The Irish were never treated as subhumans, or sold like furniture, or had their suffering justified on the basis of their skin color
That proves you dont know what the hell you are talking about.
The slaves that time forgot
Most people have heard of the
Great Famine, which reduced the population of Ireland by around 25%.
That pales in comparison to the disaster that England inflicted upon Ireland between
1641 and 1652, when the population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000.
Then things got worse....
From the
Tudor reconquest of Ireland until
Irish Independence in 1921, the English puzzled over the problem of what to do with all those Irish people.
They were the wrong religion. They spoke the wrong language. But the big problem was that there were just too many of them.
The English had been practicing a slow genocide against the Irish since Queen Elizabeth, but the Irish bred too fast and were tough to kill. On the other side of the Atlantic, there was a chronic labor shortage (because the local natives tended to die out too quickly in slavery conditions).
Putting two and two together,
King James I started sending Irish slaves to the new world.
The
first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement in the Amazon in 1612, seven years before the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown.
The
Proclamation of 1625 by James II made it official policy that all Irish political prisoners be transported to the West Indies and sold to English planters. Soon Irish slaves were the majority of slaves in the English colonies.
In 1629 a large group of Irish men and women were sent to Guiana, and by 1632, Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat in the West Indies.
By 1637 a census showed that 69% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves, which records show was a cause of concern to the English planters. But there were not enough political prisoners to supply the demand, so every petty infraction carried a sentence of transporting, and slaver gangs combed the country sides to kidnap enough people to fill out their quotas. The slavers were so full of zest that they sometimes grabbed non-Irishmen. On March 25, 1659, a petition was received in London claiming that 72 Englishmen were wrongly sold as slaves in Barbados, along with 200 Frenchmen and 7-8,000 Scots.
So many Irish slaves were sent to Barbados, between 12,000 and 60,000, that the term
"barbadosed" began to be used.
By the 1630's, Ireland was the primary source of the English slave trade.
And then disaster struck.
Cromwell
After Oliver Cromwell defeated the royalists in the English Civil War, he turned to Ireland, who had allied themselves with the defeated royalists. What happened next could be considered
genocide.
The famine (caused by the English intentionally destroying foodstocks) and plague that followed Cromwell's massacres reduced the population of Ireland to around 40%.
And then Cromwell got really nasty.
Anyone implicated in the rebellion had their land confiscated and was sold into slavery in the West Indies. Even catholic landowners who hadn't taken part of the rebellion had their land confiscated.
Catholicism was outlawed and catholic priests were executed when found.
To top it off,
he ordered the ethnic cleansing of Ireland east of Shannon in 1652. Soldiers were encouraged to kill any Irish who refused to relocate.
Instead of trying to describe the horror, consider the words from the
English State Papers in 1742.
"In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was
thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and
the women and Irish girls... To solace them."
I can't help but notice that the exact same language and logic used to justify enslavement of the blacks was used to justify enslavement of the Irish.
It is something for those who think slavery was simply a matter of skin color to consider.
As for the Irish slaves, Cromwell
specifically targeted Irish children.
“During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, [Oliver] Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.” For some reason, history likes to call these Irish slaves as 'indentured servants'. As if they were somehow considered better than African slaves. This can be considered an attempt at whitewashing the history of the Irish slave trade.
There does exist indentured servitude where two parties sign a contract for a limited amount of time. This is
not what happened to the Irish from 1625 onward.
They were sold as slaves, pure and simple.
In reality, they were considered by some to be
even lower than the blacks.