Should the border seperating Ireland be removed? ( Archived) (39)

I find it quite ironic that after all the years of fighting and lost lives, the solution is being found in the financial area which is how the problems, in my opinion, originated in the first place.

My own family originate from County Mayo on my Dads side and ended up here due to the potato famine.

haha, cheers, and heres a pint back for your very good post

I didnt know about the Pale and will look it up very soon. I was thinking more along the lines of that 95% of the Irish landscape was owned by absentee protestant english landlords, whose large estates were run by local agents under tremendous pressure to maximize income without investing in the local population - the reliance on the potato because of its market value and the subsequent crop failure had devastating effects.

This bit is copied; In fact the English government responsible for these policies was toppled, and relief efforts were left entirely to the Irish landlords, whose livelihood depended upon the sale of the grain cash crops generated, which were not affected by the blight. In an effort to maintain their standard of living, the landlords refused to lower their rental fees, and continued to send massive revenues from taxes, rents and grain sales to their English land owners throughout the entire famine period.

With the revenues from grain sales committed to the landlords, and the food supply all but eliminated, the Irish population was faced with mass starvation, and to make matters worse, the winter of 1846 - 1847 was the worst in recent memory. Towns and villages across the Irish countryside soon became filled with starving, freezing mobs, quickly overwhelming all local relief efforts. Soup kitchens were set up, and volunteers throughout England and America began raising funds, but it was too late to stop the disaster.

Consumption of raw or partially cooked foods by the desperate population coupled with the lack of foods bearing vitamin C brought on typhus, dysentery, cholera, “famine fever” and scurvy, which soon reached epidemic levels. To many the only escape from the death and misery surrounding them was to emigrate to other English speaking countries.