Speaker 1: Air horns, air horns, airhorns, pull a lot of airhorns
Speaker 1: and straight residence right and yours. I love this one thing.
Speaker 1: I have not been to a club in a while,
Speaker 1: so I do miss uh that that reggaeton sound. Prop.
Speaker 1: How you doing today? This is behind the bastards. I
Speaker 1: feel like my Marty going through stuff. But I feel
Speaker 1: like you're about to make it increasingly works, so I'm well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is I'm anticipating being very sadden. This isn't gonna
Speaker 1: be a happy one. Prop. How do you feel about Ireland?
Speaker 1: I have a lot of feelings about Ireland, Like like,
Speaker 1: I feel like Ireland probably got the greatest slang in
Speaker 1: the whole wide world. Concredible slang, you know, like y'all
Speaker 1: just y'all just hate everybody, you know. I like the pissiness.
Speaker 1: I like that you don't take irreverence, you don't take
Speaker 1: nothing serious, you know. Yeah, it's the yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: when you're doing a contest of like islands where a
Speaker 1: lot of bad things have been done to them. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of competition, you know. But but but boy,
Speaker 1: Ireland really up up up in the let's say, the
Speaker 1: top quarter of that pack. They're pretty up there, especially
Speaker 1: because like they they wouldn't drafted into white people until
Speaker 1: much later. You know, it did take get to be
Speaker 1: white too, Like that's cold, that's cold as ice, you know,
Speaker 1: saying like we'd the northern part of the same island
Speaker 1: and we can't get to be white people. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. It's it's it's quite a quite a tale. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about the English? Well, I will
Speaker 1: say this, they have a track record of just shipping
Speaker 1: on the rest of the earth for just the most
Speaker 1: efficient just with the greatest efficiency. Like I'm never like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how that little island was able to
Speaker 1: shoot on the whole earth as they It'd be fair
Speaker 1: to say they're like the New England Patriots of nations.
Speaker 1: It really is just the Tom Brady of country. Just
Speaker 1: can't lose, I will say, though, you know, yes, I
Speaker 1: am in the in the midst of finishing, uh top boy.
Speaker 1: So as of right now, I'm like East London, isn't it,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, like selling the food. So
Speaker 1: right now I'm like, now, granted, I will say this,
Speaker 1: I've noticed what made London cool is what made everything
Speaker 1: else cool, which is the presence of black people, because
Speaker 1: why Top Boy is so dope, it's the Jamaican immigrants
Speaker 1: that like created this whole type of slaying. It's calm, bro,
Speaker 1: It's that. Yeah, Don'tason, I'm joining is because I'm just like, hey,
Speaker 1: black people make everything cool. That's It's a big part
Speaker 1: of why London Calling is such a good album. Um.
Speaker 1: Now prop today. First off, I'm glad you've been scoping
Speaker 1: that because we're really going to need to lean on
Speaker 1: the English accents here for comedy relief, because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to do a lot of that. I've
Speaker 1: been practicing my my posh, so we'll give that a shot. Um.
Speaker 1: We're talking today about the thing that is most commonly
Speaker 1: called the potato famine. UM. One thing that Irish people
Speaker 1: will point out is that there was no such thing
Speaker 1: as a potato famine. Um. And the argument that will
Speaker 1: make is that, like, well, there was a potato blight,
Speaker 1: but Ireland had plenty of food. The famine was entirely caused,
Speaker 1: but there it was. It was a famine caused by
Speaker 1: English people, right. It was a famine caused by the
Speaker 1: the the the ruling class of the British Empire was
Speaker 1: not a famine caused by a potato bug and that
Speaker 1: is accurate. Um, yeah, yeah it is. Yeah. No, No,
Speaker 1: they don't leave it to the Brits to like do
Speaker 1: a genocide and blame it on a vegetable. Hey, listen, y'all,
Speaker 1: I'll try to tell you we was just doing mine
Speaker 1: in our own business and then the potato decided to die.
Speaker 1: Yeah what what what? What? What do you want us
Speaker 1: to do? The potato made the call like it's calming
Speaker 1: all that it is. It is. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: different takes you see from empires that commit genocides. You know,
Speaker 1: Turkey just decided to pretend that nothing bad ever happened
Speaker 1: to Armenian people. Uh. The Germans seemed broadly to have
Speaker 1: embraced that they did some bad things. But yeah, they're
Speaker 1: down there at least say, okay, guys, the British pointing
Speaker 1: to produce in the grocery store and being like, no,
Speaker 1: that's what you gotta be angry at. Um. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you have a dated somebody who was just
Speaker 1: ferociously never wrong, like would say stuff, that's like there's
Speaker 1: being right and then there's being less right. And I
Speaker 1: think in this situation, I'm just less right. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's that's that's that's England again. Yeah, that's that's that's
Speaker 1: the old that's that's old john Bull Um, which is
Speaker 1: the thing that people used to call England. Um. So
Speaker 1: have you ever have you ever been to Ireland? Prop? No, man,
Speaker 1: It's it's on my bucket list. I've been there a bunch.
Speaker 1: I love. I love going to Ireland, particularly I really
Speaker 1: like Dublin. And if you if you go to Dublin,
Speaker 1: which is a beautiful town, um always pretty great too.
Speaker 1: I like, there's a lot of great places in Ireland.
Speaker 1: But if you go to Dublin UM and you head
Speaker 1: to Custom House K you will see a series of
Speaker 1: statues and they're kind of There's like this street, you know,
Speaker 1: with a sidewalk next to it, and there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of statues of like wraith like human beings marching along
Speaker 1: this this little chunk of sidewalk. There's a one of
Speaker 1: them has a mother clutching a diving, dying baby to
Speaker 1: a breast. The other is like carrying either just like
Speaker 1: a past or the corpse of a starved child over
Speaker 1: her shoulders and it's it's it sounds terrible. It's the
Speaker 1: famine memorial, and it's a really really affecting memorial, and
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like in the middle of things,
Speaker 1: you know, um, and there It's one of those one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I really appreciate that memorials. If you
Speaker 1: do spend a lot of time, as I have, in
Speaker 1: parts of the world where you come across like starving
Speaker 1: people and refugees. It's some whoever made the memorial new
Speaker 1: I knew what they were doing, and I think there
Speaker 1: was like a conscious attempt to uh like there was
Speaker 1: an understanding of like how that looks. It's it's pretty affecting. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're going to talk about today, and
Speaker 1: it was yeah, yeah, the not a potato famine. Um.
Speaker 1: And it is interesting that these and I think what's
Speaker 1: sound kind of so compelling about this to me is
Speaker 1: that like all of the people who died and the
Speaker 1: thing we're about to talk about, um, this this was
Speaker 1: I think it's fair to say an act of genocide.
Speaker 1: That's certainly something that like one of our main sources
Speaker 1: today of Tim pat Coogan, will claim, but it was
Speaker 1: not a genocide. That kind of Usually when you have
Speaker 1: something like this, it comes as the result of like
Speaker 1: a civil war or at least a bloody conflict of
Speaker 1: some there's some sort of like fight, um, and then
Speaker 1: there is kind of an ethnic cleansing or a killing. UM.
Speaker 1: That's not really the case with the Great Hunger. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's more a genocide that's kind of the result
Speaker 1: of pure venal greed and free market ideology taken to
Speaker 1: the status of a religion. Um. And it's it's it's
Speaker 1: quite a tale. We're going to discuss the death toll
Speaker 1: a little bit later. For now, I'm just going to
Speaker 1: point out that the pre famine population of Ireland was
Speaker 1: a little bit less than nine million people. UM. Today
Speaker 1: there are just north of five million people in Ireland. UM.
Speaker 1: And in fact, last year is when Ireland first reached
Speaker 1: five million in population since the famine. UM it is
Speaker 1: probably yeah, it's probably the only nation on earth to
Speaker 1: have fewer people today than it did in the eighteen forties. UM. Wow, Yeah,
Speaker 1: man's is proper wicked. Brov that the peace for the food.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm sorry, like I'm really deep into top
Speaker 1: boy right now. That's that's that's fine. I'm I'm very
Speaker 1: deep into I'm still gearing up to to try out
Speaker 1: my my English accent. We we we dusted it off
Speaker 1: for one of the Kissinger episodes and you you were
Speaker 1: going off in we were going off a little bit.
Speaker 1: We were trying to do that, like and so yeah,
Speaker 1: the thing about my like, I know it's bad, but
Speaker 1: the best part about like how to do this one
Speaker 1: is because it's part Jamaican, So you can kind of
Speaker 1: like if you lean to Pat Swa, it's like it's
Speaker 1: okay because they're Jamaican immigrants, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: So like that's my only out. But at the same time, bro,
Speaker 1: it's calm, bro, like it's not good. I know it's
Speaker 1: not good. You know. The best I can do is well,
Speaker 1: I don't see why we have to have people who
Speaker 1: aren't English on the planet. It doesn't seem really particularly feasible.
Speaker 1: But both hand Hannah in apology apologize, I mean yes,
Speaker 1: at the same time for a number of this is great,
Speaker 1: though I do apologize ahead of time anytime I do
Speaker 1: a British accent to Jake, Um, my greatest, my good, my,
Speaker 1: my posh. My post British is give them the old
Speaker 1: what Fall. There we go nailing it, but the old
Speaker 1: what Fall. I will say this though I know this
Speaker 1: after touring through the UK enough, like doing music, like
Speaker 1: I finally figured out like that there and of course
Speaker 1: does that. There's like regional accents, so like I get
Speaker 1: it now when you're like in Birmingham, they do the
Speaker 1: Birmingham like they got that that that thing. Well, I
Speaker 1: think what we can certainly say is that we will
Speaker 1: be getting revenge for all of England's crimes by doing
Speaker 1: a variety of bad Yeah. Yeah, you was able to
Speaker 1: conquer the world. The least you can do is have
Speaker 1: to tolerate. Yeah, you're gonna get angry when I mispronounced
Speaker 1: Northampton or whatever. Um. So to explain how all of
Speaker 1: this happened, um, how like so many people were killed,
Speaker 1: um or we're allowed to die, We're gonna have to
Speaker 1: go back in history quite a bit to the very
Speaker 1: birth of the British Empire um, because in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, Ireland was kind of the first colonial possession
Speaker 1: of the Empire. UM. Now, prior to English conquest of Ireland, UM,
Speaker 1: the island maintained a history of pretty ferocious independence. It
Speaker 1: was never even close to being colonized by the Romans.
Speaker 1: They kind of like stop at at Scotland more or less,
Speaker 1: like they're trying to get up north, but they build
Speaker 1: that wall like it's a mess, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: trying to get up that far as you might know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: England not super close to Rome. Uh, Ireland, it's already
Speaker 1: far just far enough, you know. So you know, the
Speaker 1: Ireland pretty pretty much doing its own thing for that
Speaker 1: period of time, and then in like ten sixties six
Speaker 1: you get the Normans, which are kind of like basically
Speaker 1: the French conquer England um. And then after that point,
Speaker 1: you know the English kings or Norman kings, right, so
Speaker 1: not that long after the Norman's conquered England. In Ireland,
Speaker 1: there's this guy, Brian Beru, who is a high king
Speaker 1: and he the Normans try to invade Ireland and he
Speaker 1: defeats their armies and throws them back um or at
Speaker 1: least that's kind of how history is often summarized. The
Speaker 1: reality is a lot more complex. But you know this
Speaker 1: is not that in depth of an Irish history podcast.
Speaker 1: So like most parts of medieval Europe, Ireland, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of little kingdoms. You've got a
Speaker 1: bunch of like different kings, and they're all at war
Speaker 1: with each other pretty often, like most places in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: you got a bunch of people who are fighting with
Speaker 1: each other all the time. Um. And so while the
Speaker 1: Normans are in charge in England, there's this Irish king
Speaker 1: named Jarmide and mcmurra um and he he gets into
Speaker 1: a little bit of a scrap with some of his neighbors.
Speaker 1: So he kind of accidentally on purpose kidnaps the wife
Speaker 1: of one of his rivals. Um and that doesn't go
Speaker 1: great for him, So he he winds up in fighting
Speaker 1: the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this
Speaker 1: little squabble. Um, which will prove to have been a mistake.
Speaker 1: You don't invite the eye number one. Yeah, So all
Speaker 1: this is happening, and like the mid eleven hundreds, right this,
Speaker 1: this Irish king is like, hey, Norman's come on over,
Speaker 1: help me out. I kidnapped a lady and it didn't
Speaker 1: go great for me. Um. And and when the Normans
Speaker 1: get invited over to Ireland, there's a pope, right, you know,
Speaker 1: popes are a big deal. In the eleven hundreds, there's
Speaker 1: not really like that's kind of the only game in
Speaker 1: town unless you're going orthodox, right, Like, if you're a Christian,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty much the popes or nothing. Um. And
Speaker 1: the pope at this time was a guy named Adrian
Speaker 1: and he's actually the only english person they've ever let
Speaker 1: be pope. Um, which might key you went on how
Speaker 1: bad an idea it was to let an English person
Speaker 1: be the Yeah, this is the last time they try that.
Speaker 1: Ship they bring us, they bring a Nazi and to
Speaker 1: be pope before they let another British person. I'm like,
Speaker 1: and they got they got a pretty spicy track record
Speaker 1: for him to be like, I don't know about you know,
Speaker 1: that didn't work out at all. Um. So Adrian, uh,
Speaker 1: this English pope he uh, the Norman's kind of come
Speaker 1: to him and they're like, they work out a deal,
Speaker 1: and so he gives the King of England at this point,
Speaker 1: Henry the Second a papal bull, which is like, you know,
Speaker 1: a pope uh announcement law type deally right, when the
Speaker 1: pope declares the thing that's a papal bull kind of Um,
Speaker 1: my Catholic audience is screening at me for inaccurately describing
Speaker 1: what a papal bull is. But whatever he issues, this
Speaker 1: papal bull that legitimizes their invasion of the Ireland. Um.
Speaker 1: And so there's this basically what it what has happened
Speaker 1: here is the English Crown have made a deal with
Speaker 1: the papacy to colonize Ireland, which is seen as wild
Speaker 1: and still pretty pagan. Um. So that's that that that's
Speaker 1: what happens at this point when the Normans get invited over,
Speaker 1: they make this deal with the Pope to to christianize
Speaker 1: the pagan Irish um and to discuss what comes back
Speaker 1: for a good practice for the America's, for the America's
Speaker 1: for I mean, that's one of the points that like
Speaker 1: there's a pretty good book called The Invention of the
Speaker 1: White Race that goes into this some more detail. But
Speaker 1: like most of the techniques that the British Empire would
Speaker 1: use in places in Southeast Asia and Africa in in
Speaker 1: the America's, we're kind of tested out in Ireland, right
Speaker 1: in the Ireland. Yeah, um. And for what comes next year.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim
Speaker 1: pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot. From the
Speaker 1: Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay
Speaker 1: in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through
Speaker 1: the appointment of hand picked bishops, rather than having to
Speaker 1: struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish abbots, who
Speaker 1: hitherto had often been appointed by the families who controlled
Speaker 1: the extensive church lands and monasteries. The attraction for the
Speaker 1: Normans was straightforward. It gave them access to Irish Land, which,
Speaker 1: with their advances and agriculture, they were able to exploit
Speaker 1: far more profitably than where the cattle hurting Irish, and
Speaker 1: so Christ and Caesar came to be hand in glove. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: when Henry the eighth defied the Pope by divorcing his
Speaker 1: wife to marry Anne Boleyn, the gloves came off between
Speaker 1: King and Pope, with disastrous results for the Irish. From
Speaker 1: the time of Henry the Eighth's breaking with Rome, England
Speaker 1: became a Protestant nation and Ireland remained a Catholic one. Thus,
Speaker 1: apart from the inevitable attempts by a large country to
Speaker 1: subordinate a smaller country, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland. Also,
Speaker 1: not alone would the Catholic Irish lose their lands, they
Speaker 1: would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of
Speaker 1: the Protestant clergy. Not surprisingly, in a land where the
Speaker 1: poet is both feared and revered, Native Irish resentment at
Speaker 1: the superimposition of Protestantism found its expression, and a bitter
Speaker 1: verse by Rafferty, the famous blind Irish poet, don't talk
Speaker 1: of your Protestant minister or his church without temple or state,
Speaker 1: for the foundation stone of his religion was the bollox
Speaker 1: of Henry the Eighth. Well, pretty good little poem. That's
Speaker 1: good that I would love to see. Like, man, I
Speaker 1: wish there was like an alternate, like sort of multiverse
Speaker 1: timeline where the Irish just rejected the idea of joining whiteness.
Speaker 1: It's just if they're just like you know what, man, nah,
Speaker 1: fam nah, you know what I'm saying, Like, I just
Speaker 1: wonder like where we would be at now. Obviously our
Speaker 1: understanding of race being so intermixed with like colorism and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, But what if the influence was just
Speaker 1: like buck y'all, nah, we ain't one of you, I'm saying,
Speaker 1: because of ship like this, where it's like not only
Speaker 1: did y'all try to colonize us, you even tried to like,
Speaker 1: I mean, y'all sprayes off faith on us to you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, which was like and then you
Speaker 1: were like actually yeah yeah, it's like first of all,
Speaker 1: like yeah, just you a subversion of our all fair
Speaker 1: you act like you invented something, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: So like man ed have been. I would have loved
Speaker 1: to have seen some sort of like alternate time line
Speaker 1: where Irish were just like black people, like we were
Speaker 1: just like well, and there's I mean there's a lot
Speaker 1: that like because one of the things that happens. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got Aliver Cromwell who invades Ireland, and like if
Speaker 1: you look at the Irish countryside, one thing you might
Speaker 1: notice is that like there's weirdly not a lot of
Speaker 1: like old growth forests or wild animals because they got murdered,
Speaker 1: like like Cromwell like kills the land to a significant extent.
Speaker 1: It's like pretty there's a lot of like horrible, terrible,
Speaker 1: fucked up war crimes that go on in this period
Speaker 1: um and a lot of it's seen as like I
Speaker 1: said a little earlier that like there was this attitude
Speaker 1: of like there's a lot of like pagan wildness in Ireland.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that like Christianity isn't there, right, the
Speaker 1: Normans of the Catholicture don't bring Christianity to Ireland. It's
Speaker 1: been there for quite a while. But there's also this
Speaker 1: attitude that like, um, there's something kind of like feral
Speaker 1: about the Irish people. You see that a lot in
Speaker 1: kind of the way in which these people write about
Speaker 1: Ireland in this time. Um, and there is I think
Speaker 1: an extent like again, a lot has been written and
Speaker 1: that's not really not the focus of this episode, and
Speaker 1: like how the Irish became white? And I'm fairly certain
Speaker 1: there's actually a book by that title. Um, yeah, But
Speaker 1: I learned a lot of that in like my like
Speaker 1: undergrad studies, like that the process of like disenfranchising slaves
Speaker 1: and like when the it's good stuff and like Shea's
Speaker 1: Rebellion and all this stuff that like kind of tied
Speaker 1: to whiteness at least in the America's Yeah, but it
Speaker 1: is important, like a lot of that does happen in
Speaker 1: the Americas because when you actually look in Ireland, there
Speaker 1: is as much as there's histories of other things, there
Speaker 1: is a significant history of like rejection of aspects of
Speaker 1: that identity, and you see little signs of that and
Speaker 1: a bunch of things, including the fact that if you
Speaker 1: go to like a football game in Ireland day, there's
Speaker 1: a decent chance you go to see a lot of
Speaker 1: Palestinian flags. There's a long history of like kind of
Speaker 1: solidarity and whatnot that comes with being a colonized people. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing, because also it's worth noting
Speaker 1: that as with like the Scots, shipload of the soldiers
Speaker 1: of the British Empire who were doing this whole making
Speaker 1: an empire thing are Irish people too. So it's it's
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff is happening. Um. So English domination
Speaker 1: of Ireland was not a clean process that didn't happen
Speaker 1: all at once. This is going on for a period
Speaker 1: of kind of centuries. It's being sort of ironed out.
Speaker 1: As a rule. Irish lords ruled most of the land
Speaker 1: in Ireland through the twelve hundreds to the early like
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. Um. And you know it's the stuff we've
Speaker 1: been talking about. There's fighting in between these different lords,
Speaker 1: there's alliances. Some of them are like backing the English
Speaker 1: to like funck over their neighbors. Pretty normal feudalism stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: Celtic Ireland, as it's generally called, was divided between four
Speaker 1: or five lords at any given time the bulk of
Speaker 1: the land um, and they distributed like the land that
Speaker 1: was under their control to lower chiefs into like accepts
Speaker 1: the in in what we're called land usages and in
Speaker 1: exchange for this land. Basically again, it's the pretty normal
Speaker 1: feudalism deal. You've got a hand over a portion of
Speaker 1: your agricultural produced for the lord, and if there's a war,
Speaker 1: you've got to like help, you know, give him bodies.
Speaker 1: Basically standard. Yeah, you've got these guys and they got there,
Speaker 1: they got their guys. Um. It's it's pretty normal, pretty
Speaker 1: normal feudalism stuff, which is not all that different from
Speaker 1: organized crime, but with better outfits. Um yeah, like most government. Um. So,
Speaker 1: Henry the Eighth becomes king as we discussed, and he
Speaker 1: kind of staggers dick first into the history of religion. Um,
Speaker 1: that's crazy, Like there was a way I would love
Speaker 1: to be there for the Henry the Eighth story that well,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll get to that at one point. That's a
Speaker 1: little further back than we usually do. All probably Cromwell.
Speaker 1: Probably do Cromwell before we do Henry, because I mean
Speaker 1: Cromwell's after. But you know, yeah, I'm just like, listen,
Speaker 1: if there's any like sort of if you are, if
Speaker 1: you are a Christian or Protestant in any way, shape
Speaker 1: or form like you there's no in I don't care
Speaker 1: what schout theology is, your hat has to go off
Speaker 1: to him to eight. It's an incredible flex like in
Speaker 1: that completely, that's amazing. He got to start a denomination
Speaker 1: just because because because he needed the pool Namby, he
Speaker 1: invented the what is it the Anglican Hirian? Yeah, because
Speaker 1: they wanted to fuck differently this look in respect? Do
Speaker 1: I like, there's the human humans sit out theology down
Speaker 1: for a second? Respect due bro, Yeah, it's it's it's pretty,
Speaker 1: it's pretty. It's pretty cool. So one of the things
Speaker 1: that Henry the Eighth does because he's he's he's not
Speaker 1: happy that the Irish aren't willing to give up their
Speaker 1: religion because he wanted to fuck um. And there's other
Speaker 1: stuff like there's a lot of like Irish raids on
Speaker 1: the English coast. There's kind of fighting with in Ireland.
Speaker 1: So anyway, he decides Ireland has been a troublesome food
Speaker 1: quite enough time, and and he makes a declaration that
Speaker 1: all Irish lands, whether they're owned by Gaelic, Irish or
Speaker 1: English transplants, have to descender, have to surrender their their
Speaker 1: land to the Crown, and then the Crown's going to
Speaker 1: give them back. Right. So what he's doing, he's not
Speaker 1: actually trying to take their land away, but he's trying
Speaker 1: to make it clear that everyone who owns land in
Speaker 1: Ireland owns it through the King of England. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: that's pretty that's pretty mobster right there. He wants everybody
Speaker 1: to um con bend the knee, you know that. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: So the Irish, a lot of people in Ireland, i
Speaker 1: should say, aren't super happy with this, right Um it's
Speaker 1: and and so they rebel and this kicks off a
Speaker 1: series of wars that go throughout like the early sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: There's a number of rebellions. One of them is led
Speaker 1: by a guy named Dodoherty. Uh and in sixteen o
Speaker 1: eight he loses this rebellion and he had owned like
Speaker 1: he was one of these guys who's owned a shipload
Speaker 1: of irelansh Irish land. Um and because he loses this rebellion,
Speaker 1: all of the land he's owned is granted to the
Speaker 1: Lord Deputy, a guy named Author Chichester, which is virtually
Speaker 1: Chichester's a name and both as a first and a
Speaker 1: last name that you're going to hear a couple of
Speaker 1: times in this story. I had never heard it before,
Speaker 1: this terrible name. Terrible name, not like Authority, which is
Speaker 1: a good name. I like, it's pretty like it's it's
Speaker 1: always fun, always fun saying to say in Irish names. Um,
Speaker 1: so England had only kind of I mean, part of
Speaker 1: how England wins the victories in these wars. They're finding
Speaker 1: it's not just them coming in as as will be
Speaker 1: the case with like all of their colonial wars. They're
Speaker 1: not just sending in an army and crushing the local opposition.
Speaker 1: They are allying with Irish rebels, right, and they're kind
Speaker 1: of playing these different chieftain or not with rebels, but
Speaker 1: they're playing these different chieftains off each other. So some
Speaker 1: of these Irish chieftains stay loyal to the crown and
Speaker 1: they fight on behalf of the crown against other Irish people, right,
Speaker 1: And that's how it's it's going to be the same
Speaker 1: in Africa, right with these peeps like the King's African
Speaker 1: rifles and whatnot. You know, that's where we get our
Speaker 1: idiom means and whatnot is these colonial soldiers who are
Speaker 1: getting played against other you know, indigenous people's. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a bummer, it's a real bummer. And this is
Speaker 1: not I had said previously that Ireland's kind of the
Speaker 1: first colony of England. That doesn't mean it's the first
Speaker 1: place that the English like conquer. That's not England, right,
Speaker 1: because they take whales and they take Scotland first, right. Um.
Speaker 1: But those again, there's people probably in both places who
Speaker 1: will argue. But I think there's a difference with what
Speaker 1: happens in those places and what happens in Ireland that
Speaker 1: makes Ireland more of a colony situate. Because people always
Speaker 1: are conquering each other, right, they do it everywhere. They
Speaker 1: do it in Africa, the New China, they all every
Speaker 1: every group of human beings. There have been some who
Speaker 1: have like conquered others. What what we start to see
Speaker 1: happening in this developing colonial period is different. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that's really different is that when when
Speaker 1: the English, you know, take have to fight their fights
Speaker 1: with Scotland. The same thing happens where there's groups of
Speaker 1: nobles in Scotland who sided with the English English Crown
Speaker 1: and help crackdown and rebellions, and there's groups that rebel.
Speaker 1: The same thing happens in Wales. But once those wars
Speaker 1: are over, the Welsh and scott lords who had sided
Speaker 1: with the English crown get a piece of the pie, right,
Speaker 1: Like they get integrated to a signific pretty significant extent,
Speaker 1: and like the ruling class of this this forming thing
Speaker 1: that's going to become the United Kingdom. Um. And so
Speaker 1: a lot of these Irish chieftains who side with the
Speaker 1: crown think like, well, something like this is going to
Speaker 1: happen with us, right, which seems like a good deal.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not going bad for these these folks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's when assimilation works, yeah, right, It's
Speaker 1: like we'll just assimilate you into the culture and everything's
Speaker 1: everything's fine. Yeah, And it seems like this is the
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, and and and that's kind of what
Speaker 1: a lot of these folks who have sided with the
Speaker 1: crown expect to happen in Ireland. It's not how things
Speaker 1: work out, and I want to quote next from the
Speaker 1: book The Invention of the White Race by Theodore Allen.
Speaker 1: The option for racial oppression left no room in the
Speaker 1: ranks of the colonial upper crap upper class for Catholic
Speaker 1: Irish chieftains, for all that some of them might wear
Speaker 1: the titles sir. The English therefore proceeded systematically with the
Speaker 1: repudiation of their promises to their Irish wartime allies, whether
Speaker 1: they had been enemies or allies in the Tyrone War,
Speaker 1: whether they flew to arms or merely protested at court.
Speaker 1: The Irish of chieftain class were to be demoted socially
Speaker 1: to the status of no more than small landlords, politically
Speaker 1: excluded from posts of authority, and placed socially beyond the
Speaker 1: pale of British respectability, tannistry and gavel kind. The Celtic
Speaker 1: forms of succession and inheritance were outlawed. Irish chieftains might
Speaker 1: be expropriated and put to death for making an appeal
Speaker 1: based on Celtic law, and the practice of the Catholic
Speaker 1: religion was outlawed. Britain's were forbidden to acquire land from Britain's,
Speaker 1: that is, English or Scots they were to get it
Speaker 1: from the Irish. In the sixest sheeted Ulster counties, only
Speaker 1: a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep
Speaker 1: as much as one thousand acres of land. They just yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so bad, and it's like, I know, I'm looking
Speaker 1: back at history, you know, I'm kind of like Monday
Speaker 1: more quarterback in here, but like it just seems so arbitrary.
Speaker 1: Of this is wrapped up in the Catholicism Anglicans split.
Speaker 1: It's got to be that, right, because I'm un it.
Speaker 1: I mean, like because again, like to this day, like
Speaker 1: you know, with the ways people feel about Italians where
Speaker 1: I'm like, why not domn I'm like, is it what
Speaker 1: they don't count? I'm like, is it? Is it that? Anyway? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has to be the religion thing and then being
Speaker 1: able to fold that into your your construction of yeah,
Speaker 1: because it starts, it doesn't And it's just that like
Speaker 1: these initial divisions, uh, and the kind of conflicts they
Speaker 1: spawn just keep deepening over time, because it doesn't until
Speaker 1: the Irish are even more than just sort of a subject,
Speaker 1: a subject people um seen as like a conquered people
Speaker 1: who have to be kind of brutally kept in their place.
Speaker 1: Like this is a kind of an evolving understanding. None
Speaker 1: of this happens overnight. Um, And I'm like, but yeah,
Speaker 1: by and large, I'm like, relatively speaking, the space between
Speaker 1: the British and the Irish is like l A and
Speaker 1: the Valley. Like, yeah, there's there's suburbs in the United
Speaker 1: States that are closer to their cities of origin than
Speaker 1: like or further than like Dublin is from from London. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not even it's not even like to San Francisco.
Speaker 1: It's not even lay San Francisco. I'm like, yo, like
Speaker 1: day day round the corner, Like, yeah, there's I think,
Speaker 1: like Kanye's farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of
Speaker 1: the landmass we're talking about here. Yeah, I'm just like
Speaker 1: it's only um, yeah, they're not far away, but like
Speaker 1: in terms of like the cultural differences, it is pretty vast,
Speaker 1: and it's growing this period in part because English elites
Speaker 1: really come to despise the Irish as a race. Lord
Speaker 1: Chichester um who wound up I'm probably pronouncing that wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm sure something like Jerry or some ship. Because it's
Speaker 1: English names, it's always like what no of course you
Speaker 1: pronounced Chichester. Chichester. It's pronounced you know. Yeah, okay, I'm
Speaker 1: reading one. For reading the letters on the page, for
Speaker 1: trusting the way you wrote this, that's I mean. I'm sorry, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I didn't. I didn't realize it was pronounced
Speaker 1: lester because it's not at all spelled like lester. There's
Speaker 1: there's not an L anywhere in here, and that's why
Speaker 1: I thought there wasn't pronounced lester. It's one of those things,
Speaker 1: like whales. You look at the way things are spelled
Speaker 1: in Welsh and it makes like I would never even
Speaker 1: try to pronounce those, but at least they don't. They
Speaker 1: aren't pretending to be something friending. You look at a
Speaker 1: Welsh where and you're like, okay, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: how to say that. You look at the word for
Speaker 1: lester and it's like, oh, well that looks like a
Speaker 1: thing that I should be able to just read. But no, exactly, Nope. Anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: we don't trust you. We'll talk about this racist asshole
Speaker 1: in a second. We're back. So, Lord Chichester, who winds
Speaker 1: up in possession of that rebel Adoherty's land? He writes
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter quote I have often said and written, it
Speaker 1: is famine which must consume the Irish. Our swords and
Speaker 1: other endeavors work not for that speedy effect which is
Speaker 1: effect expected for the overthrow. So even in it, in
Speaker 1: this period of time, the sixteen hundreds, you have English
Speaker 1: lords being like there's too many Irish, they're too quarrelsome
Speaker 1: we got an engineer of famine, right, like, just to video, y'alls,
Speaker 1: there's too many of Starvation is going to be the
Speaker 1: best way to deal with these people. British thanos and
Speaker 1: a lot of English nobility are going to spend quite
Speaker 1: a bit of time engineering. Really, what's a series of disasters?
Speaker 1: Because before the Great Hunger there are a couple of
Speaker 1: other pretty terrible famines, one of which kills hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of people. We just don't talk about it much
Speaker 1: anymore because the Great Hunger is even worse. Um, But
Speaker 1: you know, I want to talk about like how they
Speaker 1: did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of
Speaker 1: this landlording system that arises over the course of a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries in Ireland. Um. Now, we we chat
Speaker 1: on this show pretty regularly about serfdom, which is a
Speaker 1: social situation that existed in a lot of Europe throughout
Speaker 1: the medieval period and existed in Russia until the eighteen sixties. Right,
Speaker 1: Russia doesn't free their serfs until right around when UM
Speaker 1: the Amounts of Patient Proclamation is signed there within a
Speaker 1: couple of years of each other. UM and serfdom is
Speaker 1: a type of slavery. It's not nearly as bad as
Speaker 1: like chattel slavery in North America, UM in part because
Speaker 1: obviously one of the worst things about chattel slaveries families
Speaker 1: get split up. Right, you can like sell individuals from
Speaker 1: families and separate them from their loved ones. Surfs are
Speaker 1: bound to the land, so they are part of the
Speaker 1: property parcel that you own, So you can't like split
Speaker 1: up families outside of like drafting people to go fight
Speaker 1: in wars, which which absolutely does happen and is pretty unpleasant. UM.
Speaker 1: But it does mean like the downside of being a
Speaker 1: surf is that you're not really free, you can't leave,
Speaker 1: you can't really do anything but be a serf. The
Speaker 1: upside is that number one, you're not you're not really
Speaker 1: paying rent. You know, like you can't get kicked off
Speaker 1: the land because yeah, yeah, I've always I've always explained
Speaker 1: it like, okay, you know when you when you like
Speaker 1: if you're renting an apartment and the apartment has a
Speaker 1: stove watching machine, like it's already there, Like it just
Speaker 1: it kind of comes with the apartment, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It's like it's a surf. Yeah, they're kind
Speaker 1: of like you just come with the land when I
Speaker 1: buy it, you know. Yeah, it's I'm sure this will
Speaker 1: happen in like another three years. But imagine if your
Speaker 1: landlord owned you, and that meant that you had to
Speaker 1: do what your landlord said and work in whatever job
Speaker 1: they wanted you to work. But you also couldn't get evicted. Um,
Speaker 1: so it would be a kick you out, but you
Speaker 1: also can't move. Yeah, exactly, So it sucks. But also
Speaker 1: it's really where I'm bringing all this up to say
Speaker 1: that like as bad as Serfdom was, it is vastly
Speaker 1: superior to what Irish peasants are enduring from the sixteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and seventeen hundreds. I think it's important to like,
Speaker 1: for you know, future reference for any any listener, especially
Speaker 1: like the type of listeners that you and I have
Speaker 1: to when you talk about slavery to understand sort of
Speaker 1: the gradient of types of slavery, and I think yeah,
Speaker 1: like on one end of the spectrum is sort of
Speaker 1: like yeah, like a like a conquered village, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, Um, and you're taking the warriors to
Speaker 1: do something or some sort of like serfdom if you will,
Speaker 1: all the way to this, Yeah, well the humans are
Speaker 1: prob where humans are are cattle like, so that's like
Speaker 1: chattel slavery, you know what I'm saying, Like there's a
Speaker 1: a scale, you know what I mean, If you will,
Speaker 1: it's really important because a lot of the especially folks
Speaker 1: who want to minimize chattel slavery that exists in the
Speaker 1: United States, they'll be like, well, slavery exists everywhere and
Speaker 1: it's always bad, which is like saying war exists everywhere
Speaker 1: and it's always bad. It's like, yeah, but different kinds
Speaker 1: of wars others like yes, like desert storm war is bad,
Speaker 1: but desert storm was not as bad as for example,
Speaker 1: the German innovation of Russia. It was worse than the other.
Speaker 1: And it's like, yeah, like Roman, and there's often gradients,
Speaker 1: Like we talk about ancient Roman slavery. There were slaves
Speaker 1: in ancient Rome who would have who would have felt
Speaker 1: very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America.
Speaker 1: These would have been slaves working on the lat of Fundia,
Speaker 1: which were these massive agricultural plantations or in the minds,
Speaker 1: and these are terrible lives for these slaves and they're
Speaker 1: worked to death and it's it's really a miserable situation.
Speaker 1: But a lot of slaves in ancient Rome would have
Speaker 1: been more or less we're working internships, like and they're
Speaker 1: not even unpaid, like they're getting paid a lot. Like
Speaker 1: you when when you get freed and you had you
Speaker 1: would get free generally before too much time as like
Speaker 1: a household slave or like, yeah, like people would people,
Speaker 1: particularly educated Greeks, would sell themselves into slavery to become
Speaker 1: teachers for rich people because it was like a better life.
Speaker 1: So it's not like if you're like, you can't just say,
Speaker 1: like slavery in Rome was this because there are a
Speaker 1: bunch of different types of slate and anyway, totally we're
Speaker 1: getting off the subject. Yeah yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think that's a very important distinction, especially like
Speaker 1: when you're trying, like you said, having a cultural dialogue
Speaker 1: with somebody about, like I said, minimizing the experience of
Speaker 1: one person sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to
Speaker 1: where you like it. It really is different though. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's worth understanding that because the Irish in this period
Speaker 1: they're not slaves in any way. Um, but also in
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which there's certainly worse off in
Speaker 1: most ways than surfs. Um. It's because of this landlording
Speaker 1: system that evolves. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, like this period,
Speaker 1: there there's this process of the Celtic feudal system being
Speaker 1: dismantled piece by piece and ownership of the land being
Speaker 1: transferred to English landlords, most of whom were what you'd
Speaker 1: call absentee landlords. Right, they don't live in Ireland. Thankfully
Speaker 1: that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody here pays rent. Nobody listening
Speaker 1: to the show pays rent to somebody who lives far away,
Speaker 1: and it's just kind of collecting a check. That doesn't
Speaker 1: happen anymore, but it did in this period. It never happened.
Speaker 1: So first of first I couldn't follow you. I was like, wait,
Speaker 1: that he's making a joke. I'm yeah, I'm just being
Speaker 1: a lass. So throughout the sixteen hundreds, England confiscates more
Speaker 1: than three million acres of land um. And yeah, this
Speaker 1: this during this period of time, Irish peasants changed from
Speaker 1: being more or less in a similar position to peasants
Speaker 1: in a lot of Europe to being renters um and
Speaker 1: this winds up being a lot worse under what can
Speaker 1: to be called the Middleman system. And there's a couple
Speaker 1: of different ways that this kind of works. It's not
Speaker 1: the same across all of Ireland. But one of the
Speaker 1: ways in which this works is called the Middleman system.
Speaker 1: And in this English people acquire land which they then
Speaker 1: let to a fixed rate to a single english person
Speaker 1: who lives in Ireland. So the land is like owned
Speaker 1: by an english person who lives outside the island, and
Speaker 1: then they basically lease it to an English person who
Speaker 1: lives in Ireland and works as like a property manager,
Speaker 1: and he sub lets the property to peasants. These are
Speaker 1: This is a very modern system in a lot a
Speaker 1: lot of this is gonna sound very familiar, not to like,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to compare this to like rental situation
Speaker 1: people living in San Francisco. It's obviously, like not not
Speaker 1: to minimize the horror what's happening in Ireland, but like
Speaker 1: legally on paper, there's there's some real similarities between and
Speaker 1: in part because like what is figured out in this
Speaker 1: period of time spreads in a lot of ways, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the different attitudes towards how leasing and
Speaker 1: renting and stuff should totally kind of being invented in
Speaker 1: this period um. So the middleman system allows landlords to
Speaker 1: profit handily off of Irish land and labor without actually
Speaker 1: seeing the people they're exploiting. You know, that's up to
Speaker 1: the middleman to do the direct exploiting, so you can
Speaker 1: just kind of take the cash. Another system that is
Speaker 1: popular in chunks of Ireland is called land tenure um
Speaker 1: and in this system, absentee landlords rent small tracts of
Speaker 1: land directly to peasants without a middleman um and over
Speaker 1: the course of two hundred years or so, there's kind
Speaker 1: of some different ways that this works, but the ultimate
Speaker 1: result is that most Irish peasants, like three million people
Speaker 1: by the time the Great Hunger starts, wind up living
Speaker 1: on these very very small plots of land. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about this more later, but they keep getting divided up
Speaker 1: more and more over time. Um in his nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: two text The Great Hunger historian Cecil Wouldham Smith, which
Speaker 1: is a very English name for a guy who's who's
Speaker 1: writing a very critical book about the Great Hunger proper
Speaker 1: Cecil Smith. Um, I just can't get over some of
Speaker 1: these names anyway. The land Uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from Cecil, who I think is actually a pretty
Speaker 1: good historian. The land system, thus introduced, was a method
Speaker 1: of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of
Speaker 1: holding in subjection of the common people. Ireland was a
Speaker 1: conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his
Speaker 1: landlord and alien conqueror. So while it is tempting and
Speaker 1: to some extent worthwhile to again note some similarities with
Speaker 1: our modern landlording system, it's also important to see how
Speaker 1: unique this system was. The English crown is essentially using
Speaker 1: a really decentralized network of landholding arrangements to dispossess the
Speaker 1: Irish peasant, and this ensures if you don't own your farm,
Speaker 1: you can't ever make anything extra right. Like you know what,
Speaker 1: We'll talk again this a bit more. But like it.
Speaker 1: It ensures the fact that nobody owns anything and the
Speaker 1: fact that people don't have any permanent ties to the
Speaker 1: land that they're born and raised on, um means makes
Speaker 1: it very hard for peasants to put together the resources
Speaker 1: or have the stability that could lead to organized resistance.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make it impossible, there is organized resistance at periods,
Speaker 1: but it makes it a lot harder. Um. It also
Speaker 1: makes it it's very another thing that's very familiar, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And obviously when this, when aspects of this system get
Speaker 1: taken over to other parts of the world, they get
Speaker 1: a lot worse, right, Like, it's definitely worse for other
Speaker 1: people outside of Ireland when some of these things are
Speaker 1: like morphed but you can see shades of the tactics
Speaker 1: that the British Empire would use everywhere here um, and
Speaker 1: shades of like what the United States is going to
Speaker 1: do to indigenous people, you know, right, Like there's elements
Speaker 1: of that in here um because it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of things being tested. Yeah. Um. So English
Speaker 1: land laws are imported to Ireland, and these laws quote
Speaker 1: pushed to their extreme the rights of landlords and conceded
Speaker 1: nothing to the occupiers in respect of their customary rights.
Speaker 1: Under the old Irish customs, Irish renters did not get
Speaker 1: to lease the land they lived on. There are no
Speaker 1: leases in this period, so everyone is at will, which
Speaker 1: means you can be evicted at any moment for any
Speaker 1: reason or no reason at all. Um, there's no warning
Speaker 1: that has to be given. It doesn't like you can
Speaker 1: be paying your rent and they can still kick you off.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. Um. Tenants also received no kind of
Speaker 1: compensation for improving the land that they farmed. So a
Speaker 1: big part of farming, if you've ever farmed, is to
Speaker 1: like do things over time that make your land more
Speaker 1: productive and like increase your yield and make what you're
Speaker 1: on more valuable and also more capable of more easily
Speaker 1: providing a more food, both for money and for taking
Speaker 1: care of your yourself of the people who live there.
Speaker 1: You there's no point in doing that if you're an
Speaker 1: Irish Irish tenant farmer. Um. We'll get into that a
Speaker 1: little bit more too, But like because you you own nothing, um,
Speaker 1: It's it's good for people to have a sense of
Speaker 1: ownership and the things that they live in. Like, it's
Speaker 1: it's broadly positive so yeah, I was just like why
Speaker 1: why I'm now now I'm curious as to like, why
Speaker 1: do they why would you think that this like would
Speaker 1: be successful? Well like that, Yeah, but I'm like just
Speaker 1: in the initial thinking of like I would want if
Speaker 1: I own the land I wouldn't want, and I and
Speaker 1: own a land in a place that I don't even
Speaker 1: live and I probably ain't seen in years, I would
Speaker 1: want to make sure that that land is getting better.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, so I'm like, make my land better
Speaker 1: just because I'm telling you to, or just like I
Speaker 1: just thought. Maybe I'm just again modern eyes where I
Speaker 1: was like, man, I would want to incentivize, like yo,
Speaker 1: keep avocado. You know what I'm saying, Like, hey, if
Speaker 1: you could pick my soil, I want to take one
Speaker 1: of my avocados for yourself, Like I would think to me,
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm saying. There there are that
Speaker 1: there are some landlords, because again we're we're talking abroad here,
Speaker 1: there are certainly landlords who like offer better deals to
Speaker 1: people and who do try to encourage, you know, like
Speaker 1: I'm never going to kick you guys off, like you
Speaker 1: can improve your land that that happens to But but
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, it does not happen on a wide scale,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about why. But this is
Speaker 1: very much a conscious decision that people are making, and
Speaker 1: there's it's a mix of ideology. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about some aspects of like free market capitalism are being invented.
Speaker 1: So a big part of the fear here is that
Speaker 1: if you create a situation by which people would want
Speaker 1: to improve their land, that's by definition a situation which
Speaker 1: they have more control over the land they live on,
Speaker 1: which means you are violating the sacred property rights of
Speaker 1: the lord. Right. That's a big chunk of of why
Speaker 1: they don't want that to exist. Because yeah, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: we're gonna get Adam Smith is going to come into
Speaker 1: this story in a big way not not too long
Speaker 1: from now. So, but obviously we're not there yet. Six
Speaker 1: nine Adam Smith is just a glimmer in I don't
Speaker 1: know some other Smith's I at this point. So, uh,
Speaker 1: William of Orange in sixteen nine beats the Catholic king
Speaker 1: James the Second at the Battle of the boyne Um,
Speaker 1: and this spells the end of organized Catholic power in
Speaker 1: Ireland and is seen by Protestants in Northern Ireland as
Speaker 1: kind of like an Independence day sort of situation. Battle
Speaker 1: of the Boyne is a big thing for the Protestants
Speaker 1: in Northern Ireland. Um. And again it's often seen as like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have this like fight between the Catholics and the Protestants,
Speaker 1: and the Catholics lose and and it it leads to
Speaker 1: a lot of tragedy. It's again, as is always the
Speaker 1: case with Irish history, much messier than that, because the
Speaker 1: reality is that the Pope in Rome actually backs William
Speaker 1: of Orange against the Catholic King James as part of
Speaker 1: a strategic scheme to funk with King Louis of France. Um.
Speaker 1: And he secretly funnels the modern equivalent of three and
Speaker 1: a half million pounds sterling to William. Money that's spent
Speaker 1: on swords and muskets to kill Catholic isn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we don't find it. We we didn't learn this
Speaker 1: until documents were uncovered in two thousand eight. Like for
Speaker 1: in terms of like to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: like how good the fucking Catholic churches and both documenting
Speaker 1: ship and keeping it lockdown. This happens in sixteen ninety
Speaker 1: and it doesn't drop until two thousand eight. Dog, the
Speaker 1: US government's bad at FOIA requests. Do you understand what
Speaker 1: I'm saying? I just heard today. I just heard day
Speaker 1: Trump out there hiding seven hours like phone content, Like, okay,
Speaker 1: see if you can keep that hidden for full honey years.
Speaker 1: Popes like that's that, that's j V ship. Yeah, Popes
Speaker 1: like Rookie Cookies, rich shirt. There wasn't even be United
Speaker 1: States when we started covering up war. Cry you need
Speaker 1: you need country. Yeah, we we've got. We're hiding ship
Speaker 1: older than your concept of of of society. Yeah we got.
Speaker 1: We got dudes, old, sacred and your constitution gotta love it.
Speaker 1: Throughout the early seventeen hundreds, the Irish peasantry languished better
Speaker 1: off than slaves, but worse off in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways than surfs. The fact that landlords could increase rent
Speaker 1: whenever they wanted meant it was pointless again to try
Speaker 1: and farm for cash crops worth much more like there's
Speaker 1: not a lot. There's not a point in massively increasing
Speaker 1: your yields or improving the land because they can change
Speaker 1: your rented will. So if they see, oh they doubled
Speaker 1: their productivity this year, I'm gonna double rent, So why
Speaker 1: would you do that? Why would you put in that?
Speaker 1: Why would you exactly? So you you pay in in produce. Yeah,
Speaker 1: generally basically right like you're because you're you're farming. You
Speaker 1: are a farmer, so you're farming both to feed yourself
Speaker 1: and you are farming to pay your rent. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've got this middleman, you can't just be like
Speaker 1: hide and corn somewhere. But it's harder because he's and
Speaker 1: there's there's obviously there's always local collaborators whose jobs like
Speaker 1: you know, um, and there's also the people always do
Speaker 1: get away with ship right the same you know, we're
Speaker 1: flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: history to cover here, of course, and you have what's
Speaker 1: what's a what's ahead of lettuce between friends? Yeah, but
Speaker 1: there's there's also so not only there's no point in
Speaker 1: like massively increasing your yields as a farmer, because they'll
Speaker 1: just up your taxes, but there's also not much of
Speaker 1: a point in improving the land because if you make
Speaker 1: the land a lot better, then your landlord will kick
Speaker 1: you out and we'll sprint it to someone else for
Speaker 1: more money. Yep. You know, like why why why would you? Um? Now,
Speaker 1: historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress
Speaker 1: under the feudal system, this is everywhere that there is
Speaker 1: a feudal system, is that like this is broadly a
Speaker 1: thing that happens in feudalism. Feudal lords in a lot
Speaker 1: of Europe throughout the medieval period have fairly little incentive
Speaker 1: to invest in or improve their lands. If you may
Speaker 1: like a region a lot more agriculturally productive or whatever, UM,
Speaker 1: then number one, it looks more enticing for your rifles
Speaker 1: to attack and try to take. But also the money
Speaker 1: that you invest in improving that land is less money
Speaker 1: that you're spending on your military. You know, if you're
Speaker 1: smart and careful, over time it can work out for you.
Speaker 1: But it's like a risk. You're taking a gamble if
Speaker 1: you if you divert resources for that UM. And this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why feudalism doesn't you know,
Speaker 1: people find other things to do, because it's it's not
Speaker 1: great for all kinds of progress, right, like I think
Speaker 1: I do like And one of the things that's interesting
Speaker 1: is England has even though there's a king, still they've
Speaker 1: moved beyond this system in this period. That's part of
Speaker 1: why they conquer the world, right, as they developed kind
Speaker 1: of new systems that are more conclusive to the kind
Speaker 1: of progress that is beneficial. Um. But with this system
Speaker 1: of absentee landlords that they put in place over Ireland,
Speaker 1: they find a way to deny the Irish any benefits
Speaker 1: of modernization. UM. When enterprising irishmen try to make a
Speaker 1: life for themselves in other ways besides farming, the Crown
Speaker 1: cracks down on their ambitions. In the Famine plot, Tim
Speaker 1: pat Coogan rights, Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest.
Speaker 1: Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing and woolen industries
Speaker 1: were taxed out of existence when they came into competition
Speaker 1: with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which
Speaker 1: led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America.
Speaker 1: So like, not only is it a ship situation for farmers,
Speaker 1: but whenever people try to do anything else, try to
Speaker 1: go into business or whatever, that gets destroyed via like
Speaker 1: taxing or via like different there's different ways the government
Speaker 1: has a fucking this over in order to protect English businesses.
Speaker 1: You know, you know when there's no way out for
Speaker 1: the Irish. Really. There's even this brief period in the
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds where they're starting to industrialize more and
Speaker 1: the the the number of Irish people who are kind
Speaker 1: of like working in these factory jobs, industrial jobs, the
Speaker 1: don off industrial revolution is increasing and then it plummets
Speaker 1: right before the Great Hunger. And part of that is
Speaker 1: that like, well, we don't want Irish industry to compete
Speaker 1: with British, like we want to sell them that stuff
Speaker 1: for one thing, Like that's not why they're they're they're
Speaker 1: not there to develop their island into you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of Yeah, and we're talking are like are we
Speaker 1: we're still talking like Ireland as a whole? Are we
Speaker 1: talking Northern Ireland? Were Yeah, We're it's just Ireland at
Speaker 1: this polet. I mean, it's it's it's it's all under
Speaker 1: the control of the crown, right. So there are like
Speaker 1: what you've got up in the north, like places like
Speaker 1: Ulster in particular. Ulster is basically founded as a colony
Speaker 1: of English people in Ireland. Um, so yeah, you do.
Speaker 1: And again this is kind of like Ulster is founded
Speaker 1: right along the same time. It's like so that like
Speaker 1: the English, you're founding colonies in the east coast of
Speaker 1: North America, so they're actually kind of colonizing Ireland in
Speaker 1: similar ways to how they're colonizing the America's at around
Speaker 1: the same period of time. UM. So obviously all this
Speaker 1: the fact that England is kind of hamstringing Irish growth
Speaker 1: has impacts beyond just keeping the Irish downtrodden. Um. English
Speaker 1: landlords could have been proved this situation while remaining into
Speaker 1: control in control if they'd agreed to enter into contracts
Speaker 1: with their tenants like leases, that would maybe limit their
Speaker 1: ability to increase rent or evict people. But they weren't
Speaker 1: willing to do this, and that's part of why there
Speaker 1: can be no progress. In a paper for the Marquette
Speaker 1: Law Review, Cynthia Smith writes, because the landlord's goal was
Speaker 1: to extract as much money from the land as possible,
Speaker 1: any contractual agreement with tenants would have been an obstacle
Speaker 1: to this rent seeking. In addition to rent seeking, there
Speaker 1: were a number of reasons why English landlords neglected to
Speaker 1: invest in their holdings in Ireland. The small size of holdings,
Speaker 1: the uncertain political situation, general economic conditions, and the availability
Speaker 1: of more lucrative investment alternatives. All of these factors may
Speaker 1: have contributed to the landlord's reluctance to improve. Landlords were
Speaker 1: further deterred from investing because they were already making a
Speaker 1: substantial profit on the rent collected on the unimproved land. Finally,
Speaker 1: landlords neglected to make improvements because they feared that tenants
Speaker 1: would use the investments so intensively that the value of
Speaker 1: the improvement would depreciate it too high a rate. Misuse
Speaker 1: of an improvement was likely to occur when tenants had
Speaker 1: no security of tenure. However, if tenants had been given
Speaker 1: some security, misuse would not have been a problem because
Speaker 1: tenants would have been in the process of maximizing their
Speaker 1: net income and used the improvement optimally. So there's like
Speaker 1: a number of different ways this could work, and this
Speaker 1: is how things work in a lot of other parts
Speaker 1: of Europe that are modernizing. Um. But the absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's slum lording ship on the scale of an entire people, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like they England has turned Ireland into a slum um
Speaker 1: so that they can lord over it. Now. The backwardness
Speaker 1: of pre famine agriculture in Ireland caused by the inefficient investment.
Speaker 1: Of This becomes apparent when Ireland's labor productivity in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty five is compared to English labor productivity. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: British people are like twice as productive as Irish people
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty five, Like if you're kind of like
Speaker 1: looking at them as economic units. Um. And this is
Speaker 1: because there's just been no development that's been allowed to occur, um,
Speaker 1: not none, but very little. But even that scale or
Speaker 1: comparison is like it's so infuriating. It's like, well, look
Speaker 1: we're more productive than y'all, Like, well I wonder why, yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: and this is going to justify it's going to be
Speaker 1: used to justify a lot of racism against the Irish
Speaker 1: because like, well, look they're not very productive, like they
Speaker 1: just can't keep up with the modern society or whatever. Um. So,
Speaker 1: landlords find that the easiest way to increase profits from
Speaker 1: generation to generation is to further subdivide their lots, which
Speaker 1: allows them to rent to even greater numbers of the
Speaker 1: growing Irish population. And these peasants again, these people who
Speaker 1: live in these renting situations, they make their living by
Speaker 1: growing different grains and other kind of like export crops,
Speaker 1: and then those crops are exported and that's what pays
Speaker 1: their rent. Since rent race is constantly but their amount
Speaker 1: of land is fixed and in fact often shrinking. Irish
Speaker 1: peasants are caught in this unwinnable cycle of increasing poverty,
Speaker 1: and the desperation of their situation leads them to embrace
Speaker 1: a recent import from the New World potatoes. Now we
Speaker 1: talk a lot, I mean there's a lot of like
Speaker 1: talk in popular culture about Ireland and the potato. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the potato comes from again the New World. It's not
Speaker 1: like a native to Ireland. The reason why they adopt
Speaker 1: it so quickly is that the potato is one of
Speaker 1: the very few single foods on Earth that can be
Speaker 1: you can live off of nothing but potatoes if that's
Speaker 1: all that you have, you can you can especially different
Speaker 1: kinds of potatoes. There's all sorts of different strains. Some
Speaker 1: of them have different kinds of nutritional values. But um
Speaker 1: potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff like they have
Speaker 1: what you need to not iohold you. I think I
Speaker 1: got through a year in college on French fries. Yeah. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I acnology. I I could live off a potato. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they also grow, and you can grow it in
Speaker 1: really bad soil. So the way in which these plots
Speaker 1: are subdivided each like family, you know whatever, farming in it,
Speaker 1: however you want to phrase it has like a small
Speaker 1: chunk in the land that they live on has a
Speaker 1: small chunk of like good land, and then usually like
Speaker 1: bogs and stuff and like hillsides that's less good for growing.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things you can do with
Speaker 1: potatoes is in the good land you have, you can
Speaker 1: grow ship like corn that you're going to export and sell,
Speaker 1: and in your ship land you can just sew potatoes
Speaker 1: and those will keep you alive. Right. Potatoes also aren't
Speaker 1: worth anything as an export crop. They're just not worth
Speaker 1: selling really, um. So it also it's what you eat
Speaker 1: because you can't profit off of it. It's just win
Speaker 1: win man like it does. Yeah, yeah, especially because I'm
Speaker 1: like I will Okay, this is a bit of a tangent,
Speaker 1: but I will defend to my grave in and out fries.
Speaker 1: I know everybody talks they're not bad, they're bad. I
Speaker 1: like them. I think it's because, yeah, you know why,
Speaker 1: because they taste like potatoes. I feel like everybody arguing
Speaker 1: over fries like, I'm like you eating wax and salt
Speaker 1: and you think, of course that's gonna taste great because
Speaker 1: it's yeah and potatoes. Now look, I look, who's your
Speaker 1: top five fry? Don't lose your place top five fries.
Speaker 1: I have strong opinions about this. I mean, I really like,
Speaker 1: I'm a waffle fry guy, and I haven't eaten there
Speaker 1: in a long time, but I do. I did love
Speaker 1: Chick fil A back in the day when I was
Speaker 1: a younger man. I haven't had their fries in like
Speaker 1: ten years, so I don't know. Maybe they're not as
Speaker 1: as good as No, they're still they still slap. I'm
Speaker 1: less that's a good choice fries. I was like, No,
Speaker 1: I was about to say, I was just about to say,
Speaker 1: wing stop. We had him yesterday. One thing incredible because
Speaker 1: they taste like potatoes and are actually seasoned. They taste
Speaker 1: like season potatoes. Here's here's a little tip that I do.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'll get those five guys fries and then this
Speaker 1: is key. You know that that like spicy chili oil
Speaker 1: you can get from Creator Joe's. Yes, I put a
Speaker 1: bunch of them in like a baking pan. I get
Speaker 1: like a tablespoon of chili oil. Dollop it over there,
Speaker 1: smear it all around the potatoes, pop them in the
Speaker 1: oven at three fifty for like ten minutes to crisp
Speaker 1: them up with the fucking it's slaps. It's good. You
Speaker 1: just changed my life because I'm like, I am definitely
Speaker 1: the like, don't leave your fries around me, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Don't like don't walk away from your plate.
Speaker 1: Don't look away. I'm taking your fries. We all love potatoes. Now.
Speaker 1: The problem is and and and also it's worth noting
Speaker 1: it may not sound like eating nothing but potatoes is
Speaker 1: a very healthy diet Irish people. One of the things
Speaker 1: that is noted in this period is that they tend
Speaker 1: to be larger and seemingly healthier than English people of
Speaker 1: a similar socio economic class. And it's because they're they
Speaker 1: they they're they're eating a lot of potatoes, which, compared
Speaker 1: to like a lot of the diets available to people
Speaker 1: at the time without money, is one of the better
Speaker 1: options for being relatively healthy. Also, the English cuisine just man, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't. We don't need to talk about British food,
Speaker 1: like I was like, man, I do like Irish breakfast though,
Speaker 1: I'll give I think the Irish are one of the
Speaker 1: better breakfast making peoples of the world. You know who
Speaker 1: else makes good breakfast? Well? I was going to do Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was like, well about that island where you hunt? Okay,
Speaker 1: Sophie is angry at me now, so here's ads. All right.
Speaker 1: So we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are, and
Speaker 1: they are and how like it's actually not again comparing
Speaker 1: I'm not talking trying to say an objective modern terms,
Speaker 1: but based on the kind of diets available back then,
Speaker 1: living off potatoes in this period is not a bad
Speaker 1: way to make a go of it. Um. But one
Speaker 1: of the issues is that over time on Ireland everyone
Speaker 1: gravitates to growing just one single strain of potato because
Speaker 1: it's the best one for the It produces the best yields,
Speaker 1: and it's the most nutritious. It's called the lumper. It's
Speaker 1: not particularly tasty, but it is your works the biggest
Speaker 1: bang for your buck and towards of like calories you
Speaker 1: can grow per square whatever. Um. So this works for
Speaker 1: a while, right, Like, while the lumper is growing, well,
Speaker 1: this is great because people get a lot of food
Speaker 1: and people like not starving to death. The problem is
Speaker 1: that if you're if everyone is growing one kind of potato,
Speaker 1: then you have what's called a mono culture. I was
Speaker 1: just about to say, it's not like monocultures ain't good.
Speaker 1: I just left the coffee farm uh in Colombia and
Speaker 1: they were talking a lot about biocultures and monocultures and
Speaker 1: like like just just to add to your existential dread. Uh.
Speaker 1: According to these like expert coffee farmers, they're like, look,
Speaker 1: we got about maybe thirty more harvests in US unless
Speaker 1: we start doing more like bioculture, you know, multi culture.
Speaker 1: This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right
Speaker 1: whenever you do it's that there's like monocultures. If I'm
Speaker 1: not mistaken, people will point out that like one reason
Speaker 1: why banana flavored candy tastes so unlike bananas is that
Speaker 1: it was based on the flavor of a banana that
Speaker 1: basically doesn't exist anymore because they all got wiped out
Speaker 1: and now we eat a different kind of banana. Um.
Speaker 1: You look into the history of farming bananas, it's wild.
Speaker 1: But the good thing about when a plague wipes out
Speaker 1: all of the bananas is that like for a while
Speaker 1: people don't get bananas, Like it's an economic problem for people.
Speaker 1: But I don't think many people have commercially farmed bananas
Speaker 1: as the vast majority, if not the entirety, of their
Speaker 1: nutritional existence, right. Um. Not to minimize the problem that
Speaker 1: a banana blight causes. UM, but you can see how
Speaker 1: this works great for a while, but when you get
Speaker 1: a disease that's going to funk over the potato, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a problem for Irish people. But also, again,
Speaker 1: to go back to what you're saying at the start,
Speaker 1: it's not a problem that like there's no food in
Speaker 1: Ireland because Irish people are only growing potatoes on a
Speaker 1: fairly small chunk of the land they have. Most of
Speaker 1: the land they have is going to grow food that
Speaker 1: they're going to export in order to make their rent right.
Speaker 1: It's important to keep that in mind. So near the
Speaker 1: turn of the eighteenth century, resentment and anger over the
Speaker 1: suffering under English domination leads to another rebellion in Ireland.
Speaker 1: This one is aided by the French who are in
Speaker 1: like you know they France and that have been fighting
Speaker 1: for like a century almost by the point of which
Speaker 1: this happens, yeah, yeahs And France actually tries to land
Speaker 1: troops in Ireland twice. They land an army once, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't go great for them. Um, it's not real
Speaker 1: easy to like, if you're France, land an army in
Speaker 1: Ireland that's going to be capable of and this this
Speaker 1: actually keeps happening for forever. In World War One, the
Speaker 1: Germans try to land a ship full of guns on
Speaker 1: in Ireland to like and it did a little bit,
Speaker 1: but the rebellion that that comes afterwards doesn't work great. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know that that that's the there's a whole story.
Speaker 1: There are a lot a lot of people try to
Speaker 1: land armies or guns in Ireland in order to not
Speaker 1: because they particularly care about Irish liberation, but because like
Speaker 1: the English, and this seems like an easy way to
Speaker 1: screw them up. It never quite works. Um. So when
Speaker 1: these French guys, you know, they have their their fight,
Speaker 1: and this this kind of the fact that someone's fighting
Speaker 1: the English leads a lot of Irish people to be like, well,
Speaker 1: we might have a shot at like doing something here.
Speaker 1: So there's a rebellion. Tim pat Coogan rights. However, rebellion
Speaker 1: spearheaded by the United Irishman, was bloodily suppressed. At the time.
Speaker 1: It was frequently said that the sev rebellion was secretly
Speaker 1: encouraged by direction of the English Prime Minister, William Pitt,
Speaker 1: so that it would go off half cocked before the
Speaker 1: Society of United Irishman could succeed in their aim of
Speaker 1: uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter against the Crown. Certainly, English
Speaker 1: policy seemed directed at fermenting rather than aboording rebellion. Troops
Speaker 1: were forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholic farm owners in the Yeomanry,
Speaker 1: the Protestant militia was given a free hand in oppressing
Speaker 1: their Catholic neighbors. Fair minded Protestants were outraged at what
Speaker 1: they saw on Easter Tuesday, April tenth at Newton Mount
Speaker 1: Kennedy in County Wicklow. A Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt,
Speaker 1: attending the sound the town fair, was sickened to witness
Speaker 1: the ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs of the
Speaker 1: young women for wearing green stuff petticoats. So like pretty
Speaker 1: brutal stuff happening here, like slice and ladies at the
Speaker 1: market because they're wearing green and that's Irish stuff. Also,
Speaker 1: it's worth noting like one of the things that the
Speaker 1: British due to piss people off, is forced them to
Speaker 1: quarter soldiers in their homes. We joke a lot about
Speaker 1: the Quartering Act and about like the what is the
Speaker 1: third Amendment like that that you can't quarter soldiers, and
Speaker 1: there's like there's a reason why people felt that needed
Speaker 1: to be in Yeah, Um, the English love quartering soldiers
Speaker 1: in your fucking house. Sometimes I'll just drive down the
Speaker 1: street past National Guard bases or military bases and just heckle,
Speaker 1: just be like, come into my house, motherfucker's that's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. I'm give a ship, Marine Corps. You don't
Speaker 1: need to stay in my house. Yeah, I got an amendment,
Speaker 1: motherfucker's he number three say I ain't got. Sometimes I'll
Speaker 1: invite like a like a like a lance corporal into
Speaker 1: my house and be like, you know what, get the
Speaker 1: funk out, never mind, that's right, go get out of here,
Speaker 1: Get out of here. Um, I'm gonna continue that quote
Speaker 1: from Tim pet Coogan, I respect to historian of the
Speaker 1: period has written is the most violent and tragic event
Speaker 1: in Irish history between the Jacobite Wars and the Great Famine.
Speaker 1: In the space of a few weeks, thirty thousand people
Speaker 1: peasants armed with pikes and pitchforks, defenseless women and children
Speaker 1: were shot down or blown like chaff as they charged
Speaker 1: up to the mouth of the cannon. One of the
Speaker 1: malicious tactics was pitch capping. A canvas crown was placed
Speaker 1: on the head of an insurgent or alleged insurgent, and
Speaker 1: boiling tar was poured into the canvas. Around after this
Speaker 1: had time to set, the cap was torn off, taking
Speaker 1: with it much of the croppy's scalp. The term croppy
Speaker 1: came from the habit of some insurgents of cropping their
Speaker 1: hair in the fashion of the French revolutionists. The hatred
Speaker 1: of Protestants for the Catholics was such that the commanding
Speaker 1: English general Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he
Speaker 1: was defending that he had as little to do with
Speaker 1: them as he possibly could. And you'll see this again
Speaker 1: later in the famine. Were like British soldiers are horrified
Speaker 1: at some of the things being done to Irish people.
Speaker 1: They never really do anything about it. But they're they're
Speaker 1: really really concerned. I wonder how Ambercrombie feels about his
Speaker 1: his legacy now, Oh, I think pretty good. I mean
Speaker 1: what he thinks of it. Now, I'm saying in the
Speaker 1: sense that he's just some sort of douche bag frat
Speaker 1: boy style dressing. Now, look, if you were at the
Speaker 1: head of an army that is burning people scalps off
Speaker 1: with pitch and you get to be remembered by shirtless
Speaker 1: dudes hanging out in the mall in two thousand six,
Speaker 1: that's not the worst way that. I guess that's not
Speaker 1: the worst thing to do. But I'm just like, do
Speaker 1: you think do you think your little your little shirtless guys,
Speaker 1: your frat boys are like they you don't think they're soft,
Speaker 1: Like they're not as hard as you were when use
Speaker 1: meulting fool scalps or you just like that's right, look
Speaker 1: at my son. Yeah, I don't know. I mean to
Speaker 1: be fair, Abercrombie at Allister caused lots of trauma to
Speaker 1: lots of people. It's like if it's like if in
Speaker 1: very two hundred years there was like a like a
Speaker 1: sexy gene type jeans brand called Himmler's. Yeah. Everybody's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you've got some of those Himmlers. Those are good. It's
Speaker 1: like that their models are hot. Yeah, like oh where, yeah,
Speaker 1: you got you got the new you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: you got you're wearing a Mussolini's I got, Yeah, those
Speaker 1: look great. I got the most linear Levins like yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So for a decade or so prior to the sevente Rebellion,
Speaker 1: there was actually Ireland gets a parliament briefly, I think,
Speaker 1: for like twelve years, which on paper gives them a
Speaker 1: small degree of autonomy from England, but not really because
Speaker 1: the parliament in Ireland is only supposed to basically do
Speaker 1: what the Parliament in England tells them to. But after
Speaker 1: the seventy rebellion, the English are like, well, we can't
Speaker 1: even let them have this fake degree of autonomy. So
Speaker 1: will William Pitt the Younger bribes Irish parliamentarians to vote
Speaker 1: for what he called the active Union. And this is
Speaker 1: what makes Ireland a part of the United Kingdom. So again,
Speaker 1: Ireland votes to join the UK if you ignore all
Speaker 1: of the things about it that are not legitimate, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: like a lot of votes in history right, like probably
Speaker 1: most votes in his Yeah, I mean the history of
Speaker 1: voting is mostly the history of bribery basically is It's
Speaker 1: crazy though, like it like you mentioned earlier, how like
Speaker 1: you go to like a lot of like Irish like
Speaker 1: football events and they got like like Palestinian flags. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I hope people seeing like how that picture is coming
Speaker 1: into play now, like why they would like um, understand
Speaker 1: and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland. Like they're
Speaker 1: like like, I hope is coming together now, like pictures
Speaker 1: getting pretty clear, you know, yeah that this this goes
Speaker 1: on again where the hundreds of years and uh and
Speaker 1: we're still at that, we're at like the middle point
Speaker 1: right right if you can even say that's over right,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot of people in Ireland, not as
Speaker 1: many as there used to be, but you can still
Speaker 1: find folks who will be like, look, man, I mean
Speaker 1: the island is still not united. There's yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: some like ship going on. We're not thrilled about. Um.
Speaker 1: That's that Most people I know are broadly like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's it's certainly a lot better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the like in this period for sure, that whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is I I did. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of folks did take some joy when like Brexit
Speaker 1: hit and England English passports. Suddenly we're worth a lot
Speaker 1: less and some people are like going over to Ireland
Speaker 1: to try and get Irish passports, like yeah, that's right,
Speaker 1: come crawling back, baby, like long game, guys. So, with
Speaker 1: their own imperial propaganda, superior British productivity served as evidence
Speaker 1: that the Irish were a lesser race and they deserve
Speaker 1: to language. Under the guidance of an English power, they
Speaker 1: were lampooned as a lazy and shiftless people. Much was
Speaker 1: made of the method by which they planted potatoes, and
Speaker 1: which were called lazy beds, right like because again, you
Speaker 1: don't have to It's like you're just kind of like
Speaker 1: dropping them in the dirt, right like that's how potato
Speaker 1: farming works. But like the English are like, look, the
Speaker 1: Irish are so lazy that they don't want to put
Speaker 1: in a hard work. They just want to like grow
Speaker 1: potatoes and turn them a smarter Yeah. Well and also
Speaker 1: just because like well if they were to make more,
Speaker 1: you would just take it from you just get why
Speaker 1: like you guys again, yeah, it's this infuriating dude, Like
Speaker 1: it's pretty not great. Yeah, I'm like it reminds me
Speaker 1: of which may feel like a stretch, but like follow
Speaker 1: me here. It's like we all went to we all
Speaker 1: went to We was in school during the time, which
Speaker 1: is the same as everybody else's time out. Just like
Speaker 1: every class you took in, like history and social studies
Speaker 1: was telling you about how socialist countries just don't work, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, you're telling me this while we're actively
Speaker 1: paying millions of dollars to destabilize them and then being
Speaker 1: able to like we're spending millions of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: to make their government's not work and then come tell
Speaker 1: our kids, hey see there, the governments don't work. And
Speaker 1: it's like, well, full, that's you know why, Like you're
Speaker 1: you're just like as anybody like connecting these dots here,
Speaker 1: it ain't working because you're making it not work right.
Speaker 1: So when you're like, oh, man, they're only growing potatoes,
Speaker 1: look at them. They're just they're lazy growing potatoes and
Speaker 1: they only grow so much. You know why we only
Speaker 1: why are we growing potatoes? That's I mean, it's like
Speaker 1: you promise people who have been enslaved that they're going
Speaker 1: to get farmland and uh forty acres, and then you
Speaker 1: don't give it to them, and then you develop like
Speaker 1: a legal system that arrests huge numbers of them uh
Speaker 1: and locks them out of the best jobs. And then
Speaker 1: a bunch of them are very impoverished, and you go,
Speaker 1: why why don't these people why aren't they better at
Speaker 1: making money? Well, maybe you didn't give them a lot
Speaker 1: of options. Yeah, you steal from a group of people
Speaker 1: all of the land that they had lived on, uh
Speaker 1: and forced them onto tinier and tinier chunks of land
Speaker 1: while killing the vast majority of them. And then you're like, boy,
Speaker 1: why are they having such trouble adapting to modern economy? Geezempressed?
Speaker 1: Why are they so sad? Yeah, it's it's all again.
Speaker 1: It's all variations of the same story, you know. Um
Speaker 1: so yeah, do do do do so. English media focuses
Speaker 1: a lot on how little effort the Irish put into farming,
Speaker 1: um why, ignoring the fact that Irish people are growing
Speaker 1: cash crops that are exported for the profit of benefit
Speaker 1: of English landlords and provide a lot of the food
Speaker 1: that England is growing, and in fact, despite a lot
Speaker 1: of their backwardness in terms of like agricultural techniques and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Ireland is continuously increasing productivity in this time um, and
Speaker 1: it becomes England's breadbasket. It's also a growing source of
Speaker 1: animal products Irish Ireland supplies by eight hundred, Ireland supplies
Speaker 1: English cities with three of their beef, se of their butter,
Speaker 1: and eight six of their pork. Um just like to
Speaker 1: name a few things. So like again, the degree to
Speaker 1: which all of this is absolutely central to the industrial
Speaker 1: revolution in England can't really be overstated because when the
Speaker 1: Irish are providing so much food for English people that
Speaker 1: get that, among other things, frees up English labor to
Speaker 1: work in like these growing factory system and new industrialized
Speaker 1: you know. Um. So the misery of life under English
Speaker 1: domina allows most peasants just two outlets fucking and fighting. Um.
Speaker 1: The former explains why the Irish population triples from the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds of the early eighteen hundreds. Tim pat Coogan
Speaker 1: claims that a lot of peasants basically make the decision like,
Speaker 1: our lives can't get worse and birth controls not a thing, right,
Speaker 1: so we might as well might as well fuck you know,
Speaker 1: like what else is there? Um, And this is part
Speaker 1: of why there's a birth explosion. There's also like potatoes
Speaker 1: are a pretty good thing to eat, and so there
Speaker 1: is calories, right, there's food for a while too. So
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons, the Irish population just blows
Speaker 1: up from about seventeen hundreds about eighteen hundred again like triples. Um.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that develops over time is like
Speaker 1: a very weird kind of fighting culture. And this is
Speaker 1: like there's a lot of racial stereotypes um about like
Speaker 1: the Irish people as like quarrelsome and wanting to fight. Um.
Speaker 1: But there's like there's reasons why that stereotype develops, and
Speaker 1: it's because in Ireland again, people are very poor. They
Speaker 1: have a history of rebelling against the crown, and they
Speaker 1: don't have any kind of options for social advancement in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases. And what do your young men
Speaker 1: do when like ship's rough, They like they fight, This
Speaker 1: happens every Yeah, I respect it, Like I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, drink,
Speaker 1: you drink like like alcohols, like this is the last
Speaker 1: day on earth that there will be alcohol and yeah,
Speaker 1: go home, you smash in and then you're just pissy
Speaker 1: for the rest of the day because all we're gonna
Speaker 1: have is potatoes. So let's fight like this. This happens
Speaker 1: all over the place like this is the same ship
Speaker 1: people talk about, like the Appalachia, right, like Appalachia, and
Speaker 1: it's like honor culture and like all of the and
Speaker 1: in Ireland kind of their version of that is called
Speaker 1: faction fighting, which is there's this is a fascinating thing.
Speaker 1: I had no idea what's happening. Um, but it starts
Speaker 1: in the County Tipperary in the early eight hundreds and
Speaker 1: it quickly spreads all over the island. And in the
Speaker 1: famine plot, Coogan explains, sometimes several hundred participants took part
Speaker 1: on either side. The most famous fight at ballyve A
Speaker 1: Strand and County Kerry in eighteen thirty four involved some
Speaker 1: three thousand contestants, of whom over two hundred were killed.
Speaker 1: The fighting gangs were based on extended families or on parishes,
Speaker 1: and normally fights took place either at fairs or on
Speaker 1: feast days or public holidays. The weapons were chiefly seasoned
Speaker 1: blackthorn sticks, whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by
Speaker 1: the insertion of lead in the butts. These killing instruments,
Speaker 1: where the origin of the lailes carried today by by
Speaker 1: today's lepre con dolls, and even more deadly weapon was
Speaker 1: the white thorn steak, a cut from which could prove fatal.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sides and slash hooks were used. So there's just
Speaker 1: like this again, respect it like pretty. It's like it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't have m M A, but you
Speaker 1: can get a couple of thousand people together to fight
Speaker 1: in the field. Hey, just like me and my cousins.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying, Me and my cousin's couple
Speaker 1: homies down the street. We get to beat this block.
Speaker 1: We're gonna scrap with that block, and it's all it's
Speaker 1: all in fun. If you die, you die. I don't
Speaker 1: hate people are gonna die. Some people gonna die. You
Speaker 1: better then muscle up. Let you talk about like this,
Speaker 1: this ship is happening and like like we talked in
Speaker 1: episodes like this is happening like Georgia. Like there's different
Speaker 1: kinds of like like it. All over the world. People
Speaker 1: find excuses to get it in big groups and beat
Speaker 1: the ship out of each other. Um, we'll be, we
Speaker 1: will be. Look when you you living in you living
Speaker 1: in the in the city of l A. You're sitting
Speaker 1: on the porch. One of your uncles will be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you think you could beat that full up and you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Like hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come here,
Speaker 1: Hey fight my nephew. And then now y'all just in
Speaker 1: the street fighting. You know what I'm saying. Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like we're bored. Yeah, I don't hate, We're
Speaker 1: just bored, you know what I'm saying. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: tell you what. Let me tell you. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you what I learned in those days. If somebody hits
Speaker 1: you in the middle of your nose, you're gonna go
Speaker 1: blind from tears. So don't let nobody hit you. In
Speaker 1: Aga knows that was one of great lessons I ever learned.
Speaker 1: Head down, hands up, down, hands up now again. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot going on here. Um, but this is
Speaker 1: not like the English make a lot of this in
Speaker 1: their propaganda about like how uniquely fighting the Irish are,
Speaker 1: Like we this happens all over the world, everywhere, and
Speaker 1: everywhere in the world. It's just what happens when like
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of young men without much in
Speaker 1: the way of options for the future. You've you've ruined
Speaker 1: any sense of purpose and any forum, and that you've
Speaker 1: also like they're angry because the situation is unfair, but
Speaker 1: they it has become very clear that we're not going
Speaker 1: to we're not going to beat the British military. You know. Um.
Speaker 1: It's also you know, this kind of feeds into this
Speaker 1: system of what are called secret societies at the time,
Speaker 1: and when we talk about like that term means something different.
Speaker 1: Now basically what's happening is insurgent groups are over ireland, right,
Speaker 1: and there's different ones right as well. We'll see later.
Speaker 1: There are some kind of secret societies that are are
Speaker 1: made up of landlords or in support of the landlords.
Speaker 1: There's some that are in support of just Protestant cause,
Speaker 1: and there's others that are basically battling the status quo
Speaker 1: that are like like actually fighting against the these this
Speaker 1: absentee landlord system or like Catholic groups funding against Protestants.
Speaker 1: Probably one of the more interesting of these groups were
Speaker 1: called the Rock It's um. They declared allegiance to a
Speaker 1: mythical captain Rock. This is not a guy who existed,
Speaker 1: but like they would the Rocks would carry out attacks
Speaker 1: on landlords, like they would murder or beat up landlords
Speaker 1: or rent collectors, and then they would write letters justifying
Speaker 1: what they've done, signed by Captain Rock. It was kind
Speaker 1: of like an I M. Spartacus sort of all those
Speaker 1: Spartacus was real, obviously, you know. It's that sort of
Speaker 1: thing we're claiming that there's like this, you know, my
Speaker 1: brain is flooding right now with some sort of puns
Speaker 1: and word plays about oh just a Wayne the Rock
Speaker 1: Johnson or Chris Rock in slapt and like it's so
Speaker 1: hard to not go with the Chris Rock like and
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, when you can't land on a
Speaker 1: joke because there's too many of them fire in it.
Speaker 1: That's what just happened right now. You just remember that
Speaker 1: thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks. Yes, um, actually
Speaker 1: in terms of if you if you're looking for something
Speaker 1: to laugh at prop the most powerful secret society in
Speaker 1: this period were called the White Boys. Um all right,
Speaker 1: all right, um. Gustav the de Beaumont, who was a
Speaker 1: sympathetic French intellectual at the time, wrote this of the
Speaker 1: White Boys quote, they lived by an atrocious, savage code
Speaker 1: worthy of a semi barbarious population which abandoned to itself
Speaker 1: and has no light to guide its efforts, finds no
Speaker 1: sympathy to assuage its passions, and is reduced to look
Speaker 1: to rude instincts for the means of safety and protection.
Speaker 1: These are banditti of a singular kind. To obtain arms
Speaker 1: or vengeance, they commit all sorts of outrages while they
Speaker 1: abstain from the gold or silver under their hands. So
Speaker 1: he's kind of pointing out that like they they're really
Speaker 1: more interested in vengeance than making money. They're not like
Speaker 1: traditional They're not like criminals in that sense, they really
Speaker 1: want to Like Fux, some ship up um and in
Speaker 1: many ways the White Boys are a pre to a
Speaker 1: lot of modern insurgent terrorist groups. Um. Some of them
Speaker 1: were quite aeraded too. And in their manifesto kind of
Speaker 1: they have like this thing that is explaining what they're
Speaker 1: fighting for. They write, quote, let us strike the culpable
Speaker 1: not only in their persons, but in their dearest interests
Speaker 1: and affections. Let not only their cattle be how hamstrung,
Speaker 1: their houses, burned, their land, turned up, their harvest, their
Speaker 1: harvests destroyed, But let their friends and relations be devoted
Speaker 1: to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor um, which
Speaker 1: is there's an allegation that when they talk about wanting
Speaker 1: people's wives and daughters to be dishonored, that they're like
Speaker 1: threatening to commit rape of They may they may yeah,
Speaker 1: they may have been. Um. You know this is this
Speaker 1: is not not a pretty series of things that are happening. UM.
Speaker 1: So the white boys and they see them is like
Speaker 1: a precursor to the kind of anti colonial insurgent groups
Speaker 1: that would dominate a lot of late twentieth century geopolitics. Right,
Speaker 1: you can see this is like the first stirrings of
Speaker 1: some things that are going to happen all over the world. UM.
Speaker 1: In Ireland, also in this period gives birth to what
Speaker 1: some call scholars consider the first organized mass nonviolent resistance
Speaker 1: campaign in history. UM. It's organized by a guy named
Speaker 1: Daniel O'Connell, who was one of the very few members
Speaker 1: Ireland's part of the UK Right. So I there are
Speaker 1: it is possible for Irish people to get elected to parliament.
Speaker 1: There's a long history of like what because like we'll
Speaker 1: actually we're about to talk about this. So O'Connell rises
Speaker 1: to prominence first as a lawyer. Um, and he forms
Speaker 1: an organization called the Catholic Association in eighteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: and this was the first semi effective Irish political party
Speaker 1: in history. Um. The Catholic Association and O'Connell spent years
Speaker 1: fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in eighteen twenty nine.
Speaker 1: And that's what makes ancipation. Yeah, because Catholics you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to like hold land or or political office right
Speaker 1: like you are. There is like a degree of um
Speaker 1: like apartheid for Catholics kind of in the legal sense
Speaker 1: of the word in this period in Ireland. And so
Speaker 1: Connell wins the right in this organization win the right
Speaker 1: for Catholics to sit on the Parliament. Right, so now
Speaker 1: you can have because Irish people could be on the
Speaker 1: Parliament before, but they had to be Irish Protestants. Because
Speaker 1: of O'Connell, you get your first. He is the first
Speaker 1: Catholic Irish legislator in elected or like in modern elector
Speaker 1: I think maybe before she got all fuck. Um. This
Speaker 1: also opens up like Catholics can be lawyers in ways
Speaker 1: they couldn't before. And they're allowed to be military officers
Speaker 1: in the British military now. Um, so this is like
Speaker 1: a big civil rights campaign, right, So O'Connell forms this
Speaker 1: political party. They fight for like seven years and they win.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a pretty massive victory, you know,
Speaker 1: for Irish civil rights in this period. So the next year,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty, O'Connell wins election to the Parliament and he
Speaker 1: becomes the first Catholic in modern history to sit in
Speaker 1: the English Parliament. And he's a pretty cool dude. He's
Speaker 1: poor by parliamentary standards, which means he's rich, but not
Speaker 1: rich compared to the other rich people, right like you know, um,
Speaker 1: and he dresses like a normal person. So the British
Speaker 1: elected leaders call him the King of the beggars because
Speaker 1: he he looks poor to them. Again, is not a
Speaker 1: poor person. There are minimum financial requirements to be in parliament, right,
Speaker 1: so he's not he's not impoverished, but they they see
Speaker 1: him as impossible, and they also see him as like
Speaker 1: he is the representative of the hordes of working poor
Speaker 1: in Ireland, you know. Um. Tim pat Coogan writes he
Speaker 1: deserves to be regarded as the founder of the modern
Speaker 1: peaceful civil rights movement. His hatred of oppression was universal.
Speaker 1: My heart walks abroad he said, and wherever the miserable
Speaker 1: is to be suckered and the slaves to be set free,
Speaker 1: there my spirit is at home, and I do like
Speaker 1: to dwell in America. He was deified by the anti
Speaker 1: slavery movement for his speeches in their favor and for
Speaker 1: the manner in which he turned down substantial money offers
Speaker 1: from slave owners, who commanded twenty seven votes in the
Speaker 1: House of Commons during the Emancipation Battle, saying, gentlemen, God
Speaker 1: knows that I speak for the saddest people the sun sees.
Speaker 1: But may my right hand forget its cunning and made
Speaker 1: my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth before
Speaker 1: to help Ireland, I keep silent on the Negro question.
Speaker 1: And what he's saying there is there's a vote like
Speaker 1: in England band slavery in this period, right, And a
Speaker 1: bunch of parliamentarians are like, hey, dude, vote with us
Speaker 1: to keep slavery and will help you out in gaining
Speaker 1: some concessions for Irish people in Parlimad. And he's like,
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I would never be able to live with
Speaker 1: myself if I did that. Like our situation is bad,
Speaker 1: but like this is I I could not. I could
Speaker 1: not do that. It's a it's a principal moral stand.
Speaker 1: He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him
Speaker 1: He gets a lot of the the early Irish Diastra
Speaker 1: in New York hate him because he like hates George Washington,
Speaker 1: because George Washington owns a bunch of slaves or owned
Speaker 1: a bunch of ladies. At this point, um, he gets
Speaker 1: attacked a lot by US newspapers. The New York Herald
Speaker 1: accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children,
Speaker 1: because again he's like he thinks slavery's at um. By
Speaker 1: the eighteen forties, he was an old man who had
Speaker 1: spent decades fighting for his people. In eighteen forty three
Speaker 1: he embarked on one last great battle repealing the Act
Speaker 1: of Union. Right, and this thing that that brings Ireland
Speaker 1: into the UK. Given total English dominance of parliament, this
Speaker 1: was not seen as possible, right, like, in a in
Speaker 1: a quote unquote legitimate way. The English Parliament is not
Speaker 1: going to vote to give up Ireland, right, Yeah, But
Speaker 1: he decides, well, fuck I don't. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: try and convince a bunch of English rich assholes that
Speaker 1: Ireland ought to be free. Um. So he creates what
Speaker 1: some people will say is the first modern civil disobedience campaign.
Speaker 1: He holds a series of what are called monster meetings,
Speaker 1: which are where huge numbers of Irish people as symbol
Speaker 1: to protest in favor of independence. The first one of
Speaker 1: these is a hundred and twenty thousand people, and crowd
Speaker 1: sizes grow over the course of the year that he's
Speaker 1: doing this to three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand
Speaker 1: at a meeting in Cork. By August of that year,
Speaker 1: he's succeeded in assembling his largest crowd yet, seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand people. That's basically a tenth of the
Speaker 1: Irish population. More than that, really, this is forties you said, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's he gets three quarters of a million people to
Speaker 1: gather to protest for their independence. Um. And again there's
Speaker 1: a lot of I I went over the fact that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stereotypes of the Irish is drunken,
Speaker 1: violent in this period. He's very aware of that, and
Speaker 1: so there's this kind of volunteer order police force at
Speaker 1: these protests to make sure that there's no alcohol and
Speaker 1: there's no fighting um that people are staying absolutely in
Speaker 1: line or scrupulously abiding by the laws outside of the
Speaker 1: fact that they're gathering to to make this protest um.
Speaker 1: And that makes it really hard for the British government
Speaker 1: to like stop this stuff, right because there's folks are
Speaker 1: so disciplined, they have trouble finding kind of an end
Speaker 1: to blow this movement up. Um. And and it's this
Speaker 1: is a real problem because it is like, you know,
Speaker 1: when you've got seven hundred and fifty thousand people assembling
Speaker 1: for something, well that's potentially a military issue. Right, if
Speaker 1: you can get seven fifty thousand folks together for anything,
Speaker 1: you could cause some problems for the government. You know,
Speaker 1: Like that's a lot of motherfu that's a lot. Today
Speaker 1: there was a fucking protest in the US with seven people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's some ship could could go down. Obviously, we we
Speaker 1: had like that many people out in the street just
Speaker 1: try to stop the Iraq war and it did nothing,
Speaker 1: but it could it could mean, it could have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of thing if if day was up
Speaker 1: on the British was up on just you know this
Speaker 1: Oh no, I hadn't invented yet, but I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: let's up with the tear gas. I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: could have just do what you do now, which is
Speaker 1: just we are building to that prop Okay, but it
Speaker 1: is like I think if you wanted to, if there
Speaker 1: were a comparable civil disobedience movement in the United States,
Speaker 1: it would be it would it would be putting twenty
Speaker 1: or thirty million people into the streets in a single
Speaker 1: location day, which I don't think could happen logistically, like
Speaker 1: we don't have the roads for that. It's not obvious,
Speaker 1: but it's this is this is huge. So O'Connell plans
Speaker 1: to hold his most critical meeting on October eighth in
Speaker 1: Clontarf near Dublin. By this point, the powers that be
Speaker 1: have grown terrified of what O'Connell is assembling. Um so
Speaker 1: his you know, they have trouble because the meetings are peaceful.
Speaker 1: But on October, in October of eighteen forty three, they decide, well,
Speaker 1: fuck it, like I don't care. Wait, we don't. We're
Speaker 1: not going to care anymore, but we're not going to
Speaker 1: pretend to care that he's followed the rules. The Irish
Speaker 1: do not have a right to organize for independence, so
Speaker 1: they ban his meeting, and then they gather an army
Speaker 1: and they sail warships into the port and train long
Speaker 1: range cannons on the meeting site and say, if you gather,
Speaker 1: you get a million people together, we are going to
Speaker 1: show you with naval artillery. Yeah we're not just like
Speaker 1: we are shooting guns into a broad We will pound
Speaker 1: you with bombs like yeah yeah. O'Connell has a choice here,
Speaker 1: and the choice that a lot of civil disobedience campaigners
Speaker 1: have had. It's the choice Martin Luther King made versions
Speaker 1: of where it's like, Okay, if we assemble peacefully here,
Speaker 1: they're gonna funk a lot of people up. Do we
Speaker 1: do it? And he decides no, He decides not to
Speaker 1: risk those lives, and he cancels the meeting. Um he
Speaker 1: gets arrested, he serves four months in prison for conspiracy.
Speaker 1: And the fact that he refuses to push the British
Speaker 1: government to force them to either put up or shut up.
Speaker 1: A lot of future Irish activists are going to see
Speaker 1: this as evidence that like peaceful protest doesn't work right.
Speaker 1: This is a big part of like why the things
Speaker 1: that happened the nineteen sixteen Rising, why the decades and
Speaker 1: decades of insurgent terrorism and stuff like a lot of
Speaker 1: them will point back to O'Connell and be like, we
Speaker 1: we we tried, like people tried to do this peacefully
Speaker 1: and and you threatened to kill us. So what else?
Speaker 1: What are what are the options? I guess we'll make box. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where you went, you know. Yeah, um wow. I'm
Speaker 1: always I'm always learly like and this is just my
Speaker 1: own sort of baggage. I'm always leary when I hear, like,
Speaker 1: you know, a book say this dude was the first
Speaker 1: version of something, especially how I dude when I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but that being said this, I when
Speaker 1: you said O'Connell, like a lot of like things from
Speaker 1: my black studies like started popping up of like no, wait,
Speaker 1: we we talk about him off you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I didn't know the story toil just now, but his
Speaker 1: name like rang a lot of bells for me. And
Speaker 1: it's when I try to be clear here that like
Speaker 1: you will historians will claim that I'm not like, I
Speaker 1: can't comprehensively say no one else ever tried anything like this.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm calling you on that. He does get
Speaker 1: credit from a lot of people for this. He's certainly
Speaker 1: like a seminal figure in the concept of non violence resistance.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this this this, yeah, like I this is
Speaker 1: one of those dope moments on this show where like
Speaker 1: some something that you may know like vaguely kind of
Speaker 1: like final he comes in view and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's complicated and a lot of ways, like I see
Speaker 1: the way that you're describing, like how he like didn't
Speaker 1: take that next step, you know in apartheid South Africa,
Speaker 1: Like you know, people make those claims about Nelson Mandela
Speaker 1: that there was like another step he did didn't take
Speaker 1: and that you know what I'm saying, and where when
Speaker 1: he became more radicalized, you know what I'm saying, and
Speaker 1: like and so you have modern like activists that are like, uh,
Speaker 1: I appreciate you. You took the rock far enough, or
Speaker 1: didn't take the rock far enough that you took as
Speaker 1: far as you could go, but look, you wasn't down
Speaker 1: to shoot. Yeah, And this is I mean, you'll always
Speaker 1: I think that's always going to be the case with
Speaker 1: everyone who does anything good within the context of like
Speaker 1: the civil rights movement, there's always and anyone who was
Speaker 1: like anyone who is organizing for radical social change pretty
Speaker 1: much always hits a point where they reached the end
Speaker 1: of their personal willingness to fight for kind of aradical change.
Speaker 1: And so like nobody's perfect. We all did that, Like,
Speaker 1: there are things that we all believe right now that
Speaker 1: in a couple of generations folks would be like, how
Speaker 1: did you put up with this? Though? Ye like, I
Speaker 1: got I get why you were protesting for this and this,
Speaker 1: but how how didn you have a problem with you know,
Speaker 1: that's just like the march of time ship right, um,
Speaker 1: And I'm not like I think it'd be unreasonable to
Speaker 1: condemn O'Connell for what he did. It's just like, this
Speaker 1: is what happened, right Like, he made the call that
Speaker 1: he made, and then the things that happened afterwards happened,
Speaker 1: And it's worth understanding that, And it's worth understanding that
Speaker 1: there is a point I'm never gonna be forgiving, like
Speaker 1: the I RA for setting off a fucking bombs and
Speaker 1: random bars and ship like, there's fun up things that
Speaker 1: happen in the the armed portion of the struggle for independence.
Speaker 1: But when some of those advocates go back and say, like, well,
Speaker 1: we gave the non violent ship to try. They're not wrong,
Speaker 1: you know, um, and that's worth that's worth acknowledging from
Speaker 1: historical standpoint. So that's the end of eighteen forty three.
Speaker 1: In the summer of eighteen forty five, an uma seat
Speaker 1: or water mold, known today as fight oh Flora infestans.
Speaker 1: That's the best I can do. Like that, it's like
Speaker 1: an English name, last name. You know, you're not going
Speaker 1: to get it perfect. The last four words you said,
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know what you just said.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's a fungus, right, it starts to
Speaker 1: spread throughout Europe. We're not gonna get into a ton
Speaker 1: of detail because again, this is like particularly there's a
Speaker 1: lot of coverage that are like, really, blame this this
Speaker 1: fungus on all of the things that happen. It's not.
Speaker 1: The fungus is fault. The fungus is like a thing
Speaker 1: that it's It's like it's like blaming the disaster in
Speaker 1: Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane when it's like that's that's
Speaker 1: not really what I'm angry about, you know. But like this,
Speaker 1: this thing, like this, this this is an important part
Speaker 1: of the story. This this thing starts to hit in
Speaker 1: Europe right um crops start to fail. It starts. It
Speaker 1: becomes increasingly clear that like, not only is there this
Speaker 1: thing affecting potatoes all over the continent, but it's like
Speaker 1: pretty bad. It's wiping out large chunks of the harvest.
Speaker 1: Newspapers and farmers almanacs note with fear as it rampages
Speaker 1: through crops, first on the continent and then in England.
Speaker 1: On August eighteen forty five, it is discovered for the
Speaker 1: first time in Ireland at the Dublin Royal Botanical Gardens.
Speaker 1: Obviously it probably came somewhere else first, but you're going
Speaker 1: to notice it at the Royal Botanical Gardens first because
Speaker 1: they've got the most eyes on them. The population of
Speaker 1: Ireland at this moment moment was probably close to nine
Speaker 1: million people. You know, you're talking the eighteen forties were
Speaker 1: not as good at censuses and stuff as we have
Speaker 1: probably around nine million people, little bit less. Most of
Speaker 1: these people are Catholic. Three million of them are the
Speaker 1: kind of peasants that we've spent a lot of this
Speaker 1: episode talking about peaking out a precarious living on the
Speaker 1: land as renters utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of
Speaker 1: the potato for their caloric needs. Um, and that is
Speaker 1: the stage being set for what's going to happen next,
Speaker 1: which is not gonna be nice, but prop you know
Speaker 1: what is gonna be nice These plugables you're plug doubles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're cloud very nice. Absolutely yeah man. Prop hip hop
Speaker 1: um propp uh. That's all the socials and the website. Um,
Speaker 1: there's the hood politics pod uh. Still popping and cracking
Speaker 1: and getting some Sophie's helping me get some doper not doper,
Speaker 1: but some dope guests and such. You know, we're having
Speaker 1: good time over there. Yeah yeah, prop hip hop, prop
Speaker 1: hip hop. Check it out, check out you know something
Speaker 1: else to check out? Good things? Read a book or um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, find an English person and be like
Speaker 1: what the funk? Man, huh what the fuck? Yeah look
Speaker 1: at being this person and be like thanks, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: go to an English bar and just like frown, just
Speaker 1: sit in the corner and like mean muther, just mean
Speaker 1: mug um and be like what for do it? O'Connell
Speaker 1: got an alister, which I learned is like almost like
Speaker 1: the Irish like maga, Yeah, yeah, I forgot an ollister.
Speaker 1: There you go. To me, it is a little bit Maggie.
Speaker 1: You know, it sounded cool to me because I don't
Speaker 1: know what allister means. Anyway, it was you know, it's
Speaker 1: that it's that Northern Irish Protestant stronghold that's kind of
Speaker 1: formed as a colony. Basically, you know, good stuff, good stuff,
Speaker 1: So go colonize England. You know that's what you actually
Speaker 1: really everybody, everybody colonized England. Take, suck them up.