@SemperLiberum (Villain)

Twitter user @SemperLiberum

Ancaps and other Hellenic-style slave-makers were responsible for the genocide of the Irish during the potato famine.

"The proximate cause of famine was potato blight, which ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. However, the impact in Ireland was disproportionate, as one third of the population was dependent on the potato for a range of ethnic, religious, political, social, and economic reasons, such as land acquisition, absentee landlords, and the Corn Laws, which all contributed to the disaster to varying degrees and remain the subject of intense historical debate."¹

"In an article on "English Rule" on 7 March, Mitchel wrote that the Irish People were "expecting famine day by day", and that they attributed it collectively not to "the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England." He continued in the same article that the people "believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of England's rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish." He wrote that the people watched as their "food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth", all the while watching "heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England."¹

"In 1996, Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, which concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race- and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the group commonly known as the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per the Hague Convention of 1948."¹

The famine in Ireland highlights the importance of a basic income and the superiority of basic income over regular welfare.

" The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.

The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland "as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." "¹

"The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P., prohibited anyone who held at least  1⁄4 of an acre (0.1 ha) from receiving relief. In practice, this meant that, if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay rent and taxes, should be reduced, as many thousands of them were, to applying for public outdoor relief, he would not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Of this Law, Mitchel wrote that "it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed—if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies." This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse"—a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850."¹

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1. "Great Famine (Ireland)." Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland). Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.