Inconvenient Facts

Chris Fogarty from Chicago in an unpublished letter sent to both the Irish News and History Ireland, slams History Ireland.

History Ireland (HI) magazine (Sept/Oct, 2015) purports to shed light on the 1845-1850 Holocaust by citing Sir William Robert Wills Wilde. It concludes by perfuming Wilde’s enthusiasm for ethnic-cleansing via murder.   

How deceptive is HI? It completely covers up the at-gunpoint Food Removal. It conceals the fact that more than half of Britain’s then-empire army (67 of a total of 130 regiments[1]) participated in that five million[2] person genocide that HI still labels “famine”[3] and “unintentional.” “Unintentional” applies only if the food-stripping army was in mutiny. Where’s proof of mutiny?

Having thus plumbed the depths of evil, HI also promotes the following lesser falsehoods.

HI’s article resurrects the genocide-friendly notion of “Ireland’s Potato People” last conjured for the Holocaust’s 150th anniversaries in 1995-2000. That earlier promotion even more crudely depicted Ireland’s “potato people” as having died off of “Terminal Stupidity;” of growing only one failure-prone crop, thus having “improved the world’s gene pool by falling into a lethal trap of their own making.” Why would HI’s editors repeat that old, vile “potato people” slur of the murdered millions? 

A lesser though significant HI omission is that of “Sir” earned by Wilde from the British Crown in 1864; a knighthood earned “more for his involvement with the census than for his medical contributions[4].” Wilde’s “involvement with the census” is abetted by HI. The article, like Wilde himself, falsely portrays as an epidemic of diseases what actually was a massively-organized genocide[5].

Other inconvenient facts are omitted: Sir William Wilde was a member of Ireland’s Ascendancy, Church of Ireland, and kin of genocidal English Lord Mount Sandford in Kilkeevin. Kilkeevin was eclipsed by the new town of Castlerea that grew outside that lord’s demesne gates. Castlerea’s eclipsing of Kilkeevin is due to Lord Wills-Sandford’s British army-enforced usurpation, like other landlords in Ireland, of essentially all of the agricultural wealth produced by the people for miles around. He arrogated to himself the spending of all of that wealth. A year’s work on such estates was typically remunerated by a site for a cabin and a few acres the worker cultivated for his own use. Thus England’s landlords in Ireland perpetrated history’s longest (centuries-long) organized robbery of an entire nation’s output. Similarly Castlebar grew outside Lord Lucan’s gates; Westport outside Lord Sligo’s gates; Strokestown outside “Lord” Pakenham-Mahon’s gates, etc.

Despite having “cashed out” of thousands of acres, the estate of Lord Mount Sandford (Henry Wills-Sandford) still comprised 24,410 acres[6] in 1883 (like all landlords’ land Deeds, based upon confiscation). Contemporaneously, Lord Sligo (Mr. Browne), in addition to other “fee lands,” possessed 114,881 acres, and “Lord” Pakenham-Mahon (Mr. Henry Sandford Pakenham-Mahon) possessed 28,123 acres. Irish landlords? It was Pakenham relative General Edward Pakenham who was killed in 1815 leading Britain’s army against America in New Orleans.

In addition to a multi-thousand acre estate in England, in 1883 Lord Ashbrook (Henry Flower) possessed 23,050 Co. Laois acres around his Castle Durrow. In 1836 he evicted my granduncle Andrew Fogarty and grandaunts Mary and Sera and their parents from their land in Ballykealy, Durrow. My paternal grandfather Kieran Fogarty was born in July 1839 in a temporary shelter beside the lord’s gallows uphill of Durrow.

Ireland’s landlords are gone – back to England. Ireland’s Ribbonmen, Land League, and international outrage against the landlords’ genocidal usurpations of Ireland’s production forced Britain to buy the landlords out (at above-market prices) and repatriate them to England nearly all between 1900 and 1910. Their crimes continued until their departure. As Lords and M.P.s they had employed their legislative clout to use Britain’s army to remove a torrent of Irish food[7], starving its producers.

HI’s inadvertent self-refutation? The article states; “...more than half of Ireland’s ‘pre-Famine’ population of 8.5 million[8] consumed only potatoes and buttermilk.” If buttermilk existed, what do HI editors think happened to the butter?

Your article even includes anti-Irish cartoons. Oughtn’t “History Ireland” be re-named Propaganda Britain? Also; don’t HI editors grasp that concealing a genocide invites more of them?


[1] British National Archives Records WO 378/7 et al.

[2] Ireland 1845-1850, the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it “Perfect.” Pages 95-111.

[3] The old, discredited lie we were all taught in schools.

[4] Wikipedia

[5] Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust... pages 188 – 237.

[6] This acreage and others mentioned here are from The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland; a List of All Owners of Three Thousand acres and Upwards (1883)

[7] Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust… Exhibits B (The Times news of food landings) and D (Ordnance Survey Maps)

[8] Ibid: Chapter 6.

4 comments:

  1. The use of the word famine hides the facts as Chris has so rightly published above, in 1985/6 Sinn Fein as it was then in conversations with cummans Dennis (the tout) Donaldson agreed that the term "famine"was a misnomer and if genocide was not used at least Gorta Mór, that didnt last very long and we seen recently in Newry quisling $inn £einds micro minister Martybroy Mc Guinness and Newry and Mourne district council engaging in perpetuating the lie that there was a famine here, Jim Mc Ilmurray used the "famine word again yesterday in Dougher cemetery, it seems to me that the nationalist /republican population are willing to assist in allowing the Brits to downplay their part in that mass murder or genocide of our people, I for one will never refer to that time as anything other than what it was genocide simple as ,

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  2. Which nation bombed a hospital in Afghanistan last week ? As ever, Silence from irish America.

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  3. Not wishing to wander of the thread, the war in Afghanistan is wrong ,its illegal and its condemned by all right thinking people ,so Alan are you engaged in any form of protest other than sniping here,?

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  4. Alan "Which nation bombed a hospital in Afghanistan last week ?"

    No interest but I bet Rothschild made a few dollars from it....be it arms, re building, emergency medical supplies...

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