Wow!

[percysunshine]

Great Famine (Ireland) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Laws that restricted the rights of Irish Catholics

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish Catholics had been prohibited by the penal laws from owning land, from leasing land; from voting, from holding political office; from living in a corporate town or within 5 mi (8.0 km) of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things that are necessary in order to succeed and prosper in life. The laws had largely been reformed by 1793, and in 1829, Irish Catholics could again sit in parliament following the Act of Emancipation.[13]

Landlords and tenants

During the 18th century, a new system for managing the landlord's property was introduced in the form of the "middleman system". Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the (usually Protestant) landlord of a regular income, and relieved them of any responsibility; the tenants however were then subject to exploitation through these middlemen.

Catholics made up 80% of the population, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation in 1829. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class", the English and Anglo-Irish families who owned most of the land, and who had more or less limitless power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast: the Earl of Lucan owned over 60,000 acres (240 km2). Many of these landlords lived in England and were called "absentee landlords". The rent revenue was sent to England,[14] collected from "impoverished tenants" paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export.[15]

In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root cause of disaffection in the country. They set up a Royal Commission, chaired by the Earl of Devon, to inquire into the laws with regard to the occupation of land in Ireland. Daniel O'Connell described this commission as perfectly one-sided, being made up of landlords and no tenants.[16] Devon in February 1845 reported that "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure . . . in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water . . . their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury . . . and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property." The Commissioners concluded that they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain."[17]

Wow...the 2012 DNC political platform.

 

[The T]

Whoooo Hoooo TruthMatters just called me black! I'm so very Irish!!! Doing the happy dance!!

Oh wait!!...............is that racist???

 

[Peach]

Did you see all those white people on parade today? Wow!

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I thought you were Siamese Willow...................Happy St. Patrick's Day.

 

[percysunshine]

the irish are the blacks of the british isles

True enough. But a black & tan has nothing to do with two people, one African in ancestry, and the other, a white person who's gotten a lot of sun.

Aren't we all African in ancestry?

Some of us are from Pluto.

 

[Amelia]

Ah.