It’s strange, isn’t it? We have our D4s, dissident Free staters and west-Brits tellin’ us non-stop that ‘we were better off under British rule’. This myth is often regularly promulgated on this site, with many desperate for a return to the Commonwealth or our Free Staters tellin’ us ‘it wasn't really that bad, we wanted to just make our own decisions, it’s why there was a Rising’ and off they go. Facts go flying out the window with them.
Now, given the quasi-Theocratic Free State which engaged in a counter-revolution, things did not necessarily improve to any great degree with ostensible independence when the Vichy Free State was set up. However, it should be thoroughly noted that there was not this retrograding by the Free State that made things much more worse for the population. To say this is a gargantuan falsehood and it mainly tries to expiate for ubiquitous British tyranny back in these days. With the Brits slaughtering us for centuries, some choose to still defend this most wicked occupation of Ireland, conjuring up pseudo-history and fairy tales to meet their deluded dreams of what life was like under the Brits, i.e some sort of Utopia.
I will briefly go through a modicum of examples to show that life under the Brits was not this great adventure, with the most senile ‘point’ given to back it up that Ireland was ‘the seventh richest country in the world in the union.’ Of course, one could talk 'till their dying days about the destruction of Ireland. Let’s just look at this life under the union to see exactly how good the paddies had it. I know some Castle Catholics will be unequivocally scandalised by my impertinent attitude towards their union, but you must understand that your theory of Ireland better under the union is nothing more than clap trap.
Article Six of the Act of Union had basically mentioned Free Trade between Ireland and England, but as Cecil Woodham-Smith pointed out, this was nothing more than a cod, as the English used Ireland, as they had for centuries for their own imperialistic purposes:
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The hope of investment proved a delusion. Free Trade between the two countries enabled England to use Ireland as a market for surplus English goods; Irish industry collapsed, unemployment was widespread, and Dublin, now that an Irish parliament sat no longer in College Green became a half dead city.
Gerard McCann has summed up the Act of Union and its consequences as well:
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The imposition of the Union forced change in commercial activity across the island – with the north-east acting to strengthen its cotton and linen manufacture, while the south and west underwent a coerced diversification process to become a supplier of agricultural products such as barley, livestock, wheat and potatoes. While profit gravitated towards the financial hubs of London and Dublin, prosperity was increasingly being distributed on the basis of location, family, heritage, faith and loyalty. For the vast majority of the population of the island, however, the new order meant socio-cultural subjugation matched with grinding poverty.
Indeed, a glorious time when Ireland rightly had her place as part of the Union. Unfortunately, this was only the tip of the iceberg. It wasn't as if the Brits had just used us for their surplus and threw a few bones, they left the Irish with their bones on show, for decades and decades, until the Famine of 1845-51 solved the Irish question.
As far back as 1824, the Brits knew quiet well what was happening in Ireland. There was a select Committee into the Disturbances in Ireland which quoted a magistrate in Cork. His words were very striking and touched a raw nerve with our benevolent occupiers; only trying to civilize us: ‘I have seen several countries and I have never saw a peasantry so badly off’ (House of Commons, Hansard, 1824). Sir Walter Scott, the poet and novelist, said of the Irish that their ‘poverty has not been exaggerated: it is on the extreme verge of human misery’.
The unscrupulous British establishment did little, however. Maybe it was the langor of keeping other untermensch down in their colonies that led them to not help paddy. Woodham-Smith though has shown some rather disturbing facts about just how callous the Brits were regarding the Irish and that a simple explanation to cast away ‘the Famine was a complete and utter shock’ and 'they totally had no idea how bad the country was' myth is redundant.
Between 1801 and 1845, there were 114 commissions and 61 special committees in Ireland. Now I understand that this may come as a surprise to the Castle Catholics who think Ireland was an idyllic place back in these days, but these commissions and special committees had warned of a disaster about to hit Ireland (the laboring classes have suffered more ‘than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain') due mainly to the neglect of the entire population. They also reported on how the landlords acted in Ireland with unseen cruelty and commented on their mistreatment of the population, even though they were landlords themelves. Yet, they sat idly by. Gerrard McCann has summed this up, the point about the Brits and not knowing what was going to happen if disaster had hit:
[QUOTE]Beyond Hansard and newsprint, there were also a number of key governmental reports, each cataloging economic activity and poverty in Ireland in the years preceding the 1845 famine: the ‘Poor Inquiry’ of 1835-6, the Census of 1841 and the report of the ‘Devon Commission’ in February 1845. There were also a serios of period observations which, together with the state’s evidence, provided an intimate portrait of conditions on the colony. In sequence, they were Edward Wakefield’s An Account of Ireland, Statistical and Political (1812), James Ebenezer Bicheno’s Ireland and its Economy (1830), Henry Inglis’s A Journey Through Ireland (1834), Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journeys to England and Ireland (1837), Gustave de Beaumont’s L’Ireland: sociale, politique et religieuse (1839), William Makeplace Thackeray’s The Irish Sketchbook (1843) and J.G Kohl’s Travels in Ireland (1844). Collectively, they presented a distressing view of a society and an economy on the verge of collapse.[/QUOTE]
Before and after the union (when we had that glorious parliament that was so sought after by the Redmonites as the panacea to all our ills), there were plethora of crop failues in Ireland, ‘an estimated 24 crop failures between 1728 and 1882, the most destructive in 1739, 1740, 1770, and 1880. Indeed, extensive crop failures occurred in a sequence of years up until 1844.’ But the greatest industrial empire of all time, who went out to only civilize the Irish, never once took note of all their warnings and said ‘what if their reliance on their staple diet (potatoes) too suffers? What if the number of Famines before this actually has an even greater affect?’ No, our Brits, the saviors, were actually patting themselves on the back for all this and doing nothing at all about it.
George Combe, author of The Constitution of Man and its Relations to External Objects during Black 47 remarked:
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‘By reckless marriages they have increased their numbers far beyond their capital, means of employment, and of subsistence and abject poverty, occasionally destitution and famine, with fearful ravages of disease, stalk, through the land, appalling the beholder, and leading feeble minds to question the sway of a benevolent Providence in Irish affairs. The oppressor and oppressed stand equally rebuked.’
A declaration of insanity, but the ideas of the ruling class at the time, both in Britain and occupied Ireland, where the rich in Dublin threw extravagant parties during the Famine. Indeed, the planners for the visit of the genocidal Queen Victoria carefully planned her tour around the affluent parts of Dublin, were she admitted that the Irish have a wonderful time. She too got in on the mayhem during the Famine. When people were starving and began robbing for food, the Queen made sure that paddy did not get his way and, according to revisionist historian Robert Kee ‘with the government concerned about widespread looting and theft, the queens speech of that year (1847) called for tougher measures to deal with crime in Ireland.’ Of course, there was no one to deal with the crimes of the Brits themselves.
The landlords with the assistance of the British army running wild, with the British cabinet in hysterics saying that the landlords had a right to rip the roofs of houses and evict squatters leaving them to die, when there was any talk of a solution or a redistribution of wealth, these calls were met with fierce put downs. Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said to John Russell ‘be ready to give as near as nothing may be.’ The liberal politician James Wilson in an article for the Economist stated 'it is no man's business to provide from another
‘But that is just how it was back then, money was wisely spent and for good causes’ scream the Castle Catholics. Do you mean making sure slave owners were paid for ending slavery? 20 million? Do you mean the money spent wisely for the Crimean War not long after the Famine? Do you mean the money spent to deal drugs in China? All of that against a pathetic few million spent on so-called ‘subjects’, the supposed backbone of the empire, according to Queen Victoria. Yes, the Irish never had it so bloody good during these times. The rape of the language, the destruction of Irish culture, the unemployment, the racism, the insane capitalism such as the Gregory Law, the underdevelopment, and on and on, why did those pesky Fenians and Irish Volunteers ever try and separate from Britain?
But, we would soon be the seventh richest nation in the galaxy and beyond. Saying that, as the dissident Free Staters do, somehow seeks to justify the degradation the Irish lived in. But if we apply that logic, then the Famine was of a great significance to Ireland as the economy improved. Will our D4 raise a glass to the Famine:
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Astonishingly, between 1840 and 1913 per capita incomes in Ireland rose at 1.6 per cent per year, faster than any other country in Europe. Where Irish incomes averaged 40 per cent of the British level in 1840, this proportion had risen to 60 per cent by 1913.
The great bourgeoisie nationalist John Redmond was an ultra-capitalist, more than happy to see Ireland starve whilst hoping for some ridiculous cultural revival under Home Rule, no doubt, with the poor complaining in Irish about being hungry, rather than English. He had attacked the workers during the Lockout of 1913. Redmond went further saying that ‘separation from England was undesirable and impossible’. Yes, it must have been so good at this time, being the seventh richest nation in the world and with all that work in the North East especially, where people never had it so good. By the way, as McCann points out, it wasn’t just great thinking that led to this increase in wealth for a minority in Ireland, for example, the basic destruction of the cotton industry in the American Civil War and its slow recovery allowed Belfast to prosper in that trade.
This great industrial augmentation is the great reason these dissident Free Staters and west-Brits give for the wonderful empire. However, as Alice Effie Murray pointed out in History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland from the Period of the Restoration:
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Irish manufacturing industry still concentrates itself in the north, hardly spreading beyond certain districts; emigration has been draining Ireland of her population for more than half a century; the class of absentees is far larger than it was before the union. The great commercial expansion of the nineteenth century has conferred little benefit on Ireland; it is merely resulted in an increase of taxation to support trade in which she has little share.
And how had the people been treated in this most ineffable time, during which we were ‘the seventh richest nation on the planet’? In Belfast, female workers - long after being battered around the gaf by their husbands and not being able to do anything about it, treated as domestic slaves, sought after by the bourgeois as sex toys and more - wrote a piece about their conditions in the greatest reason for the Brits to return to the South, because of its economic benefits. These women, now being raped in the workforce, after their English brethren had got the ball rolling by working naked in mines giving birth, summed up the conditions in Belfast for workers. A women’s section of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union tackling sectarianism also noted that ‘Many Belfast Mills are slaughter-houses for the women and penitentiaries for the children’.
James Connolly, who would have been a well-known dissident at the time, quoted the medical officer for health in Belfast’s report in 1909 on the condition of women:
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Dr. Baillie, Medical Officer of Health for Belfast, has on many occasions in his Annual Report set down in his dry official way some statistics as to the pressure of the Capitalist system upon the Belfast workers, and these statistics, well considered, might well produce a crop of revolutionists in the Northern City.
In his official report for 1909, referring to the extraordinary number of premature births, Dr. Baillie remarks:–
“The premature births were found to be most prevalent among women who worked in mills and factories, engaged in such work as the following – spinning, weaving, machining, tobacco-spinning and laundry work. Many of the women appear to be utterly unable for such work owing to the want of sufficient nourishment and suitable clothing, and being through stress of circumstances compelled to work up to the date of confinement, this would be accountable for many young and delicate children found by the Health Visitors.”
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Of Typhus Fever Dr. Baillie says, and the admission is remarkable, that:–
This disease is extremely proved to be associated with conditions of privation, poverty, and over-crowding, bad feeding and intemperance.
But we just never had it so bloody good and why did we have to leave this noble effort by the Brits to civilize us? If it wasn’t for the Free State, we wouldn’t have experienced all of the poverty in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, etc that was never there before.
Moving down to Dublin, the conditions were most unpalatable for the majority of the people in the city. This sepulchral time in Dublin had many such as Kevin O’Higgins desperate for the good all days as early as 1926. McCann sums up the conditions of Dublins workers in 1913:
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With a death rate of 27.6 per cent per 1000 of the population, Dublin was worse than Calcutta for the standard of living and depth of poverty in its slums. Tenements which had been constructed to sustain a post-famine workforce were desperately overcrowded, with almost 15,000 of them housing 30,000 families – in 1840 there had been 353 tenements in Dublin. Eighty per cent of the 87, 305 people who lived in tenements lived in one room with their families.
But we never had it so good! And the conditions of the tenements were quite rightly compared with the fields of Flanders by Connolly. Connolly went on and quoted the Report of the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the Housing of the Dublin Working Classes which shows just how rotten it was in the seventh richest nation in the world and under the guise of the most benevolent occupiers of all time (‘Thank the Brits they weren’t like Belgium’ said Ruth Dudley Edwards). The Irish bosses, in an occupied state, were allowed to run wild, as well as the neglect by Dublin Corporation, the tools of the occupiers. Did the Brits ever intervene at this stage and put an end to all this?:
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We cannot close this chapter more fittingly than by quoting with our own comments the following extracts from an Editorial in The Irish Times (Dublin) of 18th February, 1914, upon the Report of the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the Housing of the Dublin Working Classes. Part of the Report itself is also quoted in the Appendix:–
The Report of the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into the housing conditions of the Dublin working classes was laid on the table of the House of Commons on Monday night. It is a document of almost historic importance; every word of it should have been submitted without delay to those whom it chiefly concerns – namely, the ratepayers of Dublin. The Commissioners have done their work fearlessly and well. We cannot suppose that there is in existence a more startling or arresting Blue Book. The report is a terrible indictment of the social conditions and civic administration of Dublin. Most of us had supposed ourselves to be familiar with the melancholy statistics of the Dublin slums. We knew that Dublin has a far larger percentage of single-room tenements than any other city in the Kingdom. We did not know that nearly twenty-eight thousand of our fellow-citizens live in dwellings which even the Corporation admits to be unfit for human habitation. We had suspected the difficulty of decent living in the slums; this report proves the impossibility of it. Nearly a third of our population so live that from dawn to dark and from dark to dawn it is without cleanliness, privacy or self-respect. The sanitary conditions are revolting, even the ordinary standards of savage morality can hardly be maintained. To condemn a young child to an upbringing in the Dublin slums is to condemn it to physical degradation and to an appalling precocity in vice.
These four level-headed civil servants have drawn a picture hardly less lurid than the scenes of Dante’s Inferno, and they give chapter and verse for every statement. It is a bitter reproach to Dublin that their report should go forth to the world; but it is a necessary and well-deserved reproach.
We are to blame, but the chief share of blame rests on the Corporation of Dublin. The report is perfectly fair to the Corporation. It gives it full credit for what it has done in the matter of housing schemes, and recognises the weight of its inherited embarrassments. But the Commissioners have been compelled to find that the Corporation is directly responsible for the worst evils of the tenement system. They tear to pieces the excuse so often presented to ourselves and other critics – that admitted defects could not be remedied without fresh legislation. The report finds that the Corporation has grossly abused and mismanaged its existing powers. It has utterly failed to enforce its sanitary authority under the Act of 1890. It has encouraged slum-ownership not merely by connivance but by example. The report finds that three members of the Corporation – Aldermen O'Reilly and Corrigan and Councillor Crozier – are returned in evidence as owning, or being interested in nine, nineteen and eighteen tenement houses respectively. Some of their property is classed as “third-class property”. Ten other members of the Corporation own, or are interested in, tenement houses. The report exposes the scandal of the rebate system, which was designed to encourage and reward decent and conscientious management of tenement property. The Commissioners are of opinion that in the case of some of the members of the Corporation who own tenements, rebates have been improperly allowed. They criticise sharply the "dispensing powers" which Sir Charles Cameron has seen fit to exercise. The Corporation, by its slackness and inefficiency, is directly responsible for the creation of a number of owners who have little sense of their duty as landlords. The report finds that, if the Corporation had rightly administered its own laws, it would have prevented the influx into Dublin of that large volume of rural labour which has depressed wages and intensified the tragedy of the slums. The Corporation's policy has at once increased and demoralised the miserable army of slum workers. ‘Larkinism’, in so far as it is a revolt against intolerable conditions of life, is one of the by-products of our civic administration.
There we have it folks, a brief history of the most magnanimous empire of all time. The peril of the population on the verge of death? ‘Sure every country regarded their poor like that at that time.’ The Famine’s destructiveness? ‘Sure they were Irish landlords, the Brits had 100% nothing at all to do with the Famine.’ ‘The slums in Belfast, Dublin and the dire poverty in the west of Ireland? ‘Sure, we were the seventh richest country in the world. We were getting Home Rule as well, until a few spoiled it for everyone and injected violence into Ireland that was never seen before.’
‘But why are you going on about this history? It’s in the past.’ Is it? What say an American to an African-American? Do they have their government today telling them that slavery was nothing? Do they have apologists in the mainstream media telling them that it was good? That they needed to be civilised? or that 'sure everyone was doing it'? Do the Germans tell the French to get over the Nazi’s? Do the Turks tell the Armenians to shut up and the world never blinks? No, of course not. Only paddy isn’t allowed have the decency to actually point out that his country has been destroyed by imperialism with historians and academics running wild promulgating all these historical lies, and a media desperate for Ireland to ‘mature’ and then shut up.
But besides all that, we have a very weird bunch of people in Ireland who romanticize the Brits kicking our heads in for centuries or subjugating us like laboratory mice in draconian conditions. These people try to expiate for everything the Brits have done and try and make out that they verily, did little wrong. The only thing they did wrong was end their occupation! A fantasy world is created, with the Irish living happily in the union, with not a bother, until 1916 changed all of this.
These dissident Free Staters such as John Bruton and west-Brit Eamon Deleany types are hell bent on putting Ireland back into the commonwealth while also, trying to make out that Irish independence can never work, despite the reactionary nature of the Free State and its unwillingness to actually be a free and independent state, still to this day.
Yes, history has been rewritten and the fairy-tale continues to be floated about in the media and the academic world with little to no substance.
Oh, and Tiocfaidh ár lá.