide and blame it on a vegetable. Hey, listen, y'all,
I'll try to tell you we was just doing mine
in our own business and then the potato decided to die.
Yeah what what what? What? What do you want us
to do? The potato made the call like it's calming
all that it is. It is. There's a lot of

(04:29):
different takes you see from empires that commit genocides. You know,
Turkey just decided to pretend that nothing bad ever happened
to Armenian people. Uh. The Germans seemed broadly to have
embraced that they did some bad things. But yeah, they're
down there at least say, okay, guys, the British pointing
to produce in the grocery store and being like, no,
that's what you gotta be angry at. Um. I don't

(04:51):
know if you have a dated somebody who was just
ferociously never wrong, like would say stuff, that's like there's
being right and then there's being less right. And I
think in this situation, I'm just less right. Yeah, that's
that's that's that's that's England again. Yeah, that's that's that's

(05:12):
the old that's that's old john Bull Um, which is
the thing that people used to call England. Um. So
have you ever have you ever been to Ireland? Prop? No, man,
It's it's on my bucket list. I've been there a bunch.
I love. I love going to Ireland, particularly I really
like Dublin. And if you if you go to Dublin,
which is a beautiful town, um always pretty great too.

(05:32):
I like, there's a lot of great places in Ireland.
But if you go to Dublin UM and you head
to Custom House K you will see a series of
statues and they're kind of There's like this street, you know,
with a sidewalk next to it, and there's a bunch
of statues of like wraith like human beings marching along
this this little chunk of sidewalk. There's a one of

(05:53):
them has a mother clutching a diving, dying baby to
a breast. The other is like carrying either just like
a past or the corpse of a starved child over
her shoulders and it's it's it sounds terrible. It's the
famine memorial, and it's a really really affecting memorial, and
it's just kind of like in the middle of things,
you know, um, and there It's one of those one

(06:14):
of the reasons I really appreciate that memorials. If you
do spend a lot of time, as I have, in
parts of the world where you come across like starving
people and refugees. It's some whoever made the memorial new
I knew what they were doing, and I think there
was like a conscious attempt to uh like there was

(06:34):
an understanding of like how that looks. It's it's pretty affecting. Um.
So that's what we're going to talk about today, and
it was yeah, yeah, the not a potato famine. Um.
And it is interesting that these and I think what's
sound kind of so compelling about this to me is
that like all of the people who died and the

(06:55):
thing we're about to talk about, um, this this was
I think it's fair to say an act of genocide.
That's certainly something that like one of our main sources
today of Tim pat Coogan, will claim, but it was
not a genocide. That kind of Usually when you have
something like this, it comes as the result of like
a civil war or at least a bloody conflict of
some there's some sort of like fight, um, and then

(07:17):
there is kind of an ethnic cleansing or a killing. UM.
That's not really the case with the Great Hunger. Um.
It's it's more a genocide that's kind of the result
of pure venal greed and free market ideology taken to
the status of a religion. Um. And it's it's it's
quite a tale. We're going to discuss the death toll

(07:38):
a little bit later. For now, I'm just going to
point out that the pre famine population of Ireland was
a little bit less than nine million people. UM. Today
there are just north of five million people in Ireland. UM.
And in fact, last year is when Ireland first reached
five million in population since the famine. UM it is

(08:00):
probably yeah, it's probably the only nation on earth to
have fewer people today than it did in the eighteen forties. UM. Wow, Yeah,
man's is proper wicked. Brov that the peace for the food.
I'm I'm I'm sorry, like I'm really deep into top
boy right now. That's that's that's fine. I'm I'm very

(08:22):
deep into I'm still gearing up to to try out
my my English accent. We we we dusted it off
for one of the Kissinger episodes and you you were
going off in we were going off a little bit.
We were trying to do that, like and so yeah,
the thing about my like, I know it's bad, but
the best part about like how to do this one

(08:43):
is because it's part Jamaican, So you can kind of
like if you lean to Pat Swa, it's like it's
okay because they're Jamaican immigrants, you know what I'm saying,
So like that's my only out. But at the same time, bro,
it's calm, bro, like it's not good. I know it's
not good. You know. The best I can do is well,
I don't see why we have to have people who

(09:04):
aren't English on the planet. It doesn't seem really particularly feasible.
But both hand Hannah in apology apologize, I mean yes,
at the same time for a number of this is great,
though I do apologize ahead of time anytime I do
a British accent to Jake, Um, my greatest, my good, my,

(09:27):
my posh. My post British is give them the old
what Fall. There we go nailing it, but the old
what Fall. I will say this though I know this
after touring through the UK enough, like doing music, like
I finally figured out like that there and of course
does that. There's like regional accents, so like I get

(09:47):
it now when you're like in Birmingham, they do the
Birmingham like they got that that that thing. Well, I
think what we can certainly say is that we will
be getting revenge for all of England's crimes by doing
a variety of bad Yeah. Yeah, you was able to
conquer the world. The least you can do is have

(10:09):
to tolerate. Yeah, you're gonna get angry when I mispronounced
Northampton or whatever. Um. So to explain how all of
this happened, um, how like so many people were killed,
um or we're allowed to die, We're gonna have to
go back in history quite a bit to the very

(10:29):
birth of the British Empire um, because in a lot
of ways, Ireland was kind of the first colonial possession
of the Empire. UM. Now, prior to English conquest of Ireland, UM,
the island maintained a history of pretty ferocious independence. It
was never even close to being colonized by the Romans.
They kind of like stop at at Scotland more or less,

(10:51):
like they're trying to get up north, but they build
that wall like it's a mess, you know, trying to
trying to get up that far as you might know. Yeah,
England not super close to Rome. Uh, Ireland, it's already
far just far enough, you know. So you know, the

(11:11):
Ireland pretty pretty much doing its own thing for that
period of time, and then in like ten sixties six
you get the Normans, which are kind of like basically
the French conquer England um. And then after that point,
you know the English kings or Norman kings, right, so
not that long after the Norman's conquered England. In Ireland,
there's this guy, Brian Beru, who is a high king

(11:33):
and he the Normans try to invade Ireland and he
defeats their armies and throws them back um or at
least that's kind of how history is often summarized. The
reality is a lot more complex. But you know this
is not that in depth of an Irish history podcast.
So like most parts of medieval Europe, Ireland, you know,
you've got a bunch of little kingdoms. You've got a
bunch of like different kings, and they're all at war

(11:55):
with each other pretty often, like most places in the world. Um,
you got a bunch of people who are fighting with
each other all the time. Um. And so while the
Normans are in charge in England, there's this Irish king
named Jarmide and mcmurra um and he he gets into
a little bit of a scrap with some of his neighbors.
So he kind of accidentally on purpose kidnaps the wife

(12:17):
of one of his rivals. Um and that doesn't go
great for him, So he he winds up in fighting
the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this
little squabble. Um, which will prove to have been a mistake.
You don't invite the eye number one. Yeah, So all
this is happening, and like the mid eleven hundreds, right this,

(12:37):
this Irish king is like, hey, Norman's come on over,
help me out. I kidnapped a lady and it didn't
go great for me. Um. And and when the Normans
get invited over to Ireland, there's a pope, right, you know,
popes are a big deal. In the eleven hundreds, there's
not really like that's kind of the only game in
town unless you're going orthodox, right, Like, if you're a Christian,
it's it's pretty much the popes or nothing. Um. And

(13:00):
the pope at this time was a guy named Adrian
and he's actually the only english person they've ever let
be pope. Um, which might key you went on how
bad an idea it was to let an English person
be the Yeah, this is the last time they try that.
Ship they bring us, they bring a Nazi and to
be pope before they let another British person. I'm like,

(13:23):
and they got they got a pretty spicy track record
for him to be like, I don't know about you know,
that didn't work out at all. Um. So Adrian, uh,
this English pope he uh, the Norman's kind of come
to him and they're like, they work out a deal,
and so he gives the King of England at this point,

(13:43):
Henry the Second a papal bull, which is like, you know,
a pope uh announcement law type deally right, when the
pope declares the thing that's a papal bull kind of Um,
my Catholic audience is screening at me for inaccurately describing
what a papal bull is. But whatever he issues, this
papal bull that legitimizes their invasion of the Ireland. Um.

(14:07):
And so there's this basically what it what has happened
here is the English Crown have made a deal with
the papacy to colonize Ireland, which is seen as wild
and still pretty pagan. Um. So that's that that that's
what happens at this point when the Normans get invited over,
they make this deal with the Pope to to christianize
the pagan Irish um and to discuss what comes back

(14:30):
for a good practice for the America's, for the America's
for I mean, that's one of the points that like
there's a pretty good book called The Invention of the
White Race that goes into this some more detail. But
like most of the techniques that the British Empire would
use in places in Southeast Asia and Africa in in
the America's, we're kind of tested out in Ireland, right

(14:51):
in the Ireland. Yeah, um. And for what comes next year.
I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim
pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot. From the
Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay
in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through
the appointment of hand picked bishops, rather than having to
struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish abbots, who
hitherto had often been appointed by the families who controlled

(15:13):
the extensive church lands and monasteries. The attraction for the
Normans was straightforward. It gave them access to Irish Land, which,
with their advances and agriculture, they were able to exploit
far more profitably than where the cattle hurting Irish, and
so Christ and Caesar came to be hand in glove. Unfortunately,
when Henry the eighth defied the Pope by divorcing his
wife to marry Anne Boleyn, the gloves came off between

(15:34):
King and Pope, with disastrous results for the Irish. From
the time of Henry the Eighth's breaking with Rome, England
became a Protestant nation and Ireland remained a Catholic one. Thus,
apart from the inevitable attempts by a large country to
subordinate a smaller country, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland. Also,
not alone would the Catholic Irish lose their lands, they
would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of

(15:55):
the Protestant clergy. Not surprisingly, in a land where the
poet is both feared and revered, Native Irish resentment at
the superimposition of Protestantism found its expression, and a bitter
verse by Rafferty, the famous blind Irish poet, don't talk
of your Protestant minister or his church without temple or state,
for the foundation stone of his religion was the bollox

(16:15):
of Henry the Eighth. Well, pretty good little poem. That's
good that I would love to see. Like, man, I
wish there was like an alternate, like sort of multiverse
timeline where the Irish just rejected the idea of joining whiteness.
It's just if they're just like you know what, man, nah,
fam nah, you know what I'm saying, Like, I just

(16:37):
wonder like where we would be at now. Obviously our
understanding of race being so intermixed with like colorism and
stuff like that, But what if the influence was just
like buck y'all, nah, we ain't one of you, I'm saying,
because of ship like this, where it's like not only
did y'all try to colonize us, you even tried to like,
I mean, y'all sprayes off faith on us to you
know what I'm saying, which was like and then you

(16:58):
were like actually yeah yeah, it's like first of all,
like yeah, just you a subversion of our all fair
you act like you invented something, you know what I'm saying.
So like man ed have been. I would have loved
to have seen some sort of like alternate time line
where Irish were just like black people, like we were
just like well, and there's I mean there's a lot

(17:19):
that like because one of the things that happens. You know,
you've got Aliver Cromwell who invades Ireland, and like if
you look at the Irish countryside, one thing you might
notice is that like there's weirdly not a lot of
like old growth forests or wild animals because they got murdered,
like like Cromwell like kills the land to a significant extent.

(17:43):
It's like pretty there's a lot of like horrible, terrible,
fucked up war crimes that go on in this period
um and a lot of it's seen as like I
said a little earlier that like there was this attitude
of like there's a lot of like pagan wildness in Ireland.
That doesn't mean that like Christianity isn't there, right, the
Normans of the Catholicture don't bring Christianity to Ireland. It's
been there for quite a while. But there's also this

(18:04):
attitude that like, um, there's something kind of like feral
about the Irish people. You see that a lot in
kind of the way in which these people write about
Ireland in this time. Um, and there is I think
an extent like again, a lot has been written and
that's not really not the focus of this episode, and
like how the Irish became white? And I'm fairly certain

(18:24):
there's actually a book by that title. Um, yeah, But
I learned a lot of that in like my like
undergrad studies, like that the process of like disenfranchising slaves
and like when the it's good stuff and like Shea's
Rebellion and all this stuff that like kind of tied
to whiteness at least in the America's Yeah, but it
is important, like a lot of that does happen in

(18:45):
the Americas because when you actually look in Ireland, there
is as much as there's histories of other things, there
is a significant history of like rejection of aspects of
that identity, and you see little signs of that and
a bunch of things, including the fact that if you
go to like a football game in Ireland day, there's
a decent chance you go to see a lot of
Palestinian flags. There's a long history of like kind of
solidarity and whatnot that comes with being a colonized people. Um,

(19:08):
that's not the only thing, because also it's worth noting
that as with like the Scots, shipload of the soldiers
of the British Empire who were doing this whole making
an empire thing are Irish people too. So it's it's
a bunch of stuff is happening. Um. So English domination
of Ireland was not a clean process that didn't happen
all at once. This is going on for a period
of kind of centuries. It's being sort of ironed out.

(19:31):
As a rule. Irish lords ruled most of the land
in Ireland through the twelve hundreds to the early like
sixteen hundreds. Um. And you know it's the stuff we've
been talking about. There's fighting in between these different lords,
there's alliances. Some of them are like backing the English
to like funck over their neighbors. Pretty normal feudalism stuff. Um.
Celtic Ireland, as it's generally called, was divided between four

(19:54):
or five lords at any given time the bulk of
the land um, and they distributed like the land that
was under their control to lower chiefs into like accepts
the in in what we're called land usages and in
exchange for this land. Basically again, it's the pretty normal
feudalism deal. You've got a hand over a portion of
your agricultural produced for the lord, and if there's a war,

(20:16):
you've got to like help, you know, give him bodies.
Basically standard. Yeah, you've got these guys and they got there,
they got their guys. Um. It's it's pretty normal, pretty
normal feudalism stuff, which is not all that different from
organized crime, but with better outfits. Um yeah, like most government. Um. So,
Henry the Eighth becomes king as we discussed, and he

(20:37):
kind of staggers dick first into the history of religion. Um,
that's crazy, Like there was a way I would love
to be there for the Henry the Eighth story that well,
maybe we'll get to that at one point. That's a
little further back than we usually do. All probably Cromwell.
Probably do Cromwell before we do Henry, because I mean
Cromwell's after. But you know, yeah, I'm just like, listen,

(20:59):
if there's any like sort of if you are, if
you are a Christian or Protestant in any way, shape
or form like you there's no in I don't care
what schout theology is, your hat has to go off
to him to eight. It's an incredible flex like in
that completely, that's amazing. He got to start a denomination

(21:19):
just because because because he needed the pool Namby, he
invented the what is it the Anglican Hirian? Yeah, because
they wanted to fuck differently this look in respect? Do
I like, there's the human humans sit out theology down
for a second? Respect due bro, Yeah, it's it's it's pretty,

(21:41):
it's pretty. It's pretty cool. So one of the things
that Henry the Eighth does because he's he's he's not
happy that the Irish aren't willing to give up their
religion because he wanted to fuck um. And there's other
stuff like there's a lot of like Irish raids on
the English coast. There's kind of fighting with in Ireland.
So anyway, he decides Ireland has been a troublesome food

(22:03):
quite enough time, and and he makes a declaration that
all Irish lands, whether they're owned by Gaelic, Irish or
English transplants, have to descender, have to surrender their their
land to the Crown, and then the Crown's going to
give them back. Right. So what he's doing, he's not
actually trying to take their land away, but he's trying
to make it clear that everyone who owns land in
Ireland owns it through the King of England. Right. Um,

(22:26):
that's pretty that's pretty mobster right there. He wants everybody
to um con bend the knee, you know that. Yeah. Um,
So the Irish, a lot of people in Ireland, i
should say, aren't super happy with this, right Um it's
and and so they rebel and this kicks off a
series of wars that go throughout like the early sixteen hundreds.

(22:47):
There's a number of rebellions. One of them is led
by a guy named Dodoherty. Uh and in sixteen o
eight he loses this rebellion and he had owned like
he was one of these guys who's owned a shipload
of irelansh Irish land. Um and because he loses this rebellion,
all of the land he's owned is granted to the
Lord Deputy, a guy named Author Chichester, which is virtually

(23:08):
Chichester's a name and both as a first and a
last name that you're going to hear a couple of
times in this story. I had never heard it before,
this terrible name. Terrible name, not like Authority, which is
a good name. I like, it's pretty like it's it's
always fun, always fun saying to say in Irish names. Um,
so England had only kind of I mean, part of

(23:30):
how England wins the victories in these wars. They're finding
it's not just them coming in as as will be
the case with like all of their colonial wars. They're
not just sending in an army and crushing the local opposition.
They are allying with Irish rebels, right, and they're kind
of playing these different chieftain or not with rebels, but
they're playing these different chieftains off each other. So some
of these Irish chieftains stay loyal to the crown and

(23:51):
they fight on behalf of the crown against other Irish people, right,
And that's how it's it's going to be the same
in Africa, right with these peeps like the King's African
rifles and whatnot. You know, that's where we get our
idiom means and whatnot is these colonial soldiers who are
getting played against other you know, indigenous people's. Um. Yeah,
it's a bummer, it's a real bummer. And this is
not I had said previously that Ireland's kind of the

(24:13):
first colony of England. That doesn't mean it's the first
place that the English like conquer. That's not England, right,
because they take whales and they take Scotland first, right. Um.
But those again, there's people probably in both places who
will argue. But I think there's a difference with what
happens in those places and what happens in Ireland that
makes Ireland more of a colony situate. Because people always

(24:35):
are conquering each other, right, they do it everywhere. They
do it in Africa, the New China, they all every
every group of human beings. There have been some who
have like conquered others. What what we start to see
happening in this developing colonial period is different. And one
of the things that's really different is that when when
the English, you know, take have to fight their fights
with Scotland. The same thing happens where there's groups of

(24:56):
nobles in Scotland who sided with the English English Crown
and help crackdown and rebellions, and there's groups that rebel.
The same thing happens in Wales. But once those wars
are over, the Welsh and scott lords who had sided
with the English crown get a piece of the pie, right,
Like they get integrated to a signific pretty significant extent,

(25:17):
and like the ruling class of this this forming thing
that's going to become the United Kingdom. Um. And so
a lot of these Irish chieftains who side with the
crown think like, well, something like this is going to
happen with us, right, which seems like a good deal.
You know, it's not going bad for these these folks. Yeah,
it's like it's it's when assimilation works, yeah, right, It's
like we'll just assimilate you into the culture and everything's

(25:39):
everything's fine. Yeah, And it seems like this is the
I mean yeah, and and and that's kind of what
a lot of these folks who have sided with the
crown expect to happen in Ireland. It's not how things
work out, and I want to quote next from the
book The Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen.
The option for racial oppression left no room in the
ranks of the colonial upper crap upper class for Catholic

(26:00):
Irish chieftains, for all that some of them might wear
the titles sir. The English therefore proceeded systematically with the
repudiation of their promises to their Irish wartime allies, whether
they had been enemies or allies in the Tyrone War,
whether they flew to arms or merely protested at court.
The Irish of chieftain class were to be demoted socially
to the status of no more than small landlords, politically

(26:21):
excluded from posts of authority, and placed socially beyond the
pale of British respectability, tannistry and gavel kind. The Celtic
forms of succession and inheritance were outlawed. Irish chieftains might
be expropriated and put to death for making an appeal
based on Celtic law, and the practice of the Catholic
religion was outlawed. Britain's were forbidden to acquire land from Britain's,

(26:41):
that is, English or Scots they were to get it
from the Irish. In the sixest sheeted Ulster counties, only
a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep
as much as one thousand acres of land. They just yeah,
it's so bad, and it's like, I know, I'm looking
back at history, you know, I'm kind of like Monday
more quarterback in here, but like it just seems so arbitrary.

(27:04):
Of this is wrapped up in the Catholicism Anglicans split.
It's got to be that, right, because I'm un it.
I mean, like because again, like to this day, like
you know, with the ways people feel about Italians where
I'm like, why not domn I'm like, is it what
they don't count? I'm like, is it? Is it that? Anyway? Yeah,

(27:25):
it has to be the religion thing and then being
able to fold that into your your construction of yeah,
because it starts, it doesn't And it's just that like
these initial divisions, uh, and the kind of conflicts they
spawn just keep deepening over time, because it doesn't until
the Irish are even more than just sort of a subject,

(27:46):
a subject people um seen as like a conquered people
who have to be kind of brutally kept in their place.
Like this is a kind of an evolving understanding. None
of this happens overnight. Um, And I'm like, but yeah,
by and large, I'm like, relatively speaking, the space between
the British and the Irish is like l A and

(28:08):
the Valley. Like, yeah, there's there's suburbs in the United
States that are closer to their cities of origin than
like or further than like Dublin is from from London. Yeah,
it's not even it's not even like to San Francisco.
It's not even lay San Francisco. I'm like, yo, like
day day round the corner, Like, yeah, there's I think,

(28:31):
like Kanye's farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of
the landmass we're talking about here. Yeah, I'm just like
it's only um, yeah, they're not far away, but like
in terms of like the cultural differences, it is pretty vast,
and it's growing this period in part because English elites
really come to despise the Irish as a race. Lord

(28:52):
Chichester um who wound up I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.
I'm sure something like Jerry or some ship. Because it's
English names, it's always like what no of course you
pronounced Chichester. Chichester. It's pronounced you know. Yeah, okay, I'm
reading one. For reading the letters on the page, for
trusting the way you wrote this, that's I mean. I'm sorry, Yeah,

(29:14):
I'm sorry. I didn't. I didn't realize it was pronounced
lester because it's not at all spelled like lester. There's
there's not an L anywhere in here, and that's why
I thought there wasn't pronounced lester. It's one of those things,
like whales. You look at the way things are spelled
in Welsh and it makes like I would never even
try to pronounce those, but at least they don't. They
aren't pretending to be something friending. You look at a

(29:36):
Welsh where and you're like, okay, well, I don't know
how to say that. You look at the word for
lester and it's like, oh, well that looks like a
thing that I should be able to just read. But no, exactly, Nope. Anyway, whatever,
we don't trust you. We'll talk about this racist asshole
in a second. We're back. So, Lord Chichester, who winds

(29:59):
up in possession of that rebel Adoherty's land? He writes
shortly thereafter quote I have often said and written, it
is famine which must consume the Irish. Our swords and
other endeavors work not for that speedy effect which is
effect expected for the overthrow. So even in it, in
this period of time, the sixteen hundreds, you have English

(30:19):
lords being like there's too many Irish, they're too quarrelsome
we got an engineer of famine, right, like, just to video, y'alls,
there's too many of Starvation is going to be the
best way to deal with these people. British thanos and
a lot of English nobility are going to spend quite
a bit of time engineering. Really, what's a series of disasters?

(30:41):
Because before the Great Hunger there are a couple of
other pretty terrible famines, one of which kills hundreds of
thousands of people. We just don't talk about it much
anymore because the Great Hunger is even worse. Um, But
you know, I want to talk about like how they
did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of
this landlording system that arises over the course of a

(31:02):
couple of centuries in Ireland. Um. Now, we we chat
on this show pretty regularly about serfdom, which is a
social situation that existed in a lot of Europe throughout
the medieval period and existed in Russia until the eighteen sixties. Right,
Russia doesn't free their serfs until right around when UM
the Amounts of Patient Proclamation is signed there within a

(31:23):
couple of years of each other. UM and serfdom is
a type of slavery. It's not nearly as bad as
like chattel slavery in North America, UM in part because
obviously one of the worst things about chattel slaveries families
get split up. Right, you can like sell individuals from
families and separate them from their loved ones. Surfs are
bound to the land, so they are part of the

(31:45):
property parcel that you own, So you can't like split
up families outside of like drafting people to go fight
in wars, which which absolutely does happen and is pretty unpleasant. UM.
But it does mean like the downside of being a
surf is that you're not really free, you can't leave,
you can't really do anything but be a serf. The
upside is that number one, you're not you're not really
paying rent. You know, like you can't get kicked off

(32:06):
the land because yeah, yeah, I've always I've always explained
it like, okay, you know when you when you like
if you're renting an apartment and the apartment has a
stove watching machine, like it's already there, Like it just
it kind of comes with the apartment, you know what
I mean. It's like it's a surf. Yeah, they're kind

(32:29):
of like you just come with the land when I
buy it, you know. Yeah, it's I'm sure this will
happen in like another three years. But imagine if your
landlord owned you, and that meant that you had to
do what your landlord said and work in whatever job
they wanted you to work. But you also couldn't get evicted. Um,
so it would be a kick you out, but you

(32:49):
also can't move. Yeah, exactly, So it sucks. But also
it's really where I'm bringing all this up to say
that like as bad as Serfdom was, it is vastly
superior to what Irish peasants are enduring from the sixteen
hundreds and seventeen hundreds. I think it's important to like,
for you know, future reference for any any listener, especially

(33:10):
like the type of listeners that you and I have
to when you talk about slavery to understand sort of
the gradient of types of slavery, and I think yeah,
like on one end of the spectrum is sort of
like yeah, like a like a conquered village, you know
what I mean, Um, and you're taking the warriors to
do something or some sort of like serfdom if you will,

(33:32):
all the way to this, Yeah, well the humans are
prob where humans are are cattle like, so that's like
chattel slavery, you know what I'm saying, Like there's a
a scale, you know what I mean, If you will,
it's really important because a lot of the especially folks
who want to minimize chattel slavery that exists in the
United States, they'll be like, well, slavery exists everywhere and
it's always bad, which is like saying war exists everywhere

(33:53):
and it's always bad. It's like, yeah, but different kinds
of wars others like yes, like desert storm war is bad,
but desert storm was not as bad as for example,
the German innovation of Russia. It was worse than the other.
And it's like, yeah, like Roman, and there's often gradients,
Like we talk about ancient Roman slavery. There were slaves

(34:16):
in ancient Rome who would have who would have felt
very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America.
These would have been slaves working on the lat of Fundia,
which were these massive agricultural plantations or in the minds,
and these are terrible lives for these slaves and they're
worked to death and it's it's really a miserable situation.
But a lot of slaves in ancient Rome would have
been more or less we're working internships, like and they're

(34:39):
not even unpaid, like they're getting paid a lot. Like
you when when you get freed and you had you
would get free generally before too much time as like
a household slave or like, yeah, like people would people,
particularly educated Greeks, would sell themselves into slavery to become
teachers for rich people because it was like a better life.
So it's not like if you're like, you can't just say,
like slavery in Rome was this because there are a

(35:00):
bunch of different types of slate and anyway, totally we're
getting off the subject. Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah,
but I think that's a very important distinction, especially like
when you're trying, like you said, having a cultural dialogue
with somebody about, like I said, minimizing the experience of
one person sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to
where you like it. It really is different though. Yeah,
it's worth understanding that because the Irish in this period

(35:22):
they're not slaves in any way. Um, but also in
there's a degree to which there's certainly worse off in
most ways than surfs. Um. It's because of this landlording
system that evolves. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, like this period,
there there's this process of the Celtic feudal system being
dismantled piece by piece and ownership of the land being

(35:42):
transferred to English landlords, most of whom were what you'd
call absentee landlords. Right, they don't live in Ireland. Thankfully
that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody here pays rent. Nobody listening
to the show pays rent to somebody who lives far away,
and it's just kind of collecting a check. That doesn't
happen anymore, but it did in this period. It never happened.
So first of first I couldn't follow you. I was like, wait,

(36:04):
that he's making a joke. I'm yeah, I'm just being
a lass. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, England confiscates more
than three million acres of land um. And yeah, this
this during this period of time, Irish peasants changed from
being more or less in a similar position to peasants
in a lot of Europe to being renters um and

(36:26):
this winds up being a lot worse under what can
to be called the Middleman system. And there's a couple
of different ways that this kind of works. It's not
the same across all of Ireland. But one of the
ways in which this works is called the Middleman system.
And in this English people acquire land which they then
let to a fixed rate to a single english person
who lives in Ireland. So the land is like owned
by an english person who lives outside the island, and

(36:48):
then they basically lease it to an English person who
lives in Ireland and works as like a property manager,
and he sub lets the property to peasants. These are
This is a very modern system in a lot a
lot of this is gonna sound very familiar, not to like,
I'm not trying to compare this to like rental situation
people living in San Francisco. It's obviously, like not not
to minimize the horror what's happening in Ireland, but like

(37:10):
legally on paper, there's there's some real similarities between and
in part because like what is figured out in this
period of time spreads in a lot of ways, like
a lot of the different attitudes towards how leasing and
renting and stuff should totally kind of being invented in
this period um. So the middleman system allows landlords to
profit handily off of Irish land and labor without actually

(37:31):
seeing the people they're exploiting. You know, that's up to
the middleman to do the direct exploiting, so you can
just kind of take the cash. Another system that is
popular in chunks of Ireland is called land tenure um
and in this system, absentee landlords rent small tracts of
land directly to peasants without a middleman um and over
the course of two hundred years or so, there's kind
of some different ways that this works, but the ultimate

(37:52):
result is that most Irish peasants, like three million people
by the time the Great Hunger starts, wind up living
on these very very small plots of land. We'll talk
about this more later, but they keep getting divided up
more and more over time. Um in his nineteen sixty
two text The Great Hunger historian Cecil Wouldham Smith, which
is a very English name for a guy who's who's

(38:15):
writing a very critical book about the Great Hunger proper
Cecil Smith. Um, I just can't get over some of
these names anyway. The land Uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna
quote from Cecil, who I think is actually a pretty
good historian. The land system, thus introduced, was a method
of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of
holding in subjection of the common people. Ireland was a

(38:37):
conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his
landlord and alien conqueror. So while it is tempting and
to some extent worthwhile to again note some similarities with
our modern landlording system, it's also important to see how
unique this system was. The English crown is essentially using
a really decentralized network of landholding arrangements to dispossess the

(38:59):
Irish peasant, and this ensures if you don't own your farm,
you can't ever make anything extra right. Like you know what,
We'll talk again this a bit more. But like it.
It ensures the fact that nobody owns anything and the
fact that people don't have any permanent ties to the
land that they're born and raised on, um means makes

(39:20):
it very hard for peasants to put together the resources
or have the stability that could lead to organized resistance.
It doesn't make it impossible, there is organized resistance at periods,
but it makes it a lot harder. Um. It also
makes it it's very another thing that's very familiar, yes, exactly.
And obviously when this, when aspects of this system get

(39:40):
taken over to other parts of the world, they get
a lot worse, right, Like, it's definitely worse for other
people outside of Ireland when some of these things are
like morphed but you can see shades of the tactics
that the British Empire would use everywhere here um, and
shades of like what the United States is going to
do to indigenous people, you know, right, Like there's elements

(40:02):
of that in here um because it's you know, it's
a lot of things being tested. Yeah. Um. So English
land laws are imported to Ireland, and these laws quote
pushed to their extreme the rights of landlords and conceded
nothing to the occupiers in respect of their customary rights.
Under the old Irish customs, Irish renters did not get
to lease the land they lived on. There are no

(40:24):
leases in this period, so everyone is at will, which
means you can be evicted at any moment for any
reason or no reason at all. Um, there's no warning
that has to be given. It doesn't like you can
be paying your rent and they can still kick you off.
It doesn't matter. Um. Tenants also received no kind of
compensation for improving the land that they farmed. So a

(40:44):
big part of farming, if you've ever farmed, is to
like do things over time that make your land more
productive and like increase your yield and make what you're
on more valuable and also more capable of more easily
providing a more food, both for money and for taking
care of your yourself of the people who live there.
You there's no point in doing that if you're an

(41:06):
Irish Irish tenant farmer. Um. We'll get into that a
little bit more too, But like because you you own nothing, um,
It's it's good for people to have a sense of
ownership and the things that they live in. Like, it's
it's broadly positive so yeah, I was just like why
why I'm now now I'm curious as to like, why

(41:28):
do they why would you think that this like would
be successful? Well like that, Yeah, but I'm like just
in the initial thinking of like I would want if
I own the land I wouldn't want, and I and
own a land in a place that I don't even
live and I probably ain't seen in years, I would

(41:48):
want to make sure that that land is getting better.
So I'm like, so I'm like, make my land better
just because I'm telling you to, or just like I
just thought. Maybe I'm just again modern eyes where I
was like, man, I would want to incentivize, like yo,
keep avocado. You know what I'm saying, Like, hey, if

(42:09):
you could pick my soil, I want to take one
of my avocados for yourself, Like I would think to me,
I don't know what I'm saying. There there are that
there are some landlords, because again we're we're talking abroad here,
there are certainly landlords who like offer better deals to
people and who do try to encourage, you know, like
I'm never going to kick you guys off, like you
can improve your land that that happens to But but

(42:30):
broadly speaking, it does not happen on a wide scale,
and we're going to talk about why. But this is
very much a conscious decision that people are making, and
there's it's a mix of ideology. We're going to talk
about some aspects of like free market capitalism are being invented.
So a big part of the fear here is that
if you create a situation by which people would want
to improve their land, that's by definition a situation which

(42:52):
they have more control over the land they live on,
which means you are violating the sacred property rights of
the lord. Right. That's a big chunk of of why
they don't want that to exist. Because yeah, yeah, we're
we're gonna get Adam Smith is going to come into
this story in a big way not not too long
from now. So, but obviously we're not there yet. Six

(43:16):
nine Adam Smith is just a glimmer in I don't
know some other Smith's I at this point. So, uh,
William of Orange in sixteen nine beats the Catholic king
James the Second at the Battle of the boyne Um,
and this spells the end of organized Catholic power in
Ireland and is seen by Protestants in Northern Ireland as
kind of like an Independence day sort of situation. Battle

(43:37):
of the Boyne is a big thing for the Protestants
in Northern Ireland. Um. And again it's often seen as like, yeah,
you have this like fight between the Catholics and the Protestants,
and the Catholics lose and and it it leads to
a lot of tragedy. It's again, as is always the
case with Irish history, much messier than that, because the
reality is that the Pope in Rome actually backs William

(43:57):
of Orange against the Catholic King James as part of
a strategic scheme to funk with King Louis of France. Um.
And he secretly funnels the modern equivalent of three and
a half million pounds sterling to William. Money that's spent
on swords and muskets to kill Catholic isn't it. Yeah,
And we don't find it. We we didn't learn this

(44:18):
until documents were uncovered in two thousand eight. Like for
in terms of like to give you an idea of
like how good the fucking Catholic churches and both documenting
ship and keeping it lockdown. This happens in sixteen ninety
and it doesn't drop until two thousand eight. Dog, the
US government's bad at FOIA requests. Do you understand what

(44:38):
I'm saying? I just heard today. I just heard day
Trump out there hiding seven hours like phone content, Like, okay,
see if you can keep that hidden for full honey years.
Popes like that's that, that's j V ship. Yeah, Popes
like Rookie Cookies, rich shirt. There wasn't even be United

(44:59):
States when we started covering up war. Cry you need
you need country. Yeah, we we've got. We're hiding ship
older than your concept of of of society. Yeah we got.
We got dudes, old, sacred and your constitution gotta love it.
Throughout the early seventeen hundreds, the Irish peasantry languished better

(45:23):
off than slaves, but worse off in a lot of
ways than surfs. The fact that landlords could increase rent
whenever they wanted meant it was pointless again to try
and farm for cash crops worth much more like there's
not a lot. There's not a point in massively increasing
your yields or improving the land because they can change
your rented will. So if they see, oh they doubled
their productivity this year, I'm gonna double rent, So why

(45:45):
would you do that? Why would you put in that?
Why would you exactly? So you you pay in in produce. Yeah,
generally basically right like you're because you're you're farming. You
are a farmer, so you're farming both to feed yourself
and you are farming to pay your rent. I mean,
if you've got this middleman, you can't just be like
hide and corn somewhere. But it's harder because he's and

(46:06):
there's there's obviously there's always local collaborators whose jobs like
you know, um, and there's also the people always do
get away with ship right the same you know, we're
flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of
history to cover here, of course, and you have what's
what's a what's ahead of lettuce between friends? Yeah, but
there's there's also so not only there's no point in
like massively increasing your yields as a farmer, because they'll

(46:27):
just up your taxes, but there's also not much of
a point in improving the land because if you make
the land a lot better, then your landlord will kick
you out and we'll sprint it to someone else for
more money. Yep. You know, like why why why would you? Um? Now,
historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress
under the feudal system, this is everywhere that there is

(46:48):
a feudal system, is that like this is broadly a
thing that happens in feudalism. Feudal lords in a lot
of Europe throughout the medieval period have fairly little incentive
to invest in or improve their lands. If you may
like a region a lot more agriculturally productive or whatever, UM,
then number one, it looks more enticing for your rifles
to attack and try to take. But also the money

(47:09):
that you invest in improving that land is less money
that you're spending on your military. You know, if you're
smart and careful, over time it can work out for you.
But it's like a risk. You're taking a gamble if
you if you divert resources for that UM. And this
is one of the reasons why feudalism doesn't you know,
people find other things to do, because it's it's not
great for all kinds of progress, right, like I think

(47:31):
I do like And one of the things that's interesting
is England has even though there's a king, still they've
moved beyond this system in this period. That's part of
why they conquer the world, right, as they developed kind
of new systems that are more conclusive to the kind
of progress that is beneficial. Um. But with this system
of absentee landlords that they put in place over Ireland,
they find a way to deny the Irish any benefits

(47:52):
of modernization. UM. When enterprising irishmen try to make a
life for themselves in other ways besides farming, the Crown
cracks down on their ambitions. In the Famine plot, Tim
pat Coogan rights, Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest.
Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing and woolen industries
were taxed out of existence when they came into competition

(48:13):
with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which
led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America.
So like, not only is it a ship situation for farmers,
but whenever people try to do anything else, try to
go into business or whatever, that gets destroyed via like
taxing or via like different there's different ways the government
has a fucking this over in order to protect English businesses.

(48:37):
You know, you know when there's no way out for
the Irish. Really. There's even this brief period in the
early eighteen hundreds where they're starting to industrialize more and
the the the number of Irish people who are kind
of like working in these factory jobs, industrial jobs, the
don off industrial revolution is increasing and then it plummets
right before the Great Hunger. And part of that is

(48:57):
that like, well, we don't want Irish industry to compete
with British, like we want to sell them that stuff
for one thing, Like that's not why they're they're they're
not there to develop their island into you know, a
lot of Yeah, and we're talking are like are we
we're still talking like Ireland as a whole? Are we
talking Northern Ireland? Were Yeah, We're it's just Ireland at

(49:17):
this polet. I mean, it's it's it's it's all under
the control of the crown, right. So there are like
what you've got up in the north, like places like
Ulster in particular. Ulster is basically founded as a colony
of English people in Ireland. Um, so yeah, you do.
And again this is kind of like Ulster is founded
right along the same time. It's like so that like

(49:38):
the English, you're founding colonies in the east coast of
North America, so they're actually kind of colonizing Ireland in
similar ways to how they're colonizing the America's at around
the same period of time. UM. So obviously all this
the fact that England is kind of hamstringing Irish growth
has impacts beyond just keeping the Irish downtrodden. Um. English

(49:59):
landlords could have been proved this situation while remaining into
control in control if they'd agreed to enter into contracts
with their tenants like leases, that would maybe limit their
ability to increase rent or evict people. But they weren't
willing to do this, and that's part of why there
can be no progress. In a paper for the Marquette
Law Review, Cynthia Smith writes, because the landlord's goal was
to extract as much money from the land as possible,

(50:20):
any contractual agreement with tenants would have been an obstacle
to this rent seeking. In addition to rent seeking, there
were a number of reasons why English landlords neglected to
invest in their holdings in Ireland. The small size of holdings,
the uncertain political situation, general economic conditions, and the availability
of more lucrative investment alternatives. All of these factors may
have contributed to the landlord's reluctance to improve. Landlords were

(50:42):
further deterred from investing because they were already making a
substantial profit on the rent collected on the unimproved land. Finally,
landlords neglected to make improvements because they feared that tenants
would use the investments so intensively that the value of
the improvement would depreciate it too high a rate. Misuse
of an improvement was likely to occur when tenants had
no security of tenure. However, if tenants had been given
some security, misuse would not have been a problem because

(51:04):
tenants would have been in the process of maximizing their
net income and used the improvement optimally. So there's like
a number of different ways this could work, and this
is how things work in a lot of other parts
of Europe that are modernizing. Um. But the absolutely, yeah,
it's slum lording ship on the scale of an entire people, right, yeah,
Like they England has turned Ireland into a slum um

(51:27):
so that they can lord over it. Now. The backwardness
of pre famine agriculture in Ireland caused by the inefficient investment.
Of This becomes apparent when Ireland's labor productivity in eighteen
forty five is compared to English labor productivity. Um, Like,
British people are like twice as productive as Irish people

(51:48):
in eighteen forty five, Like if you're kind of like
looking at them as economic units. Um. And this is
because there's just been no development that's been allowed to occur, um,
not none, but very little. But even that scale or
comparison is like it's so infuriating. It's like, well, look
we're more productive than y'all, Like, well I wonder why, yeah, yeah, Well,

(52:11):
and this is going to justify it's going to be
used to justify a lot of racism against the Irish
because like, well, look they're not very productive, like they
just can't keep up with the modern society or whatever. Um. So,
landlords find that the easiest way to increase profits from
generation to generation is to further subdivide their lots, which
allows them to rent to even greater numbers of the

(52:32):
growing Irish population. And these peasants again, these people who
live in these renting situations, they make their living by
growing different grains and other kind of like export crops,
and then those crops are exported and that's what pays
their rent. Since rent race is constantly but their amount
of land is fixed and in fact often shrinking. Irish
peasants are caught in this unwinnable cycle of increasing poverty,

(52:54):
and the desperation of their situation leads them to embrace
a recent import from the New World potatoes. Now we
talk a lot, I mean there's a lot of like
talk in popular culture about Ireland and the potato. Obviously,
the potato comes from again the New World. It's not
like a native to Ireland. The reason why they adopt

(53:14):
it so quickly is that the potato is one of
the very few single foods on Earth that can be
you can live off of nothing but potatoes if that's
all that you have, you can you can especially different
kinds of potatoes. There's all sorts of different strains. Some
of them have different kinds of nutritional values. But um
potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff like they have
what you need to not iohold you. I think I

(53:35):
got through a year in college on French fries. Yeah. Yeah, no,
I acnology. I I could live off a potato. Yeah,
And they also grow, and you can grow it in
really bad soil. So the way in which these plots
are subdivided each like family, you know whatever, farming in it,
however you want to phrase it has like a small

(53:56):
chunk in the land that they live on has a
small chunk of like good land, and then usually like
bogs and stuff and like hillsides that's less good for growing.
And so one of the things you can do with
potatoes is in the good land you have, you can
grow ship like corn that you're going to export and sell,
and in your ship land you can just sew potatoes
and those will keep you alive. Right. Potatoes also aren't

(54:18):
worth anything as an export crop. They're just not worth
selling really, um. So it also it's what you eat
because you can't profit off of it. It's just win
win man like it does. Yeah, yeah, especially because I'm
like I will Okay, this is a bit of a tangent,
but I will defend to my grave in and out fries.

(54:38):
I know everybody talks they're not bad, they're bad. I
like them. I think it's because, yeah, you know why,
because they taste like potatoes. I feel like everybody arguing
over fries like, I'm like you eating wax and salt
and you think, of course that's gonna taste great because
it's yeah and potatoes. Now look, I look, who's your

(55:00):
top five fry? Don't lose your place top five fries.
I have strong opinions about this. I mean, I really like,
I'm a waffle fry guy, and I haven't eaten there
in a long time, but I do. I did love
Chick fil A back in the day when I was
a younger man. I haven't had their fries in like
ten years, so I don't know. Maybe they're not as
as good as No, they're still they still slap. I'm
less that's a good choice fries. I was like, No,

(55:24):
I was about to say, I was just about to say,
wing stop. We had him yesterday. One thing incredible because
they taste like potatoes and are actually seasoned. They taste
like season potatoes. Here's here's a little tip that I do.
Sometimes I'll get those five guys fries and then this
is key. You know that that like spicy chili oil
you can get from Creator Joe's. Yes, I put a

(55:46):
bunch of them in like a baking pan. I get
like a tablespoon of chili oil. Dollop it over there,
smear it all around the potatoes, pop them in the
oven at three fifty for like ten minutes to crisp
them up with the fucking it's slaps. It's good. You
just changed my life because I'm like, I am definitely
the like, don't leave your fries around me, you know
what I'm saying. Don't like don't walk away from your plate.

(56:09):
Don't look away. I'm taking your fries. We all love potatoes. Now.
The problem is and and and also it's worth noting
it may not sound like eating nothing but potatoes is
a very healthy diet Irish people. One of the things
that is noted in this period is that they tend
to be larger and seemingly healthier than English people of
a similar socio economic class. And it's because they're they
they they're they're eating a lot of potatoes, which, compared

(56:32):
to like a lot of the diets available to people
at the time without money, is one of the better
options for being relatively healthy. Also, the English cuisine just man, yeah,
we don't. We don't need to talk about British food,
like I was like, man, I do like Irish breakfast though,
I'll give I think the Irish are one of the
better breakfast making peoples of the world. You know who

(56:55):
else makes good breakfast? Well? I was going to do Yeah,
I was like, well about that island where you hunt? Okay,
Sophie is angry at me now, so here's ads. All right.
So we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are, and
they are and how like it's actually not again comparing

(57:17):
I'm not talking trying to say an objective modern terms,
but based on the kind of diets available back then,
living off potatoes in this period is not a bad
way to make a go of it. Um. But one
of the issues is that over time on Ireland everyone
gravitates to growing just one single strain of potato because
it's the best one for the It produces the best yields,

(57:39):
and it's the most nutritious. It's called the lumper. It's
not particularly tasty, but it is your works the biggest
bang for your buck and towards of like calories you
can grow per square whatever. Um. So this works for
a while, right, Like, while the lumper is growing, well,
this is great because people get a lot of food
and people like not starving to death. The problem is

(58:02):
that if you're if everyone is growing one kind of potato,
then you have what's called a mono culture. I was
just about to say, it's not like monocultures ain't good.
I just left the coffee farm uh in Colombia and
they were talking a lot about biocultures and monocultures and
like like just just to add to your existential dread. Uh.

(58:22):
According to these like expert coffee farmers, they're like, look,
we got about maybe thirty more harvests in US unless
we start doing more like bioculture, you know, multi culture.
This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right
whenever you do it's that there's like monocultures. If I'm
not mistaken, people will point out that like one reason
why banana flavored candy tastes so unlike bananas is that

(58:45):
it was based on the flavor of a banana that
basically doesn't exist anymore because they all got wiped out
and now we eat a different kind of banana. Um.
You look into the history of farming bananas, it's wild.
But the good thing about when a plague wipes out
all of the bananas is that like for a while
people don't get bananas, Like it's an economic problem for people.
But I don't think many people have commercially farmed bananas

(59:09):
as the vast majority, if not the entirety, of their
nutritional existence, right. Um. Not to minimize the problem that
a banana blight causes. UM, but you can see how
this works great for a while, but when you get
a disease that's going to funk over the potato, it's
going to be a problem for Irish people. But also, again,

(59:30):
to go back to what you're saying at the start,
it's not a problem that like there's no food in
Ireland because Irish people are only growing potatoes on a
fairly small chunk of the land they have. Most of
the land they have is going to grow food that
they're going to export in order to make their rent right.
It's important to keep that in mind. So near the
turn of the eighteenth century, resentment and anger over the

(59:51):
suffering under English domination leads to another rebellion in Ireland.
This one is aided by the French who are in
like you know they France and that have been fighting
for like a century almost by the point of which
this happens, yeah, yeahs And France actually tries to land
troops in Ireland twice. They land an army once, but
it doesn't go great for them. Um, it's not real

(01:00:15):
easy to like, if you're France, land an army in
Ireland that's going to be capable of and this this
actually keeps happening for forever. In World War One, the
Germans try to land a ship full of guns on
in Ireland to like and it did a little bit,
but the rebellion that that comes afterwards doesn't work great. Um,
I don't know that that that's the there's a whole story.

(01:00:36):
There are a lot a lot of people try to
land armies or guns in Ireland in order to not
because they particularly care about Irish liberation, but because like
the English, and this seems like an easy way to
screw them up. It never quite works. Um. So when
these French guys, you know, they have their their fight,
and this this kind of the fact that someone's fighting
the English leads a lot of Irish people to be like, well,

(01:00:58):
we might have a shot at like doing something here.
So there's a rebellion. Tim pat Coogan rights. However, rebellion
spearheaded by the United Irishman, was bloodily suppressed. At the time.
It was frequently said that the sev rebellion was secretly
encouraged by direction of the English Prime Minister, William Pitt,
so that it would go off half cocked before the
Society of United Irishman could succeed in their aim of

(01:01:20):
uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter against the Crown. Certainly, English
policy seemed directed at fermenting rather than aboording rebellion. Troops
were forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholic farm owners in the Yeomanry,
the Protestant militia was given a free hand in oppressing
their Catholic neighbors. Fair minded Protestants were outraged at what
they saw on Easter Tuesday, April tenth at Newton Mount

(01:01:40):
Kennedy in County Wicklow. A Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt,
attending the sound the town fair, was sickened to witness
the ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs of the
young women for wearing green stuff petticoats. So like pretty
brutal stuff happening here, like slice and ladies at the
market because they're wearing green and that's Irish stuff. Also,
it's worth noting like one of the things that the

(01:02:01):
British due to piss people off, is forced them to
quarter soldiers in their homes. We joke a lot about
the Quartering Act and about like the what is the
third Amendment like that that you can't quarter soldiers, and
there's like there's a reason why people felt that needed
to be in Yeah, Um, the English love quartering soldiers

(01:02:21):
in your fucking house. Sometimes I'll just drive down the
street past National Guard bases or military bases and just heckle,
just be like, come into my house, motherfucker's that's right,
that's right. I'm give a ship, Marine Corps. You don't
need to stay in my house. Yeah, I got an amendment,
motherfucker's he number three say I ain't got. Sometimes I'll

(01:02:46):
invite like a like a like a lance corporal into
my house and be like, you know what, get the
funk out, never mind, that's right, go get out of here,
Get out of here. Um, I'm gonna continue that quote
from Tim pet Coogan, I respect to historian of the
period has written is the most violent and tragic event
in Irish history between the Jacobite Wars and the Great Famine.

(01:03:07):
In the space of a few weeks, thirty thousand people
peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenseless women and children
were shot down or blown like chaff as they charged
up to the mouth of the cannon. One of the
malicious tactics was pitch capping. A canvas crown was placed
on the head of an insurgent or alleged insurgent, and
boiling tar was poured into the canvas. Around after this
had time to set, the cap was torn off, taking

(01:03:27):
with it much of the croppy's scalp. The term croppy
came from the habit of some insurgents of cropping their
hair in the fashion of the French revolutionists. The hatred
of Protestants for the Catholics was such that the commanding
English general Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he
was defending that he had as little to do with
them as he possibly could. And you'll see this again
later in the famine. Were like British soldiers are horrified

(01:03:48):
at some of the things being done to Irish people.
They never really do anything about it. But they're they're
really really concerned. I wonder how Ambercrombie feels about his
his legacy now, Oh, I think pretty good. I mean
what he thinks of it. Now, I'm saying in the
sense that he's just some sort of douche bag frat
boy style dressing. Now, look, if you were at the

(01:04:10):
head of an army that is burning people scalps off
with pitch and you get to be remembered by shirtless
dudes hanging out in the mall in two thousand six,
that's not the worst way that. I guess that's not
the worst thing to do. But I'm just like, do
you think do you think your little your little shirtless guys,
your frat boys are like they you don't think they're soft,
Like they're not as hard as you were when use

(01:04:30):
meulting fool scalps or you just like that's right, look
at my son. Yeah, I don't know. I mean to
be fair, Abercrombie at Allister caused lots of trauma to
lots of people. It's like if it's like if in
very two hundred years there was like a like a
sexy gene type jeans brand called Himmler's. Yeah. Everybody's like, oh,
you've got some of those Himmlers. Those are good. It's

(01:04:52):
like that their models are hot. Yeah, like oh where, yeah,
you got you got the new you know what I'm saying,
you got you're wearing a Mussolini's I got, Yeah, those
look great. I got the most linear Levins like yeah. Yeah.
So for a decade or so prior to the sevente Rebellion,
there was actually Ireland gets a parliament briefly, I think,

(01:05:15):
for like twelve years, which on paper gives them a
small degree of autonomy from England, but not really because
the parliament in Ireland is only supposed to basically do
what the Parliament in England tells them to. But after
the seventy rebellion, the English are like, well, we can't
even let them have this fake degree of autonomy. So
will William Pitt the Younger bribes Irish parliamentarians to vote

(01:05:37):
for what he called the active Union. And this is
what makes Ireland a part of the United Kingdom. So again,
Ireland votes to join the UK if you ignore all
of the things about it that are not legitimate, you know, yeah,
like a lot of votes in history right, like probably
most votes in his Yeah, I mean the history of
voting is mostly the history of bribery basically is It's

(01:06:00):
crazy though, like it like you mentioned earlier, how like
you go to like a lot of like Irish like
football events and they got like like Palestinian flags. I'm like,
I hope people seeing like how that picture is coming
into play now, like why they would like um, understand
and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland. Like they're

(01:06:21):
like like, I hope is coming together now, like pictures
getting pretty clear, you know, yeah that this this goes
on again where the hundreds of years and uh and
we're still at that, we're at like the middle point
right right if you can even say that's over right,
because there's a lot of people in Ireland, not as
many as there used to be, but you can still
find folks who will be like, look, man, I mean

(01:06:42):
the island is still not united. There's yeah, there's still
some like ship going on. We're not thrilled about. Um.
That's that Most people I know are broadly like, yeah,
you know, it's it's it's certainly a lot better. Yeah,
like the like in this period for sure, that whatever. Yeah,
I mean it is I I did. I think a
lot of folks did take some joy when like Brexit

(01:07:03):
hit and England English passports. Suddenly we're worth a lot
less and some people are like going over to Ireland
to try and get Irish passports, like yeah, that's right,
come crawling back, baby, like long game, guys. So, with
their own imperial propaganda, superior British productivity served as evidence
that the Irish were a lesser race and they deserve

(01:07:25):
to language. Under the guidance of an English power, they
were lampooned as a lazy and shiftless people. Much was
made of the method by which they planted potatoes, and
which were called lazy beds, right like because again, you
don't have to It's like you're just kind of like
dropping them in the dirt, right like that's how potato
farming works. But like the English are like, look, the
Irish are so lazy that they don't want to put

(01:07:46):
in a hard work. They just want to like grow
potatoes and turn them a smarter Yeah. Well and also
just because like well if they were to make more,
you would just take it from you just get why
like you guys again, yeah, it's this infuriating dude, Like
it's pretty not great. Yeah, I'm like it reminds me

(01:08:06):
of which may feel like a stretch, but like follow
me here. It's like we all went to we all
went to We was in school during the time, which
is the same as everybody else's time out. Just like
every class you took in, like history and social studies
was telling you about how socialist countries just don't work, right,
And I'm like, you're telling me this while we're actively

(01:08:27):
paying millions of dollars to destabilize them and then being
able to like we're spending millions of millions of dollars
to make their government's not work and then come tell
our kids, hey see there, the governments don't work. And
it's like, well, full, that's you know why, Like you're
you're just like as anybody like connecting these dots here,

(01:08:47):
it ain't working because you're making it not work right.
So when you're like, oh, man, they're only growing potatoes,
look at them. They're just they're lazy growing potatoes and
they only grow so much. You know why we only
why are we growing potatoes? That's I mean, it's like
you promise people who have been enslaved that they're going
to get farmland and uh forty acres, and then you

(01:09:09):
don't give it to them, and then you develop like
a legal system that arrests huge numbers of them uh
and locks them out of the best jobs. And then
a bunch of them are very impoverished, and you go,
why why don't these people why aren't they better at
making money? Well, maybe you didn't give them a lot
of options. Yeah, you steal from a group of people

(01:09:29):
all of the land that they had lived on, uh
and forced them onto tinier and tinier chunks of land
while killing the vast majority of them. And then you're like, boy,
why are they having such trouble adapting to modern economy? Geezempressed?
Why are they so sad? Yeah, it's it's all again.
It's all variations of the same story, you know. Um

(01:09:51):
so yeah, do do do do so. English media focuses
a lot on how little effort the Irish put into farming,
um why, ignoring the fact that Irish people are growing
cash crops that are exported for the profit of benefit
of English landlords and provide a lot of the food
that England is growing, and in fact, despite a lot
of their backwardness in terms of like agricultural techniques and whatnot.

(01:10:14):
Ireland is continuously increasing productivity in this time um, and
it becomes England's breadbasket. It's also a growing source of
animal products Irish Ireland supplies by eight hundred, Ireland supplies
English cities with three of their beef, se of their butter,
and eight six of their pork. Um just like to

(01:10:35):
name a few things. So like again, the degree to
which all of this is absolutely central to the industrial
revolution in England can't really be overstated because when the
Irish are providing so much food for English people that
get that, among other things, frees up English labor to
work in like these growing factory system and new industrialized
you know. Um. So the misery of life under English

(01:10:59):
domina allows most peasants just two outlets fucking and fighting. Um.
The former explains why the Irish population triples from the
seventeen hundreds of the early eighteen hundreds. Tim pat Coogan
claims that a lot of peasants basically make the decision like,
our lives can't get worse and birth controls not a thing, right,
so we might as well might as well fuck you know,

(01:11:21):
like what else is there? Um, And this is part
of why there's a birth explosion. There's also like potatoes
are a pretty good thing to eat, and so there
is calories, right, there's food for a while too. So
for a number of reasons, the Irish population just blows
up from about seventeen hundreds about eighteen hundred again like triples. Um.
And the other thing that develops over time is like

(01:11:43):
a very weird kind of fighting culture. And this is
like there's a lot of racial stereotypes um about like
the Irish people as like quarrelsome and wanting to fight. Um.
But there's like there's reasons why that stereotype develops, and
it's because in Ireland again, people are very poor. They
have a history of rebelling against the crown, and they

(01:12:04):
don't have any kind of options for social advancement in
a lot of cases. And what do your young men
do when like ship's rough, They like they fight, This
happens every Yeah, I respect it, Like I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, drink,
you drink like like alcohols, like this is the last
day on earth that there will be alcohol and yeah,

(01:12:27):
go home, you smash in and then you're just pissy
for the rest of the day because all we're gonna
have is potatoes. So let's fight like this. This happens
all over the place like this is the same ship
people talk about, like the Appalachia, right, like Appalachia, and
it's like honor culture and like all of the and
in Ireland kind of their version of that is called

(01:12:48):
faction fighting, which is there's this is a fascinating thing.
I had no idea what's happening. Um, but it starts
in the County Tipperary in the early eight hundreds and
it quickly spreads all over the island. And in the
famine plot, Coogan explains, sometimes several hundred participants took part
on either side. The most famous fight at ballyve A
Strand and County Kerry in eighteen thirty four involved some

(01:13:09):
three thousand contestants, of whom over two hundred were killed.
The fighting gangs were based on extended families or on parishes,
and normally fights took place either at fairs or on
feast days or public holidays. The weapons were chiefly seasoned
blackthorn sticks, whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by
the insertion of lead in the butts. These killing instruments,
where the origin of the lailes carried today by by

(01:13:30):
today's lepre con dolls, and even more deadly weapon was
the white thorn steak, a cut from which could prove fatal.
Sometimes sides and slash hooks were used. So there's just
like this again, respect it like pretty. It's like it's like,
you know, you don't have m M A, but you
can get a couple of thousand people together to fight
in the field. Hey, just like me and my cousins.

(01:13:52):
You know what I'm saying, Me and my cousin's couple
homies down the street. We get to beat this block.
We're gonna scrap with that block, and it's all it's
all in fun. If you die, you die. I don't
hate people are gonna die. Some people gonna die. You
better then muscle up. Let you talk about like this,
this ship is happening and like like we talked in

(01:14:12):
episodes like this is happening like Georgia. Like there's different
kinds of like like it. All over the world. People
find excuses to get it in big groups and beat
the ship out of each other. Um, we'll be, we
will be. Look when you you living in you living
in the in the city of l A. You're sitting
on the porch. One of your uncles will be like, hey,
you think you could beat that full up and you're like,

(01:14:34):
I don't know, Like hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come here,
Hey fight my nephew. And then now y'all just in
the street fighting. You know what I'm saying. Okay, you know,
it's just like we're bored. Yeah, I don't hate, We're
just bored, you know what I'm saying. And yeah, I
tell you what. Let me tell you. Let me tell
you what I learned in those days. If somebody hits

(01:14:54):
you in the middle of your nose, you're gonna go
blind from tears. So don't let nobody hit you. In
Aga knows that was one of great lessons I ever learned.
Head down, hands up, down, hands up now again. So
there's a lot going on here. Um, but this is
not like the English make a lot of this in
their propaganda about like how uniquely fighting the Irish are,

(01:15:15):
Like we this happens all over the world, everywhere, and
everywhere in the world. It's just what happens when like
you have a bunch of young men without much in
the way of options for the future. You've you've ruined
any sense of purpose and any forum, and that you've
also like they're angry because the situation is unfair, but
they it has become very clear that we're not going
to we're not going to beat the British military. You know. Um.

(01:15:37):
It's also you know, this kind of feeds into this
system of what are called secret societies at the time,
and when we talk about like that term means something different.
Now basically what's happening is insurgent groups are over ireland, right,
and there's different ones right as well. We'll see later.
There are some kind of secret societies that are are
made up of landlords or in support of the landlords.

(01:15:58):
There's some that are in support of just Protestant cause,
and there's others that are basically battling the status quo
that are like like actually fighting against the these this
absentee landlord system or like Catholic groups funding against Protestants.
Probably one of the more interesting of these groups were
called the Rock It's um. They declared allegiance to a
mythical captain Rock. This is not a guy who existed,

(01:16:20):
but like they would the Rocks would carry out attacks
on landlords, like they would murder or beat up landlords
or rent collectors, and then they would write letters justifying
what they've done, signed by Captain Rock. It was kind
of like an I M. Spartacus sort of all those
Spartacus was real, obviously, you know. It's that sort of
thing we're claiming that there's like this, you know, my
brain is flooding right now with some sort of puns

(01:16:43):
and word plays about oh just a Wayne the Rock
Johnson or Chris Rock in slapt and like it's so
hard to not go with the Chris Rock like and
it's like, you know, when you can't land on a
joke because there's too many of them fire in it.
That's what just happened right now. You just remember that
thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks. Yes, um, actually

(01:17:04):
in terms of if you if you're looking for something
to laugh at prop the most powerful secret society in
this period were called the White Boys. Um all right,
all right, um. Gustav the de Beaumont, who was a
sympathetic French intellectual at the time, wrote this of the
White Boys quote, they lived by an atrocious, savage code

(01:17:27):
worthy of a semi barbarious population which abandoned to itself
and has no light to guide its efforts, finds no
sympathy to assuage its passions, and is reduced to look
to rude instincts for the means of safety and protection.
These are banditti of a singular kind. To obtain arms
or vengeance, they commit all sorts of outrages while they
abstain from the gold or silver under their hands. So
he's kind of pointing out that like they they're really

(01:17:49):
more interested in vengeance than making money. They're not like
traditional They're not like criminals in that sense, they really
want to Like Fux, some ship up um and in
many ways the White Boys are a pre to a
lot of modern insurgent terrorist groups. Um. Some of them
were quite aeraded too. And in their manifesto kind of
they have like this thing that is explaining what they're
fighting for. They write, quote, let us strike the culpable

(01:18:12):
not only in their persons, but in their dearest interests
and affections. Let not only their cattle be how hamstrung,
their houses, burned, their land, turned up, their harvest, their
harvests destroyed, But let their friends and relations be devoted
to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor um, which
is there's an allegation that when they talk about wanting
people's wives and daughters to be dishonored, that they're like

(01:18:32):
threatening to commit rape of They may they may yeah,
they may have been. Um. You know this is this
is not not a pretty series of things that are happening. UM.
So the white boys and they see them is like
a precursor to the kind of anti colonial insurgent groups
that would dominate a lot of late twentieth century geopolitics. Right,

(01:18:54):
you can see this is like the first stirrings of
some things that are going to happen all over the world. UM.
In Ireland, also in this period gives birth to what
some call scholars consider the first organized mass nonviolent resistance
campaign in history. UM. It's organized by a guy named
Daniel O'Connell, who was one of the very few members

(01:19:15):
Ireland's part of the UK Right. So I there are
it is possible for Irish people to get elected to parliament.
There's a long history of like what because like we'll
actually we're about to talk about this. So O'Connell rises
to prominence first as a lawyer. Um, and he forms
an organization called the Catholic Association in eighteen twenty three,
and this was the first semi effective Irish political party

(01:19:37):
in history. Um. The Catholic Association and O'Connell spent years
fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in eighteen twenty nine.
And that's what makes ancipation. Yeah, because Catholics you're not
allowed to like hold land or or political office right
like you are. There is like a degree of um
like apartheid for Catholics kind of in the legal sense
of the word in this period in Ireland. And so

(01:20:00):
Connell wins the right in this organization win the right
for Catholics to sit on the Parliament. Right, so now
you can have because Irish people could be on the
Parliament before, but they had to be Irish Protestants. Because
of O'Connell, you get your first. He is the first
Catholic Irish legislator in elected or like in modern elector
I think maybe before she got all fuck. Um. This

(01:20:21):
also opens up like Catholics can be lawyers in ways
they couldn't before. And they're allowed to be military officers
in the British military now. Um, so this is like
a big civil rights campaign, right, So O'Connell forms this
political party. They fight for like seven years and they win.
I mean, this is a pretty massive victory, you know,
for Irish civil rights in this period. So the next year,

(01:20:42):
eighteen thirty, O'Connell wins election to the Parliament and he
becomes the first Catholic in modern history to sit in
the English Parliament. And he's a pretty cool dude. He's
poor by parliamentary standards, which means he's rich, but not
rich compared to the other rich people, right like you know, um,
and he dresses like a normal person. So the British

(01:21:03):
elected leaders call him the King of the beggars because
he he looks poor to them. Again, is not a
poor person. There are minimum financial requirements to be in parliament, right,
so he's not he's not impoverished, but they they see
him as impossible, and they also see him as like
he is the representative of the hordes of working poor
in Ireland, you know. Um. Tim pat Coogan writes he

(01:21:26):
deserves to be regarded as the founder of the modern
peaceful civil rights movement. His hatred of oppression was universal.
My heart walks abroad he said, and wherever the miserable
is to be suckered and the slaves to be set free,
there my spirit is at home, and I do like
to dwell in America. He was deified by the anti
slavery movement for his speeches in their favor and for
the manner in which he turned down substantial money offers

(01:21:49):
from slave owners, who commanded twenty seven votes in the
House of Commons during the Emancipation Battle, saying, gentlemen, God
knows that I speak for the saddest people the sun sees.
But may my right hand forget its cunning and made
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth before
to help Ireland, I keep silent on the Negro question.
And what he's saying there is there's a vote like

(01:22:11):
in England band slavery in this period, right, And a
bunch of parliamentarians are like, hey, dude, vote with us
to keep slavery and will help you out in gaining
some concessions for Irish people in Parlimad. And he's like,
I couldn't. I would never be able to live with
myself if I did that. Like our situation is bad,
but like this is I I could not. I could
not do that. It's a it's a principal moral stand.

(01:22:36):
He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him
He gets a lot of the the early Irish Diastra
in New York hate him because he like hates George Washington,
because George Washington owns a bunch of slaves or owned
a bunch of ladies. At this point, um, he gets
attacked a lot by US newspapers. The New York Herald
accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children,

(01:22:57):
because again he's like he thinks slavery's at um. By
the eighteen forties, he was an old man who had
spent decades fighting for his people. In eighteen forty three
he embarked on one last great battle repealing the Act
of Union. Right, and this thing that that brings Ireland
into the UK. Given total English dominance of parliament, this

(01:23:19):
was not seen as possible, right, like, in a in
a quote unquote legitimate way. The English Parliament is not
going to vote to give up Ireland, right, Yeah, But
he decides, well, fuck I don't. I'm not going to
try and convince a bunch of English rich assholes that
Ireland ought to be free. Um. So he creates what

(01:23:40):
some people will say is the first modern civil disobedience campaign.
He holds a series of what are called monster meetings,
which are where huge numbers of Irish people as symbol
to protest in favor of independence. The first one of
these is a hundred and twenty thousand people, and crowd
sizes grow over the course of the year that he's
doing this to three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand

(01:24:01):
at a meeting in Cork. By August of that year,
he's succeeded in assembling his largest crowd yet, seven hundred
and fifty thousand people. That's basically a tenth of the
Irish population. More than that, really, this is forties you said, yeah,
there's he gets three quarters of a million people to
gather to protest for their independence. Um. And again there's

(01:24:22):
a lot of I I went over the fact that
there's a lot of stereotypes of the Irish is drunken,
violent in this period. He's very aware of that, and
so there's this kind of volunteer order police force at
these protests to make sure that there's no alcohol and
there's no fighting um that people are staying absolutely in
line or scrupulously abiding by the laws outside of the

(01:24:44):
fact that they're gathering to to make this protest um.
And that makes it really hard for the British government
to like stop this stuff, right because there's folks are
so disciplined, they have trouble finding kind of an end
to blow this movement up. Um. And and it's this
is a real problem because it is like, you know,
when you've got seven hundred and fifty thousand people assembling
for something, well that's potentially a military issue. Right, if

(01:25:07):
you can get seven fifty thousand folks together for anything,
you could cause some problems for the government. You know,
Like that's a lot of motherfu that's a lot. Today
there was a fucking protest in the US with seven people. Yeah,
that's some ship could could go down. Obviously, we we
had like that many people out in the street just
try to stop the Iraq war and it did nothing,
but it could it could mean, it could have. Yeah,

(01:25:27):
it's a lot of thing if if day was up
on the British was up on just you know this
Oh no, I hadn't invented yet, but I'm like, no,
let's up with the tear gas. I was like, yeah,
could have just do what you do now, which is
just we are building to that prop Okay, but it
is like I think if you wanted to, if there
were a comparable civil disobedience movement in the United States,

(01:25:49):
it would be it would it would be putting twenty
or thirty million people into the streets in a single
location day, which I don't think could happen logistically, like
we don't have the roads for that. It's not obvious,
but it's this is this is huge. So O'Connell plans
to hold his most critical meeting on October eighth in
Clontarf near Dublin. By this point, the powers that be

(01:26:12):
have grown terrified of what O'Connell is assembling. Um so
his you know, they have trouble because the meetings are peaceful.
But on October, in October of eighteen forty three, they decide, well,
fuck it, like I don't care. Wait, we don't. We're
not going to care anymore, but we're not going to
pretend to care that he's followed the rules. The Irish
do not have a right to organize for independence, so

(01:26:34):
they ban his meeting, and then they gather an army
and they sail warships into the port and train long
range cannons on the meeting site and say, if you gather,
you get a million people together, we are going to
show you with naval artillery. Yeah we're not just like
we are shooting guns into a broad We will pound
you with bombs like yeah yeah. O'Connell has a choice here,

(01:26:59):
and the choice that a lot of civil disobedience campaigners
have had. It's the choice Martin Luther King made versions
of where it's like, Okay, if we assemble peacefully here,
they're gonna funk a lot of people up. Do we
do it? And he decides no, He decides not to
risk those lives, and he cancels the meeting. Um he
gets arrested, he serves four months in prison for conspiracy.

(01:27:21):
And the fact that he refuses to push the British
government to force them to either put up or shut up.
A lot of future Irish activists are going to see
this as evidence that like peaceful protest doesn't work right.
This is a big part of like why the things
that happened the nineteen sixteen Rising, why the decades and
decades of insurgent terrorism and stuff like a lot of

(01:27:42):
them will point back to O'Connell and be like, we
we we tried, like people tried to do this peacefully
and and you threatened to kill us. So what else?
What are what are the options? I guess we'll make box. Yeah, yeah,
that's where you went, you know. Yeah, um wow. I'm
always I'm always learly like and this is just my

(01:28:02):
own sort of baggage. I'm always leary when I hear, like,
you know, a book say this dude was the first
version of something, especially how I dude when I'm like,
I don't know, but that being said this, I when
you said O'Connell, like a lot of like things from
my black studies like started popping up of like no, wait,

(01:28:24):
we we talk about him off you know what I'm saying.
I didn't know the story toil just now, but his
name like rang a lot of bells for me. And
it's when I try to be clear here that like
you will historians will claim that I'm not like, I
can't comprehensively say no one else ever tried anything like this.
I'm not I'm calling you on that. He does get
credit from a lot of people for this. He's certainly
like a seminal figure in the concept of non violence resistance.

(01:28:49):
But yeah, this this this, yeah, like I this is
one of those dope moments on this show where like
some something that you may know like vaguely kind of
like final he comes in view and you're like, oh,
it's complicated and a lot of ways, like I see
the way that you're describing, like how he like didn't

(01:29:09):
take that next step, you know in apartheid South Africa,
Like you know, people make those claims about Nelson Mandela
that there was like another step he did didn't take
and that you know what I'm saying, and where when
he became more radicalized, you know what I'm saying, and
like and so you have modern like activists that are like, uh,

(01:29:31):
I appreciate you. You took the rock far enough, or
didn't take the rock far enough that you took as
far as you could go, but look, you wasn't down
to shoot. Yeah, And this is I mean, you'll always
I think that's always going to be the case with
everyone who does anything good within the context of like
the civil rights movement, there's always and anyone who was
like anyone who is organizing for radical social change pretty

(01:29:53):
much always hits a point where they reached the end
of their personal willingness to fight for kind of aradical change.
And so like nobody's perfect. We all did that, Like,
there are things that we all believe right now that
in a couple of generations folks would be like, how
did you put up with this? Though? Ye like, I
got I get why you were protesting for this and this,
but how how didn you have a problem with you know,
that's just like the march of time ship right, um,

(01:30:16):
And I'm not like I think it'd be unreasonable to
condemn O'Connell for what he did. It's just like, this
is what happened, right Like, he made the call that
he made, and then the things that happened afterwards happened,
And it's worth understanding that, And it's worth understanding that
there is a point I'm never gonna be forgiving, like
the I RA for setting off a fucking bombs and
random bars and ship like, there's fun up things that

(01:30:37):
happen in the the armed portion of the struggle for independence.
But when some of those advocates go back and say, like, well,
we gave the non violent ship to try. They're not wrong,
you know, um, and that's worth that's worth acknowledging from
historical standpoint. So that's the end of eighteen forty three.
In the summer of eighteen forty five, an uma seat

(01:31:00):
or water mold, known today as fight oh Flora infestans.
That's the best I can do. Like that, it's like
an English name, last name. You know, you're not going
to get it perfect. The last four words you said,
I was like, I don't know what you just said.
It's like, yeah, it's a fungus, right, it starts to
spread throughout Europe. We're not gonna get into a ton
of detail because again, this is like particularly there's a

(01:31:23):
lot of coverage that are like, really, blame this this
fungus on all of the things that happen. It's not.
The fungus is fault. The fungus is like a thing
that it's It's like it's like blaming the disaster in
Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane when it's like that's that's
not really what I'm angry about, you know. But like this,
this thing, like this, this this is an important part

(01:31:44):
of the story. This this thing starts to hit in
Europe right um crops start to fail. It starts. It
becomes increasingly clear that like, not only is there this
thing affecting potatoes all over the continent, but it's like
pretty bad. It's wiping out large chunks of the harvest.
Newspapers and farmers almanacs note with fear as it rampages

(01:32:05):
through crops, first on the continent and then in England.
On August eighteen forty five, it is discovered for the
first time in Ireland at the Dublin Royal Botanical Gardens.
Obviously it probably came somewhere else first, but you're going
to notice it at the Royal Botanical Gardens first because
they've got the most eyes on them. The population of
Ireland at this moment moment was probably close to nine

(01:32:26):
million people. You know, you're talking the eighteen forties were
not as good at censuses and stuff as we have
probably around nine million people, little bit less. Most of
these people are Catholic. Three million of them are the
kind of peasants that we've spent a lot of this
episode talking about peaking out a precarious living on the
land as renters utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of

(01:32:47):
the potato for their caloric needs. Um, and that is
the stage being set for what's going to happen next,
which is not gonna be nice, but prop you know
what is gonna be nice These plugables you're plug doubles. Yeah,
you're cloud very nice. Absolutely yeah man. Prop hip hop
um propp uh. That's all the socials and the website. Um,

(01:33:11):
there's the hood politics pod uh. Still popping and cracking
and getting some Sophie's helping me get some doper not doper,
but some dope guests and such. You know, we're having
good time over there. Yeah yeah, prop hip hop, prop
hip hop. Check it out, check out you know something

(01:33:31):
else to check out? Good things? Read a book or um,
I don't know, find an English person and be like
what the funk? Man, huh what the fuck? Yeah look
at being this person and be like thanks, yeah, yeah,
go to an English bar and just like frown, just
sit in the corner and like mean muther, just mean

(01:33:51):
mug um and be like what for do it? O'Connell
got an alister, which I learned is like almost like
the Irish like maga, Yeah, yeah, I forgot an ollister.
There you go. To me, it is a little bit Maggie.
You know, it sounded cool to me because I don't
know what allister means. Anyway, it was you know, it's

(01:34:12):
that it's that Northern Irish Protestant stronghold that's kind of
formed as a colony. Basically, you know, good stuff, good stuff,
So go colonize England. You know that's what you actually
really everybody, everybody colonized England. Take, suck them up.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland