Irish Potato Famine-The Tragedy

A detailed Summary of Irish Potato Famine-The Tragedy

According to the United Nations, the term "genocide" is very clear. It is "...the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy a whole national or ethnic group..." This definition very clearly describes such modern horrors as Auschwitz and Dachau, or more recent ones such as Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Yet this clarity breaks down when discussing such events as the Irish potato famines of 1845 to 1849. The term "genocide" has been bandied about by many since the horrible events occurred more than 150 years ago. But do and should these events be classified as genocidal? Is this a fair description of the potato famines that ravaged Ireland more than 150 years ago?

First, however, the facts. Between 1841 and 1851, the population of Ireland declined from approximately 8.3 million to 6.5 million. Out of the nearly 2 million drop, it is estimated that a little over 1 million emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, and Great Britain during the years of the famine. They were the lucky ones, as a little under 1 million of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen perished in the last great famine ever to hit Europe. [1]

They perished from a series of potato famines caused by the fungal infesta

Yet do these actions, or lack thereof, constitute genocide? Such a question is more difficult in one respect to answer than the previous one. Genocide, the UN's Declaration to the contrary, is a very pejorative term, one that, as I have noted, has been bandied about since the Famines have occurred. To my mind, this question has become a philosophical and moral question, one that is near impossible to answer with historical fact. Yet I will conclude by saying this. Whatever sympathies the British administrators might have had for famine victims, they were not nearly enough. By standing back and not adequately preventing or mitigating the famines, they were at the very least accomplices to the killings of about a million people, and the forced emigration of more than a million more (most of the ancestors to the present-day Irish living in North America). Whether the United Nations would have condemned the British for genocide had it been in existence back then is questionable, but one thing is unambigiously clear. The British were guilty of the wrongful death of about a million people, and the forced emigration of a million more.

It is easy to understand how Trevelyan and the rest thought that they were doing their duty. They were handling human beings as ciphers on a bit of paper. They looked up the answers in a textbook of economics without ever once setting eyes on the living skeletons of the Irish people. They invented a distinction between those who wer

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Category: History