The Brits and the Irish An Gorta Mor

The Brits and the Irish An Gorta Mor

In 1997, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair made the extraordinary–albeit a century and a half too late–gesture of accepting national blame and extending the British government’s hand in apology to Ireland for what is now known as The Great Hunger.

That political exercise doesn’t come close to making amends for atrocities committed by a world power against a conquered, defenseless people.

Also known as the Irish Potato Blight and the Potato Famine, An Gorta Mór in Gaelic describes the period between 1845 and 1850 but “great hunger” says it all: A million and a half to two million Irish literally starved to death or died from diseases induced by starvation–not the million Blair said–during those years.

In 2011, with our tater tots and pastas it’s as difficult to grasp the enormity of such numbers as it is to understand how a whole people could be decimated by the loss of a single crop. That difficulty and understanding become more explicable in light of Ireland’s history with Britain.

As Grant Lawrence wrote in A People’s History of the Great Irish Famine, ”History tells us that the Great Famine was caused by the potato blight. But, the potato disease shouldn’t have created the misery of what came to be known as the Great Famine. The starvation and suffering that arose from the potato failure could have been drastically reduced or even eliminated if the British had implemented governmental policies against exploitation to protect the Irish people.”

Lawrence adds, ”Instead, the British did just the opposite.” . . .
(Read more and see and hear a beautiful Irish blessing at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3887)