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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. 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I love this. Yeah. One thing I have not been to a club in a while, so I do miss that. That reggaeton sound. Masha, top prop. How you doing today? This is behind the ********. I feel like my Marty going through stuff, but I feel like you about to make it increasingly worse. So I'm well, yeah, this is, I'm anticipating being very sad. This isn't going to be a happy one. Prop. How do you feel about Ireland? Off. I have a lot of feelings about Ireland. I feel like we like. I feel like Ireland probably got the greatest slang in the whole wide world. Incredible slang. Reverent. Yeah. Like y'all just y'all just hate everybody, you know? And I like the pissiness. I like that you don't take the irreverence. You don't take nothing serious, you know? Yeah, it's the. Yeah. You know, when you're doing a contest of like islands where a lot of bad things have been done to them, there's a lot of competition, you know? But. But but, boy, Ireland, really up up, up in the. Let's say the top quarter of that pack, they're high up, they pretty up there especially cause like they they wasn't drafted into white people until much later. You know, I'm saying it did take you awhile, get to be white until like that's cold, that's cold as ice. Yeah, I'm saying like we the northern part of the same island and we can't get to be white people. Yo, saying it's, it's it's quite a quite a tale. Now how do you feel about the English? Well? I will say this. They have a track record of just ******** on the rest of the earth for like just the most efficient, just the with the greatest efficiency. Like, I've, I've never like, I don't know how that little Island was able to **** on the whole earth as well as they had. It be fair to say they're like the New England Patriots of nations. It really is just the Tom Brady of Country. Yeah, just right. Just can't lose. Yeah, I will say, though. I am going, yes, I am in the in the midst of finishing a top boy. So as of right now, I'm like East London, didn't it? You know, I'm saying like selling the food. So right now I'm like now granted, I will say this. I've noticed what made London cool is what made everything else cool, which is the presence of black people. Because why top boy is so dope? It's the Jamaican immigrants that, like, created this whole type of slang. It's calm, brother. It's that. Yeah. The whole reason I'm enjoying this because I'm just like, hey, black people make everything cool. That's so yeah. It's a big part of why London calling is such a good album. Yeah. Now, prop today, yeah. First off, I'm glad you've been scoping that, because we're really going to need to lean on the English accents here for comedy relief because it isn't it. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have to do a lot of that. I've been practicing my, my posh, so we'll we'll give that a shot. We're talking today about the thing that is most commonly called the potato famine. One thing that Irish people will point out is that there was no such thing as a potato famine. Umm. And the argument they will make is that like, well, there was a potato blight, but Ireland had plenty of food. Uh, the famine was entirely caused, but there it was. It was a a famine caused by English people, right? It was a famine caused by the the the the ruling class of the British Empire was not a famine caused by a potato bug. And that is accurate. Yeah. Yeah, bug it is. Yeah. No, no they don't leave it to the Brits to like, do a genocide and blame it on a vegetable. Hey, listen, y'all, I've tried to tell you we was just doing, minding our own business, and then the potato decided to die. Yeah. What? What? What do you want us to do? The potato made the call. Like it's calm and all that. It is. It is. There's a lot of different takes you see from empires that commit genocides. You know, Turkey just decided to pretend that nothing bad ever happened to Armenian people. The Germans seem broadly to have embraced that they did some bad things, but yeah, they're down. At least say OK, guys. The British are pointing to produce in the grocery store and being like, no, that's what you gotta be angry at. Out of you ever dated somebody who was just ferociously never wrong, like would say stuff that's like there's being right and then there's being less right. Yeah. And I think in this situation I'm just less right. Yeah. That that's that's that's that's England again. Yeah, that's that's that's the old, that's that's all John Bull, which is the thing people used to call England. So have you ever, have you ever been to Ireland prop? Man, it's it's on my bucket list. I, I've been there a bunch. I love, I love going to Ireland particularly. I really like Dublin. And if you, if you go to Dublin, which is a beautiful town, Galway is pretty great too. I like there's a lot of great places in Ireland. But if you go to Dublin and you head to custom House, OK, you will see a series of statues and they're kind of there's like this street, you know, with a sidewalk next to it and there's a bunch of statues of like Raith, like human beings marching along this, this little chunk of sidewalk. There's a one of them has a mother clutching a dying baby to her breast. The other is like carrying either just like a passed out or the corpse of a starved child over her shoulders. And it's it's a sounds terrible. It's the famine memorial and it's a really, really affecting memorial. And it's just kind of like in the middle of things, you know? Yeah. And they it's one of those. One of the reasons I really appreciate that memorial is if you do spend a lot of time, as I have in parts of the world where you come across like starving people and refugees. It's whoever made the memorial knew. Knew what they were doing and I think there was like a conscious attempt to. Like there there was an understanding of like how that looks it, it's pretty affecting. So that's what we're going to talk about today and what's. The Great Hunter Potato famine. Yeah. Yeah. The the not a potato famine. Yeah. And it it is interesting that these. And I think what's kind of so compelling about this to me is that, like all of the people who died and the thing we're about to talk about. This, this was, I think it's fair to say, an act of genocide. That's certainly something that like one of our main sources today of Tim Pat Coogan will claim. But it was not a genocide, that kind of. Usually when you have something like this, it comes as the result of like a civil war or at least a bloody conflict of some. There's some sort of like fight and then there is kind of an ethnic cleansing or a killing. That's not really the case with the great hunger. It's more a genocide. That's kind of the result. Of pure, venal greed and free market ideology taken to the status of a religion. And it's it's it's quite a tale. We're going to discuss the death toll a little bit later. For now I'm just going to point out that the pre famine population of Ireland was a little bit less than 9 million people. Today there are just north of 5 million people in Ireland and in fact last year is when Ireland first reached 5,000,000 in population since the famine. It is probably, yeah. It's probably the only nation on Earth to have fewer people today than it did in the 1840s. Wow. Yeah. Man's proper wicked brov. Hmm. That's the piece for the food. I'm. I'm. I'm sorry. Like I'm really deep in the top boy right now. That's that's that's fine. I'm I'm very deep into. I I I'm still gearing up to to to try out my my English accent. We we we dusted it off for one of the Kissinger episodes and you you were going off into we were going off a little bit. We were trying to do that like posh Yaya thing. And so yeah the thing about my like I know it's bad but the the best part about like how to do this one is because it's part Jamaican so you can kind of like if you lean to patwa, it's like it's OK because they're Jamaican immigrants, you know I'm saying so like that's my only out but. At the same time, Ralph, it's calm, brave, like it's not good. I know it's not good. You know, the best I can do is, well, I don't see why we have to have people who aren't English on the planet, so it doesn't seem really particularly feasible, but they are quite the ball. That's what you both. Apology I apologize. I I mean yes. At the same time for a number of this is great though I do apologize ahead of time anytime I do a British accent to Jake, my greatest my good, my my posh, my posh British is give them the old what fall there we go. OK they're all like that though nailing it but they hold what for now I will say this though, I have noticed after touring through the UK enough like doing music like I finally figured out like that there and of course. Uh, that there's like regional accents, so, like, I get it now when you're like in Birmingham. They do the Birmingham like they got that that that thing. Well, I I think what we can certainly say is that we will be getting revenge for all of England's crimes by doing a variety of bad acts like, that's the only. Yeah yeah, you was able to conquer the world. The least you can do is have to tolerate, yeah, you're going to get angry when I mispronounced Northampton or whatever. Whatever to explain how all of this happened, how like so many people were killed or were allowed to die, we're going to have to go back in history quite a bit to the very birth of the British Empire, because in a lot of ways, Ireland was kind of the first colonial possession of the empire. Now, prior to English conquest of Ireland, the island maintained a history of pretty ferocious independence. It was never even close. To be in colonized by the Romans, they kinda like stop at at Scotland more or less like they're trying to get up north, but they build that wall like it's a mess, you know, trying to, trying to get up that far as you might know, yeah, England. Not super close to Rome. And then even a bit further, yeah. Already far enough. This far enough. Yeah. You know. So yeah, you know, the Ireland pretty, pretty much doing its own thing for that period of time. And then in like 1066 you get the Normans, which are kind of like basically the French conquer England and then after that point, you know the the English kings are Norman kings, right. So not that long after the Normans conquer England and Ireland, there's this guy, Brian Baru, who is a high king and he, he, the Normans try to invade Ireland. And he defeats their armies and throws them back. Or at least that's kind of how history is often summarized. The reality is a lot more complex. But, you know, this is not that in depth. An Irish history podcast. So like most parts of medieval Europe, Ireland, you know, you've got a bunch of little kingdoms, you've got a bunch of, like, different kings, and they're all at war with each other pretty often. Like most places in the world, you got a bunch of people who who are fighting with each other all the time. And so while the Normans are in charge in England. There's this Irish king named Jarmin McMurray and he he gets into a little bit of a scrap with some of his neighbors, so he kind of accidentally, on purpose, kidnaps the wife of one of his rivals and that doesn't go great for him. So he he winds up in fighting the Normans to Ireland to help him deal with this little squabble, which will prove to have been a mistake. You don't invite the English mistake, number one, yeah. So yes, all this is happening in like the mid 1100s, right? This this Irish. Thing is, like, hey, Norman's come on over, help me out. I kidnapped a lady and it didn't go great for me. And and when the Normans get invited over to Ireland, there's a Pope, right? You know, popes are a big deal in the 1100s. There's not really like, that's kind of the only game in town unless you're going orthodox, right? Like, if you're Christian, it's it's pretty much the popes or nothing. And the Pope at this time was a guy named Adrian, and he's actually the only English person they've ever let be Pope, which might key you in on how bad an idea it was to let an English. Person be the good God, yeah. We're already in the 1100s. This is the last time they try that **** they bring us. They bring a Nazi and to be Pope before they let another British person do it. I'm like and I'm tracking. They got, they got a pretty spicy track record. Yeah. For them to be like, I don't know about them. I don't know. But you know that didn't work out at all. Yeah. So Adrian, uh, this English Pope, he, he, uh, the Normans kind of come to him and they're like, they work out a deal. And so he gives the King of England at this point, Henry, the second, a papal bull, which is like, you know, a Pope. Announcement law Type Dealy right when the Pope declares a thing. That's a palpable kind of my Catholic audiences screaming at me for inaccurately describing what a papal bull is, but whatever he issues this papal bull, that legitimizes their invasion of the island. And so there's this, basically what what has happened here is the English crown have made a deal with the papacy to colonize Ireland, which is seen as wild and still pretty Pagan. So that's that, that cut, that's what happens at this point. And the Normans get invited over, they make this deal with the Pope to to Christianize the the Pagan Irish and to discuss what comes practice for the good practice for the Americas, for the Americas, for. I mean that's one of the points that like, there's a pretty good book called the Invention of the white race that goes into this in more detail. But like most of the techniques that the British Empire would use in places in Southeast Asia and Africa, in in the Americas, we're kind of tested out in Ireland. Right in the Ireland, yeah, yeah. And for what comes next here, I'm going to read a quote by Irish scholar Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot. From the Vatican's point of view, the attraction of this arrangement lay in the fact that Rome would exert its authority through the appointment of hand-picked bishops, rather than having to struggle to assert its influence over powerful Irish Abbots who hitherto had often been appointed by the families who controlled the extensive church lands and monasteries. The attraction for the Normans was straightforward. It gave them access to Irish land, which with their advances in agriculture. They were able to exploit far more profitably than where the cattle herding Irish and so Christ and Caesar came to be hand in glove. Unfortunately, when Henry the eighth defied the Pope by divorcing his wife to marry Anne Boleyn, the gloves came off between King and Pope with disastrous results for the Irish. From the time of Henry the eighth breaking with Rome, England became a Protestant nation in Ireland remained a Catholic one. Thus, apart from the inevitable attempts by a large country to subordinate a smaller country, England's religious wars became superimposed on Ireland, also not alone with the Catholic Irish. Lose their lands. They would also be forced to pay for the upkeep of the Protestant clergy. Not surprisingly, in a land where the poet is both feared and revered, native Irish resentment at the superimposition of Protestantism found its expression in a bitter verse by Rafferty, the famous blind Irish poet. Don't talk of your Protestant minister or his church without temple or state, for the foundation stone of his religion was the ******** of Henry the eighth, which is pretty good little poem. That's a good little boy. Love to see. Like man. I wish there was like a alternate like sort of multiverse timeline where the Irish just rejected the idea of joining whiteness. It's just, yeah, if they were just like, you know what, man? Nah, fam. Nah. You know, I'm saying, like, I just wonder, like, where we would be at now. Obviously, our understanding of race being so intermixed with, like, colorism and stuff like that. But what if the food was just like, **** y'all? Nah, we ain't one of you. I mean, I'm saying because of **** like this where it's like, not only did y'all try to colonize us, you even tried to like, I mean, y'all sprays off faith on us, too, you know? I'm saying, which was like, and then you were like, you know something actually not. Yeah, yeah. It's like, first of all, like y'all just you a subversion of our old face. You acting like you invented something, you know? I'm saying so like. Man, that have been. I would have loved to have seen some sort of like alternate timeline where Irish were just like black people. Like, we were just like, well, there's, I mean, there's there's a lot that, like, because one of the things that happens, you know, you've got Oliver Cromwell who invades Ireland. And like, if you look at the Irish countryside, one thing you might notice is that, like there's weirdly not a lot of, like, old growth forests or wild animals because they got murdered like, like Cromwell. Like kills the land to a significant extent. It's like pretty. There's a lot of like horrible, terrible, ****** ** war crimes but that go on in this. And a lot of it's seen as, like I said a little earlier, that, like, there was this attitude of, like, there's a lot of, like, Pagan wildness in Ireland. That doesn't mean that, like, Christianity isn't there, right. The Normans in the Catholic Church don't bring Christianity to Ireland. It's been there for quite a while. But there's also this attitude that, like, there's something kind of like feral about the Irish people. You you see that a lot in kind of the way in which these people write about Ireland. In this time, yeah. And there is, I think, an extent, like, again, a lot has been written. And that's not really not the focus of this episode on, like, how the Irish became white. And I'm fairly certain there's actually a book by that title. Yeah. But I learned a lot of that in, like, my, like, undergrad studies like that the process of, like, deep disenfranchising slaves and like, when they all this good stuff and like, Shays, rebellion and all this stuff that, like, kind of tied. I used to whiteness, at least in the Americas, but yeah. And it it is important, like a lot of that does happen in the Americas, because when you actually look in Ireland, there is as much as there's histories of other things. There is a significant history of, like, rejection of, of aspects of that identity. And you, you see little signs of that and a bunch of things, including the fact that if you go to like a football game in Ireland today, there's a decent chance you gonna see a lot of Palestinian flags. There's a long history of like kind of solidarity and whatnot that comes with being a colonized people. That's not the only thing, because also it's worth noting that as with like the Scots **** load of the soldiers. The British Empire who were doing this whole making an empire thing, our Irish people too, so it's it's a bunch of stuff happening. So English domination of Ireland was not a clean process. It didn't happen all at once. This is going on for a period of kind of centuries. It's being sort of ironed out as a rule. Irish Lords ruled most of the land in Ireland through the 1200s to the early like 1600s. And, you know, it's the stuff we've been talking about. There's fighting in between these different Lords. There's alliances. Some of them are like backing the English to like, **** over their neighbors. Pretty normal feudalism stuff. Celtic Ireland. As it's generally called, was divided between four or five Lords at any given time, the bulk of the land. And they distributed like the land that was under their control to lower chiefs and to like septs that in, in, in in what we're called land usages. And in exchange for this land, basically, again, it's the pretty normal feudalism deal. You've got to hand over a portion of your agricultural produce for the Lord. And if there's a war, you've got to, like, help, you know, give him bodies. Basically standard. Yeah, you got these guys. And they got there. They got their guys. It's it's pretty normal. Pretty normal feudalism stuff, which is not all that different from organized crime but with better outfits. Yeah, like most government. So Henry the eighth becomes king, as we discussed, and he kind of staggers **** first into the history of religion as crazy. Like, yeah, there was a way I would love to be there for the Henry the eighth story that, well, maybe we'll get to that at one point. That's a little further back than we usually do. I'll probably do Cromwell, probably. New Cromwell before we do, Henry because, I mean Cromwell's after. But you know, yeah. I'm just like, listen, if there's any, like sort of. If you are, if you are a Christian or Protestant in any way, shape or form like you, there's no way. And I don't care what your theology is. Y'all hat has to go off to Henry the eighth. An incredible flex, like in that incomplete. That's amazing. He got to start a denomination just because because because he needed the ****** he he invented the what is it, the Anglican American. Yeah. Because he wanted he wanted to **** differently. Like this incredible respect like this look human to human theology down for a second. Respect dude, bro. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty, it's pretty, it's pretty cool. So. One of the things that Henry the eighth does because he's he's he's not happy that the Irish aren't willing to give up their religion because he wanted to ****. And there's other stuff like there's a lot of, like, Irish raids on the English coast. There's kind of fighting within Ireland. So anyway, he he decides, and Ireland's been troublesome for quite enough time and and he makes a declaration that all Irish lands, whether they're owned by Gaelic Irish or English transplants, have to descend, have to surrender their their land. To the crown and then the Crown's going to give them back, right? So what he's doing, he's not actually trying to take their land away, but he's trying to make it clear that everyone who owns land in Ireland owns it through the King of England, right? That's pretty gangster. That's pretty mobster right there. He wants everybody to to bend the knee, you know, that's both, basically both of us. Yeah. So the Irish, a lot of people in Ireland, I should say, aren't super happy with this, right? It's and and so they rebel. And this kicks off a series of wars that go throughout, like the early 1600s. There's a number of rebellions. One of them's led by a guy named Odoherty. And in 1608 he loses this rebellion. And he had owned, like he was one of these guys who's owned a **** load of Ireland, Irish land. And because he loses this rebellion, all of the land he's owned is granted to the Lord Deputy, a guy. So Arthur Chichester, which is weirdly chichesters a name it both as a first and a last name that you're going to hear a couple of times in this story. I had never heard it before. This terrible man. Terrible name. Not like Odoherty, which is a good name I like pretty like. It's it's always fun. I always fun saying to to say in Irish names. So New England had only kind of, I mean, part of how England wins the victories in these wars. They're finding it's not just them coming in as it as will be the case with like all of their colonial wars. They're not just sending in an army and crushing the local opposition, they are allying with Irish rebels. Right. And they're kind of playing these different Chieftain or not with rebels, but they're playing these different chieftains off each other. So some of these Irish chieftains stay loyal to the crown and they fight on behalf of the Crown. Against other Irish people, right? And that's how it's it's going to be the same in Africa, right, with these groups like the Kings, African Rifles and whatnot, you know, that's where we get our idiom means and what not is these colonial soldiers who are getting played against other, you know, indigenous peoples. Yeah, it's a bummer. It's a real bummer. And this is not, I had said previously that Ireland's kind of the first colony of England. That doesn't mean it's the 1st place that the English, like, conquer. That's not England, right? Because they take whales and they take Scotland first, right? But those, again, there's people probably in both places who will argue. But I think there's a difference with what happens in those places and what happens in Ireland that makes Ireland more of a a colony situation because people always are conquering each other, right? They do it every way. They do it in Africa, they do in China. They all, every, every group of human beings. There have been some who have like conquered others. What what we start to see happening in this developing colonial period is different. And one of the things that's really different is that when when the English, you know, take, have that fight their fights with Scotland. The same thing happens where there's groups of nobles in Scotland who side with the English English crown and help crack down on rebellions, and there's groups that rebel. Same thing happens in Wales. But once those wars are over, the Welsh and Scottish Lords who had sided with the English crown get a piece of the pie, right? Yeah, like they get integrated to a pretty significant extent and like the ruling class of this, this forming thing that's going to become the United Kingdom. And so a lot of these Irish chieftains whose side. With the crown, think like, well, something like this is gonna happen with us. Right. And which seems like a good deal. You know, it's not going bad for the these these folks. You. Yeah. It's like it's it's when assimilation works. Yeah. Right. Like it's like we just assimilate you into the culture and everything's everything's fine. Yeah. And it seems like this is the. I mean. Yeah. And and and that's kind of what a lot of these folks who have sided with the crown expects to happen in Ireland, but it's not how things work out. And I want to quote next from the book the invention of the white race by Theodore Allen. The option. For racial oppression left no room in the ranks of the colonial upper crap upper class for Catholic Irish chieftains, for all that some of them might wear the title Sir. The English therefore proceeded systematically with the repudiation of their promises to their Irish wartime allies. Whether they had been enemies or allies in the Tyrone War, whether they flew to arms or merely protested at court, the Irish of Chieftain class were to be demoted socially to the status of no more than small landlords, politically excluded from posts of authority, and placed socially beyond the Pale of British respectability. Tanistry and Gavelkind the Celtic forms of succession and inheritance were outlawed. Irish chieftains might be expropriated and put to death for making an appeal based on Celtic law and the practice of the Catholic religion was outlawed. Britons were forbidden to acquire land from Britons, that is English or Scots. They were to get it from the Irish in the sixes sheeted Ulster counties. Only a score of the deserving Irish were allowed to keep as much as 1000 acres of land. They just, yeah. It's so bad. And it's like I know I'm looking back at history. You know, I'm kind of like Monday morning quarterback in here, but like it just seems so arbitrary. Well a lot of this is is wrapped up in the Catholicism Anglicans split. It's gotta be that, right? Because I'm just like chunk of it. I mean like because again like to this day like you know with. The ways people feel about Italians where I'm like, why not them? Yeah, I'm like is it why they don't count. I'm like, is it is it the anyway, yeah. It it has to be the the religion thing and then being able to fold that into your your construction of, yeah, it's because it starts it does it. And it's just that like these initial divisions and the the kind of conflicts they spawn just keep deepening over time because it doesn't end until the Irish. They're even more than just sort of a subject. A subject people seen as like a conquered people who have to be kind of brutally kept in their place like this is kind of an evolving understanding. None of this happens overnight. And I'm like, but yeah, by and large, I'm like, relatively speaking, the space between the British and the Irish is like LA and the valley. Like, it's yeah, there's there's suburbs in the United States that are closer to their cities of origin than, like, nor further than like Dublin is from from London. Yeah, it's not even. It's not even like to San Francisco. It's not even LA to San Francisco, I'm like, yo, like they they round the corner. Like, yeah, I, I, there's, I think like Kanyes Farm in Wyoming is a significant chunk of the landmass we're talking about here. Yeah. I'm just like, it's only, yeah, they're not far away. But like in terms of like the the cultural differences, it, it is pretty vast and it's growing over this. In part because English elites really come to despise the Irish as a race. Lord Chichester. Who wound up? I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. I'm sure. Something like Jerry or some ****. Because English names, it's always like what? No, of course you pronounce Chichester. Chichester? It's pronounced, you know? Yeah. OK. I'm OK reading the letters on the page. Like, I apologize for reading the letters on the page. I apologize for trusting the way you wrote this. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't. I didn't realize it was pronounced Leicester because it's not at all spelled like less because there's there's not an L anywhere in here. That's why I thought there wasn't pronounced Lester I. Because it's one of those things like whales, you you look at the way things are spelled in Welsh and it makes like, I, I, I I would never even try to pronounce those, but at least they don't. They aren't pretending to be some. They're not pretending. You look at a Welsh word and you're like, OK, well, I don't know how to say that. You look at the word for Leicester and it's like, Oh well, that looks like a thing that I should be able to just read. But no, exactly. Nope. Anyway, whatever. Anyway, we don't trust you. 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Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Ah, we're back. So Lord Chichester, who winds up in possession of that rebel O'doherty's Land, he writes shortly thereafter. Quote I have often said and written, it is famine which must consume. The Irish are swords and other endeavours work not for that speedy effect which is effect expected for their overthrow. So even in it, in this period of time in the 1600s, you have English Lords being like, there's too many Irish, they're too quarrelsome. We got to engineer a famine, right? They should just there's too many of y'all. There's too many of y'all y'all should stars. Starvation is going to be the best way to deal with these people. British Thanos and a lot of English nobility are gonna spend quite a bit of time engineering, really, what's a series of disasters? Because before the great hunger, there are a couple of other pretty terrible. Payments, one of which kills hundreds of thousands of people. We just don't talk about it much anymore because the the the great hunger is even worse, yeah. But, you know, I, I want to talk about like, how they did this because it's all wrapped up in kind of this landlording system that arises over the course of of of a couple of centuries in Ireland. Now, we, we chat on this show pretty regularly about serfdom, which is a a social situation that existed in a lot of Europe throughout the medieval period and existed in Russia until the 1860s, right? Russia doesn't free their serfs until right around when the Emancipation Proclamation is signed there within a couple of years of each other. Umm. And serfdom is a type of slavery. It's not nearly as bad as like chattel slavery in North America, in part because obviously one of the worst things about chattel slavery's families get split up, right? You can, like sell individuals from families and separate them from their loved ones. Serfs are bound to the land, so they they are part of the property parcel that you own. So you can't like split up families outside of like, drafting people to go fight in wars, which which absolutely does happen and is pretty unpleasant. But it does mean, like the downside of being a surf is that you're not really free. You can't leave, you can't really do anything but be a surf. The upside is that number one, you're not, you're not really paying rent, you know, like you can't get kicked off the land because you're part of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've always, I've always explained it like, OK, you know, when you when you like if you were renting an apartment and the apartment has. A stove washing machine. Like, it's already there. Yeah, like, it just it kind of comes with the apartment, you know? I mean, it's like that's a surf. Yeah. They're kind of like, you just come with the land when I buy it, you know? Yeah, it's. I'm sure this will happen in, like another three years, but imagine if your landlord owned you and that meant that you had to do what your landlord said and work in whatever job they wanted you to work, but you also couldn't get evicted, so it would be a kick. Well, yeah, but you also can't move. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So it sucks, but also it it's really where I'm I'm bringing all this up to say that, like. As bad as serfdom was, it is vastly superior to what Irish peasants are enduring throughout the 1600s and 1700s. I think it's important too, like, for, you know, future reference for any, any listener, especially like the type of listeners that you and I have to when you talk about slavery to understand sort of the gradient of types of slavery. And I think, yeah, like on one end of the spectrum is sort of like, yeah, like a like a Concord village, you know what I mean? And you're taking the warriors to do something or some sort of like serfdom, if you will, all the way to this. Yeah. Well, the humans are prop where humans are are cattle, like. So that's like chattel slavery. You know, I'm saying, like there's a a scale. You know what I mean? If you will. It's really important because a lot of the, especially folks who want to minimize chattel slavery, they exist in the United States, they'll be like, well, slavery exists everywhere and it's always bad, which is like saying war exists everywhere and it's always bad. It's like, yeah, but different kinds of wars. The worst than others. Like, yes. Like, like Desert Storm. Yeah. War is bad. But Desert Storm was not as bad As for example, the German invasion of Russia. You know, like, it's different. It's one was worse than the other. Yes. And. And it's like, yeah, like Roman. And there's often gradients. Like, we talk about ancient Roman slavery. There were slaves in ancient Rome who would have, who would have felt very similarly about their situation to chattel slaves in North America. These would have been slaves working on the latifundia, which were these massive agricultural plantations or in the minds. And these are terrible. Types for these slaves, and they're worked to death. And it's really a miserable situation. But a lot of slaves in ancient Rome would have been more or less were working internships like, and they're not even unpaid. Like, they're getting paid a lot like you when when you get freed and you had a, you would get free generally before too much time is like a household slave or like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like people would people, particularly educated Greeks, would sell themselves into slavery to become teachers for rich people because it was like a better life. So it's not like if you're like, you can't just say, like. Slavery in Rome was this because there are a bunch of different types of slave anyway? Totally. We're getting off the subject. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that's a very important distinction, especially like when you're trying, like you said, having a cultural dialogue with somebody about, like you said, minimizing the experience of one person, sort of playing like this oppression Olympics to where you like it. It really is different, though. Yeah. It's worth understanding that because the Irish in this. They're not slaves in any way. But also in there's a degree to which there's certainly worse off in most ways. And surfs up. And it's because of this landlording system that evolves. So throughout the 1600s, like this. There's this process of the Celtic feudal system being dismantled piece by piece, and ownership of the land being transferred to English landlords, most of whom were what you'd call absentee landlords, right? They don't live in Ireland. Thankfully, that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody here pays rent. Nobody listening to the show pays rent to somebody who who lives far away. And it's just kind of collecting a check. That doesn't happen anymore. But it did in this. That never happened. So first up first, I couldn't follow you. I was like, wait, is it that? Oh yeah, he's making a joke. Yeah, I'm just kidding. So throughout the 1600s, England confiscates more than 3,000,000 acres of land. And yeah, this, this. During this period of time, Irish peasants change from being more or less in a similar position to peasants and a lot of Europe to being renters. And this winds up being a lot worse under what came to be called the middleman system. And there's a couple of different ways that this kind of works. It's not the same across all of Ireland, but one of the ways in which this works is called the middleman system, and in this. English people acquire land, which they then let to a fixed rate to a single English person who lives in Ireland. So the land is like owned by an English person who lives outside the island and then they basically lease it to an English person who lives in Ireland and works as like a property manager. And he sublets the properties of peasants. Yeah. These are this is a very modern system in the. Yeah. It's a lot of this is going to sound very familiar not to like I'm not trying to compare this to like rental situation. People living in San Francisco. It's obviously like not not to minimize the horror what's happening in Ireland. Like legally, on paper, there's there's some real similarities between and, in part because like what is figured out in this period of time spreads in a lot of ways. Like a lot of the different attitudes towards how leasing and renting and stuff should work are kind of being invented in this. So the, the middleman system allows landlords to profit handily off of Irish land and labor without actually seeing the people they're exploiting. You know, that's up to the middleman to do the direct exploiting. So you could just kind of take the cash, another system that is popular in chunks of Ireland. Called land tenure. And in this system, absentee landlords rent small tracts of land directly to peasants without a middleman. And over the course of 200 years or so, there's kind of some different ways that this works. But the ultimate result is that most Irish peasants, like 3 million people by the time the great hunger starts, wind up living on these very, very small plots of land. We'll talk about this more later, but they keep getting divided up more and more over time. In his 1962 text, the Great hunger historian Cecil Woodham Smith which is a very English name for a guy who's who's writing a very critical book about the Great Hunger proper British Cecil Woodham Smith. I I just can't get over some of these names. Anyway, the land I'm gonna I'm gonna quote from Cecil, who I think is actually a pretty good historian. The land system thus introduced was a method of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of holding and subjection of the common people. Ireland was a conquered country, the Irish peasant a dispossessed man and his landlord an alien conqueror. Whoa. So while it is tempting and to some extent worthwhile to again note some similarities with our modern landlording system, it's also important to see how unique this system was. The. English Crown is essentially using a really decentralized network of land holding arrangements to dispossess the Irish peasantry. And this ensures if you don't own your farm, you can't ever make anything extra, right. Like you know what? We'll talk again this a bit more, but like it, it ensures the fact that nobody owns anything, and the fact that people don't have any permanent ties to the land that they're born and raised on means makes it very hard for peasants to put together the resources or have the stability. That could lead to organized resistance. It doesn't make it impossible. There is organized resistance at periods, but it makes it a lot harder. It also makes it. It's very another thing that's very familiar. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And obviously when this, when aspects of this system get taken over to other parts of the world, they get a lot worse, right. Yeah. It's definitely worse for other people outside of Ireland when some of these things are like morphed, but you can see. Shades of the tactics that the British Empire would use everywhere here. Yeah, and shades of like, what the United States is going to do to indigenous people, you know? Right, like, it's not there. There's elements of that in here. Because it's, you know, it's a lot the same being tested. Yeah. Yeah. So English land laws are imported to Ireland and these laws, quote, pushed to their extreme the rights of landlords and conceded nothing to the occupiers in respect of their customary rights. Under the old Irish Customs, Irish renters did not get to lease the land they lived on. There are no leases in this. So everyone is at will, which means you can be evicted at any moment for any reason or no reason at all. There's no warning that has to be given. It doesn't like you can be paying your rent and they can still kick you off. It doesn't matter. Tenants also received no kind of compensation for improving the land that they farmed. So a big part of farming if you've ever farmed is to like do things over time that make your land more productive and like increase your yield and make what you're on more valuable and also more capable of more easily providing a more food, both for money and for taking care of yourself and the people who live there you. There's no point in doing that. If you were an Irish, Irish tenant, farmer. We'll get into that a little bit more too. But like because you you own nothing, it's it's good for people to have a sense of ownership and the things that they live in and on. Like it's it's broadly positive. So yeah, I was just like, why? Why? I'm now now I'm curious as to like why do they why would you think that this like? Would be successful. Well, it is like that, yeah, but I'm like just in the initial thinking of like. I would want if I own the land, I wouldn't want. And I and own a land in a place that I don't even live and I probably ain't seen in years. I wouldn't want to make sure that that land is getting better. So I'm like. So I'm like make my land better. Just because I'm telling you to or just like. I just thought I maybe I'm just again modern eyes where I was like, man, I would want to incentivize like, yo, you they keep avocado, you know? I'm saying, like, hey, if you could fix my soil, want to take one of my avocados for yourself, like I would think to me. I don't know what I'm talking there. There are that there are some landlords because again, we're, we're talking in broad here. There are certainly landlords who like offer better deals to people and who do try to encourage, you know, like I'm never gonna kick you guys off, like you can improve your life that that happens too. But but broadly speaking, it does not happen on a wide scale. And we're going to talk about why. But this is very much a conscious decision that people are making and there's a mix of ideology we're going to talk about. Some aspects of like free market capitalism are being invented. So a big part of the fear here is that. If you create a situation by which people would want to improve their land, that's by definition a situation in which they have more control over the land they live on. Which means you are violating the sacred property rights of the landlord, right. That's a big chunk of of why they don't want that to exist because, OK, yeah, yeah, we're going to. Adam Smith is going to come into this story in a big way, not too long from now. OK. So, but obviously we're not there yet. 1690 Adam Smith is just a glimmer in I don't know some other Smith's eye at this point. So William of Orange in 1690 beats the Catholic King James the 2nd at the Battle of the Boyne and this spells the end of organized Catholic power in Ireland and is seen by Protestants in Northern Ireland. Is kind of like an Independence Day sort of situation. Battle of the Boyne is a big thing for the Protestants in Northern Ireland. And again, it's often seen as like, yeah, you have this like fight between the Catholics and the Protestants and the Catholics lose and and it it leads to a lot of tragedy. It's again, as is always the case with Irish history, much messier than that because the reality is that the Pope in Rome actually backs William of Orange against the Catholic King James as part of a strategic scheme to **** with King Louis of France. And he's secretly funnels the modern equivalent of three and a half million pounds sterling. 2 William Money that's spent on swords and muskets to kill Cathy Russell Peas, isn't it? Yeah, and we don't find it. We we didn't learn this until documents were uncovered in 2008. Like for in terms of like, again, to give you an idea of like, how good the the ******* Catholic Church is it both documenting **** and keeping it locked down? This happens in 16 ******* 90. And no, it doesn't drop until 2008, dog. They think the US government's bad at FOIA requests. Do you understand what I'm saying? OK, I just heard today Trump out there hiding 7 hours of like phone content. Like, OK, see if you can keep that hidden for 400 years. Popes like that's that. That's JV ****. Yeah, popes like rookie cookies, red shirt. That wasn't even the United States when we started covering up war crimes. You wouldn't need the country. Yeah, we we've got we we're hiding **** older than your concept of of of society. Yeah, we got, we got. Dudes hold secrets older than your constitution. Gotta love it. So, OK, throughout the early 1700s, the Irish peasantry languished better off than slaves, but worse off in a lot of ways than serfs. The fact that landlords could increase rent whenever they wanted meant it was pointless again to try and farm for cash crops worth much more. Like, there's not a lot. There's not a point in massively increasing your yields or improving the land because they can change your rented will. So if they see, oh, they doubled their productivity this year, I'm going to double rent. So why would you do that? Why would you put in that? Yeah. Why would you? Exactly. Exactly. So you pay in in produce. Yeah, generally, basically. Right. Like, you're because you're you're farming. You are a farmer, so you're farming both to feed yourself and you are farming to pay your rent. And if you've got this middleman, you can't just be, like hiding corn somewhere, right? Right. It's it's harder because he yeah. And there's there's obviously there's always local collaborators whose jobs like you know and there's also there people always do get away with ****. Right. Of course it's the same. You know we're we're flattening things a little bit because there's a lot of history to cover here, of course and you know what's what's the what's a head of lettuce between friends. Yeah. But there's there's also. So not only there's no point in like massively increasing your yields as a farmer because they'll just up your taxes, but there's also not much of a point in improving the land because if you make the land a lot better. Then your landlord will kick you out and will rent it to someone else for more money. Yep, you know, like, why? Why? Why would you now? Historians have noted that one major issue with achieving progress under the feudal system, this is everywhere. That there is a feudal system, is that like this is broadly a thing that happens in feudalism. Feudal Lords in a lot of Europe there at the medieval period have fairly little incentive to invest in or improve their lands. If you make like a region a lot more agriculturally productive or whatever, then. Number one, it looks more enticing for your rifles to attack and try to take, but also the money that you invest in improving that land is less money that you're spending on your military. You know, if you're smart and careful over time, it can work out for you. But it's like a risk. You're taking a gamble if you if you divert resources for that. And this is one of the reasons why feudalism doesn't you know, people find other things to do because it's it's not great for all kinds of progress, right? Like, I think I do like and one of the things that's interesting is. England has, even though there's a king, still they've moved beyond the system in this. That's part of why they conquer the world, right as they develop kind of new systems that are more conclusive to the kind of progress that has beneficial. Yeah. But with this system of absentee landlords that they put in place over Ireland, they find a way to deny the Irish any benefits of modernization. When enterprising Irishmen try to make a life for themselves in other ways besides farming, the Crown cracks down on their ambitions in the famine plot, Tim Pat Coogan writes, Irish trade was crippled by the partial conquest. Instead of being developed, valuable cattle, fishing and woolen industries were taxed out of existence when they came into competition with either British trading interests or her military concerns, which led her to disrupt Irish trade with both France and America. So, like, not only is it a **** situation for farmers, but whenever people try to do anything else, try to go into business or whatever that gets destroyed via like taxing or via like different. There's different ways the government has of ******* this over in order to protect English businesses you know you don't want. So there there's no way out for the Irish. Really. Yeah, there's even this brief period in the early 1800s where they're starting to industrialize more. And the the the number of Irish people who are kind of like working in these factory jobs, industrial. Jobs. The dawn of the Industrial Revolution is increasing and then it plummets right before the great hunger. And part of that is that like, well, we don't want Irish in industry to compete with British, like, we want to sell them that stuff, for one thing. Like that's not why they're there. They're not there to develop their island and to, you know, a modern society. Yeah. And we're talking I like, are we? We're still talking like Ireland as a whole. Are we talking Northern Ireland? We're, yeah, we're it's just Ireland at this point. I mean, it's it's it's it's all under the control of the crown. Right. So there are like what you've got up in the north, like places like Ulster in particular. Ulster is basically founded as a colony of English people in Ireland. So yeah, you you do. And again, this is kind of like Ulster is founded right along the same time. It's like 1600 or so that, like the English, you're found in colonies in the East Coast of North America. So they're actually kind of colonizing Ireland in similar ways to how they're colonizing the Americas at around the same period of time. So obviously all this the the fact that England is kind of hamstringing Irish growth has impacts beyond just keeping the Irish downtrodden. English landlords could have improved this situation while remaining into control. In control if they'd agreed to enter into contracts with their tenants like leases that would maybe limit their ability to increase rent or evict people. But they weren't willing to do this. And that's part of why there can be no progress in a paper for the Marquette Law Review, Cynthia Smith writes, because the landlord's goal was to extract as much money from the land as possible. Any contractual agreement with tenants would have been an obstacle to this rent seeking. In addition to rent seeking, there were a number of reasons why English landlords neglected to invest in their holdings in Ireland. The small size of holdings, the uncertain political situation, general economic conditions, and the availability of more lucrative investment alternatives. All of these factors may have contributed to the landlord's reluctance to improve. Landlords were further deterred from investing because they were already making a substantial profit on the rent collected on the unimproved land. Finally, landlords neglected to make improvements because they feared that tenants would use the investment so intensively that the value of the improvement would depreciate it too. Higher rate misuse of an improvement was likely to occur when tenants had no security of tenure. However, if tenants had been given some security, misuse would not have been a problem because tenants would have been in the process of maximizing their net income and use the improvement optimally. So there's like a number of different ways this could work and this is how things work in a lot of other parts of Europe that are modernizing. But the. Absolutely, yeah, it's slum lording **** on, on the scale of an entire people, right? Yeah. Like they the England has turned. Ireland into a slum. Wow. So that they can lower it over it now. The backwardness of pre famine agriculture in Ireland caused by the inefficient investment. This becomes apparent when Ireland's labor productivity in 1845 is compared to English labor productivity like British. British people are like twice as productive as Irish people in 1845. Like on a if you're kind of looking at them as economic units. Yeah, and this is because there's just been no development. It's been allowed to occur that man, not none, but very little. Yeah, but even that scale or comparison is like. It's so infuriating. It's like, well, look, we're more productive than y'all. Like, I wonder why. Yeah, you know, I'm saying yeah, well, and this is going to justify going to be used to justify a lot of racism against the Irish because, like, well, look, they're not very productive. Like, they just can't keep up with the modern society or whatever. Oh my God. So landlords find that the easiest way to increase profits from generation to generation is to further subdivide their lots, which allows them to rent to even greater numbers of the growing Irish population. And these peasants again, these people who live in these renting situations, they make their living by growing different grains and other kind of like export crops. And then those crops are exported, and that's what pays their rent, since rent raises constantly, but their amount of land is fixed and in fact, often shrinking. Irish peasants are caught in this unwinnable cycle of increasing poverty. And the desperation of their situation leads them to embrace a recent import from the new world, potatoes. Now we talk a lot. I mean, there's a lot of like. Talk in popular culture about Ireland and the potato. Obviously the potato comes from, again, the new world. It's not like a native to Ireland. The reason why they adopt it so quickly is that the potato is one of the very few single foods on earth that can be. You can live off of nothing but potatoes. Yeah, if that's all that you have, you can, you can. Especially different kinds of potatoes. There's all sorts of different strains. Some of them have different kind of nutritional values, but potatoes have like vitamin C and stuff like they have what you need to not. I'll hold you. I think I got through. Hmm. Year in college on French fries and. Yeah, like, yeah. Nah, I ain't gonna hurt you. I I could live off a potato. Yeah. And they also grow in it. You can grow it in really bad soil. Yeah. So the way in which these plots are subdivided each like family, you know, whatever farming unit, however you want to phrase it, has like a small chunk in the land that they live on has a small chunk of, like, good land and then usually, like, bogs and stuff and, like, hillsides. That's less good for growing. And so one of the things you can do with potatoes is in the good land you have, you can grow **** like corn that you're going to export and sell, and then you're **** land, you can just sow potatoes and those will keep you alive. Right. Potatoes also aren't worth anything as an export crop. They're just not worth selling, really. So it it also, it's what you eat because you can't profit off of it. It's just this is like a win win, man. Like, you know it does. Yeah. Yeah. Especially because I'm like, I will. OK. This is a bit of a tangent, but I will defend to my grave in and out fries. I know everybody talks. Oh, they're not bad. They're not bad. I like them. I think it's because, yeah, you know why? Because they taste like potatoes. I feel like everybody arguing over fries like I'm like you eating wax and salt and you think. And you of course that's gonna taste great because it's. Yeah, observative potatoes. Now. Look, I look who's your top five fry. Don't lose your place. Top five fries. I have strong opinions about this. I mean, I really like, I'm a waffle fry guy and I I haven't eaten there in a long time, but I do. I did love Chick-fil-A back in the day when I was younger, man. I haven't had their fries in like 10 years. So I don't know, maybe they're not as good as no, they're still they still slap. I'm less. That's a good choice, Wingstop wing stops fries are one of my. I was like, no, I was about to say I was just. Not to say Wingstop. We had him yesterday. One thing fries are incredible because they taste like potatoes and our actually seasoned and they taste like seasoned potatoes. Here's here's a little tip that I do sometimes. I'll get those five guys fries and then this is key. You know that that like spicy chili oil you can get from Trader Joe's? Yeah yes. I put a bunch of them in like a baking pan. I get like a tablespoon of chili oil, dollop it over there, smear it all around the potatoes, pop them in the oven at 3:50 for like 10 minutes to crisp. Come up with the oht ******* it slaps. Yeah, dog. It's good. You just changed my life because I'm like, I am definitely the like, don't leave your fries around me. You know, I'm saying, don't like, don't walk away from your plate. Don't look away. I'm taking your fries. We all love potatoes now. The problem is and and and and also. It's worth noting, it may not sound like eating nothing, but potatoes is a very healthy diet. Irish people, one of the things that is noted in this. Is that they tend to be larger and seemingly healthier than English people of a similar socioeconomic class. And it's because. They're they they they're they're eating a lot of potatoes, which, compared to like, a lot of the diets available to people at the time without money, is one of the better options for being relatively healthy. That the English cuisine? Just how many? Yeah. We don't we don't need to talk about British food. Yeah, like, I was like, man, I do like Irish breakfast, though. I'll give. I think the Irish are one of the better breakfast making peoples of the world. You know who else makes good breakfast? Well, I was going to do a joke. Yeah, I was like, well, about that island where you hunt. OK, so she's angry at me now. So here's ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Spreaker from iheart. Alright, so we've been talking about how wonderful potatoes are and they are, and how like, it's actually not. Again, I'm not talking trying to say an objective, modern terms, but based on the kind of diets available back then, living off potatoes in this. Is not a bad way to to make it go of it. But one of the issues is that over time on Ireland, everyone gravitates to growing just one single strain of potato because it's the best one for the IT. It produces the best yields, and it's the most. Nutricious it's called the lumper. It's not particularly tasty, but it is your works. The biggest bang for your buck and towards of like calories you can grow per square, whatever. So this works for a while, right? Like while the LUMPER is growing? Well, this is great because people get a lot of food and people like not starving to death. The problem is that if you're if everyone is growing one kind of potato, then you have what's called a monoculture. I'll just about to say it's not. So it's not like monocultures ain't good. I just left the coffee farm in Colombia and they were talking a lot about bio cultures and monocultures and like, like, just just to add to your existential dread. According to these, like, expert coffee farmers, they're like, look, we got about maybe 30 more harvests in us unless we start doing more like bioculture, you know? Yeah, multicultural. This is a problem with every kind of agriculture, right? Whenever you'd have. It's that we there's like monocultures, if I'm not mistaken. People will point out that like one reason why banana flavored candy tastes so unlike bananas is that it was based on the flavor of a banana that basically doesn't exist anymore because they all got wiped out and now we eat a different kind of banana. Look into the history of farming bananas. It's wild, but the good thing about when a plague wipes out all of the bananas is that, like, for a while, people don't get bananas. Like it's an economic problem for people. But I I don't think many people have commercially farmed bananas as the vast majority, if not the entirety of their nutritional existence right now to minimize the problem that had banana blight causes. Yes, but you can see how this works. Great for a while, but. Then you get a disease that's gonna **** over the potato. It's going to be a problem for Irish people, but also one again, to go back to what we're saying at the start, it's not a problem that, like, there's no food in Ireland because Irish people are only growing potatoes on a fairly small chunk of the land they have. Most of the land they have is going to grow food that they're going to export in order to make their rent, right. It's important to keep that in mind so it's good. Near the turn of the 18th century, resentment and anger over the suffering under English domination leads to another. Rebellion in Ireland, this one is aided by the French who are in like, you know, they France and England have been fighting for like a century almost by the point at which this happened. Yeah, yeah, it's France. And France actually tries to land troops in Ireland twice. They land an army once, but it it doesn't go great for them. It's not real easy to like if you're France, land an army in Ireland that's going to be capable of. And this actually keeps happening for forever in World War One, the Germans tried to land. The ship full of guns on in Ireland to like just and it did a little bit, but the the rebellion that that comes afterwards doesn't work great. I don't know that that that's the there's a whole story there a lot a lot of people try to land armies or guns in Ireland in order to not because they particularly care about Irish liberation, but because like **** the English and this seems like an easy way to screw them up. It never quite works. So when these French guys, you know, they have their their fight and this this kind of the fact that someone's fighting. The English leads a lot of Irish people to be like, well, we might have a shot at like doing something here, so there's a rebellion, Tim Pat Coogan writes. However, rebellion spearheaded by the United Irishmen was bloodily suppressed. At the time. It was frequently said that the 1798 rebellion was secretly encouraged by direction of the English Prime Minister William Pitt, so that it would go off half cocked before the Society of United Irishmen could succeed in their aim of uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter against the Crown. Certainly English policy seemed directed at fermenting. Rather than aborting rebellion, troops were forcibly billeted on unwilling Catholic farm. Owners in the Yeomanry, the Protestant militia was given a free hand in a pressing their Catholic neighbors. Fair minded Protestants were outraged at what they saw. On Easter Tuesday, April 10th at Newtown, Mount Kennedy in County Wicklow. A Protestant farmer named Joseph Holt, attending the the town fair, was sickened to witness the ancient Britons cutting the haunches and thighs of the young women for wearing green stuffed petticoats. So like, pretty brutal stuff happening here, like slicing ladies at the market. Is there in green, and that's Irish stuff. Also, it's worth noting, like one of the things that the British do to **** people off is force them to quarter soldiers in their homes. We joke a lot about the Quartering Act and about like, what is the third amendment like that that you can't quarter soldiers and people? Why is this here? There's like a there's a reason why people felt that needed to be in. The Bill of Rights. Yeah. The English love quartering soldiers in your ******* house. Sometimes I'll just drive down the street past National Guard bases or military bases and just, Heckle, just be like, come into my house, ************* right? That's right. That's right. I'm going to **** Marine Corps. You don't get to stay in my house. Yeah, I got an amendment, *************. Hey, this ain't #3 say, I ain't gotta let you in. Sometimes I'll invite like a like a like a Lance Corporal into my house and I'm like, you know what? Get the **** out. Never mind. That's gonna go. Get outta here. Get outta here. I'm going to continue that quote from Tim. Pat Coogan, a respected historian of the period, has written 1798 is the most violent and tragic event in Irish history between the Jacobite wars and the Great Famine. In the space of a few weeks, 30,000 people, peasants armed with Pikes and pitchforks, defenseless women and children were shot down or blown like chaff as they charged up to the mouth of the Canyon. One of the malicious tactics was pitch capping. A canvas. Crown was placed on the head of an insurgent or alleged insurgent, and boiling tar was poured into the canvas around after this had time to set the cap. Was torn off, taking with it much of the Croppie scalp the term. Croppie came from the habit of some insurgents of cropping their hair in the fashion of the French revolutionists. The hatred of Protestants for the Catholics was such that the commanding English General, Abercrombie became so revolted by the people he was defending that he had as little to do with them as he possibly could. And you'll see this again later in the famine, where like British soldiers are horrified at some of the things being done to Irish people. They never really do anything about it, but they're they're really, really concerned. So that'll help. I wonder how Abercrombie. Feels about his his legacy now. Oh, I think pretty good. I mean what he thinks of it. No, I'm saying in the sense that he's just some sort of ****** ***. Yeah, frat boy style dressing. Now look, if if you are at the head of an army that is burning people scalps off with pitch and you get to be remembered by shirtless dudes hanging out in a mall in 2006. That's not the worst way that I guess that's not the worst thing to do, but I'm just like, do you think, do you think your little, your little shirtless guys, your frat boys are like they you don't think they soft, like they're not as hard as you were? Were you use melting food, scalps or are you just like. That's right. Look at my son. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, to be fair, Abercrombie and Hollister caused lots of trauma to lots of people. It's like if if it's like if in 200 years there was like a like a sexy tight jeans brand called Himmler's. Yeah everybody was like, oh you got some of those Himmler those look good. It's like that their models are hot. Yeah we're like ohh where yeah you got, you got the new you know I'm saying you got this you wearing the mussolinis you know I got these Mussolini air. Mussolini yeah. Yeah those look great. I got the Mussolini elevens like, ohh word. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. So for a decade or so prior to the 1798 rebellion there was actually Ireland gets a Parliament briefly I think for like 12 years which on paper gives them a small degree of autonomy. From England, but not really, because the the Parliament in Ireland is only supposed to basically do what the Parliament in England tells them to. But after the 1798 rebellion, the English are like, well, we can't even let them have this fake degree of autonomy. So William Pitt the younger bribes Irish parliamentarians to vote for what he called the Act of Union, and this is what makes Ireland a part of the United Kingdom. So again, Ireland votes to join the UK if you ignore all of the things about it that are not legitimate, you know? Yeah, like a lot of votes in history, right? Like, like probably most votes in history. The history of voting is mostly the history of bribery, basically is, is, is crazy though. Like, it's like you mentioned earlier how, like you go to like a lot of like Irish, like football events and they got like, like Palestinian flags. I'm like, I I hope, yeah. People seeing like how that picture is coming into play now, like why they would like. Understand and empathize with the Palestinian plight in Ireland. Like, they're like, like, I hope it's coming together now. Like, yeah, picture is getting pretty clear, you know? Yeah, this, this goes on again where the hundreds of years into and we're still at that. We're at like, the middle point, right? Yeah, this is right. If you can even say that. Right. Because there's a lot of people in Ireland, not as many as there used to be. But you can still find folks who will be like, look, man, I mean, the island still not united. There's yeah, there's still some. Like **** going on we're not thrilled about. Yeah, that said that, most people I know are broadly like, yeah, you know, it's it's it's certainly a lot better. Yeah. Like that then. This. For sure. That's a low bar, though. Whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is. I I did. I think a lot of folks did take some joy when, like, Brexit hit and England, English passports suddenly were worth a lot less and suddenly English people are like going over to Ireland to try and get Irish passports. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Come crawling back, baby. Game guys. Mm-hmm. So, with their own imperial propaganda, superior British productivity served as evidence that the Irish were a lesser race and they deserve to languish under the guidance of an English power. They were lampooned as a lazy and shiftless people. Much was made of the method by which they planted potatoes and which were called lazy beds. Right? Like, because again, you don't have to. It's not like you're just kind of like dropping them in the dirt, right? Like that's how potato farming works. But like, the English are like, look, the Irish are so lazy that they don't want to put in a hard work. They just wanna like, grow potatoes and turn them into liquor smarter. Yeah. Well, and also just because like, well, if they were to make more, you would just take it from you just get. So why? Like you guys again? Yeah, it's it's infuriating, dude. Like, it's pretty not great. Yeah, I'm like it. It reminds me of which may feel like a stretch, but like, follow me here. It's like. We all went to, we all went to, we was in school during the time, which is the same as everybody else's time out. Just like every class you took in, like history and social studies, was telling you about how socialist countries just don't work, right? And I'm like, you telling me this. While we're actively paying millions of dollars to destabilize them and then being able to like we spending millions and millions of dollars to make their governments not work. And then come tell our kids, hey see there, their governments don't work and it's like, well fool, that's you know why like you're you're just like as anybody like connecting these dots here. It ain't working cause you making it not work, right. So when you you. Yeah, he's like, oh man, they're only growing potatoes. Look at them, they're just they're lazy. They grow up. Is and the only grow so much. You know why we only why are we growing potatoes? That's, I mean, it's like, you promise people who have been enslaved that they're gonna get farmland and, uh, what is 40 acres and a mule? Acres and a mule. And then you don't give it to him. And then you develop, like a legal system that arrests huge numbers of them and locks them out of the best jobs. And then a bunch of them are very impoverished. And you go, why why don't these people, why aren't they better at making money? Well, maybe you didn't give him a lot of options. And yeah, yeah. You steal from a group of people all of the land that they had lived on, and forced them onto tinier and tinier chunks of land while killing the vast majority of them. And then you're like, boy, why are they having such trouble adapting to the modern economy? Geez, they seem so depressed. Why are they so sad? Yeah, well, it's it's all again. It's all variations of the same story, you know? So yeah, do, do, do, do, do. So. English media focuses a lot on how little effort the Irish put into farming while ignoring the fact that Irish people are growing cash crops that are exported for the profit of benefit of English landlords and provide a lot of the food that England is growing. And in fact, despite a lot of their backwardness in terms of like agricultural techniques and whatnot, Ireland is continuously increasing productivity in this time and it becomes England's bread basket. It's also a growing source of animal products Irish Ireland supplies. By 1800, Ireland supply supplies English cities with 83% of their beef, 79% of their butter and 86% of their pork, just like to name a few things. So, like, again, the degree to which all of this is absolutely central to the industrial revolution in England can't really be overstated, because when the Irish are providing so much food for English people that again, that, among other things, frees up English labour. To work in like this growing factory system and new industrialize, you know, yeah. So the misery of life under English domination allows most peasants just two outlets ******* and fighting. The former explains why the Irish population triples from the mid 1700s to the early 1800s. Tim Pat Coogan claims that a lot of peasants basically make the decision. Like, our lives can't get worse and birth control is not a thing, right? So we might as well might as well. **** you know, like what else is there? And that this is part of why there's a birth explosion, there's also, like, potatoes are a pretty good thing to eat. And so there is calories, right? There's food for a while to. So for a number of reasons, the Irish population just blows up from about 1700 to about 1800. Again, it like triples. And the other thing that develops over time is like a very weird kind of fighting culture. And this is like, there's a lot of racial stereotypes about, like, the Irish people as like quarrelsome and wanting to fight. But there's like, there's reasons why that stereotype develops. And it's because in Ireland, again, people are very poor. They have a history of rebelling against the Crown, and they don't have any kind of options for social advancement in a lot of cases. And what are young men do when, like, ***** rough, they like, they fight. This happens everywhere. Yeah. I respect it. Like, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink. You drink like, like, alcohol is like, this is the last day on Earth. That they'll be alcohol. Hmm. And. Y'all go home and you smashing, and then you're just ***** for the rest of the day because all we're going to have is potatoes, so. Let's say let's fight. Yeah, like this. This happens all over the place. Like, this is the same **** people talk about, like the Appalachia, right, like Appalachia. And it's like honor culture and like all of the and and Ireland. Kind of their version of that is called faction fighting. OK, which is there's this is a fascinating thing I had no idea was happening, but it starts in the county Tipperary in the early 1800s, and it quickly spreads all over the island. And in the famine plot, Coogan explains, sometimes several 100 participants took part on either side. The most famous fight. Ballyvoy, Strand, and County Kerry in 1834 involved some 3000 contestants, of whom over 200 were killed. The fighting gangs were based on extended families or on parishes, and normally fights took place either at fairs or on feast days or public holidays. The weapons were chiefly seasoned blackthorn sticks, whose lethal properties were sometimes added to by the insertion of lead in the butts. These killing instruments were the origin of the Shillelaghs, carried today by by today's leprechaun dolls, and even more deadly weapon was the whitethorn steak, a cut from which could prove fatal. Sometimes sides and slash hooks were used. O there's just like this again, I respect it. Like, it's like, it's like, you know, you don't have MMA, but you can get a couple 1000 people together to fight in the field. Hey, just like, look, me and my cousins, you know, I'm saying me and my cousins, couple homies down the street, we get to be this block. We're gonna scrap with that block and it's all, it's all in fun. If you die, you die. I'll have some people are gonna die. Cut some people gonna die. You better than muscle up. You didn't talk about, like, yeah, this this ****** happening. And like, like, we talked in our Stalin episodes, like, this is happening like Georgia, like, there's different kinds of, like, like it all over the world. People find excuses to get in big groups and beat the **** out of each other. In Ireland, we be, we will be. Look, when you you you live in, you live in inner city of LA, you sitting on the porch, one of your uncles will be like, hey, you think you could beat that fool up and you, like, I don't know, like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, come here. Hey, fight my nephew. And then now y'all just in the street fighting, you know, I'm saying, OK. You know, it's just like we're bored. Yeah. I don't hate the kids. They're bored. We're just bored, you know? I'm saying, and, yeah, I tell you what. Let me tell you. Let me tell you what I learned in those days. If somebody hits you in the middle of your nose, you're gonna go blind from tears. So don't let nobody hit you in the middle. You know, that was one of the greatest lessons I ever learned. Head down, hands up. Head down, hands up. Now again. So there's a lot going on here, but this is not like the English make a lot of this in their propaganda about, like, how uniquely fighty the Irish are. Like, we this happens all over the world, everywhere in the world, everywhere in the world. It's just what happens when, like, you have a bunch of young men without much in the way of options for the future. You you've ruined any sense of purpose and destiny forum and that you've also like they're angry because the situation is unfair. But they it has become very clear that we're not going to, we're not gonna beat the British military. You know, it's also, you know, this kind of feeds into this system of what are called secret societies at the time. And when we talk about like that term means something different. Now, basically what's happening is, is insurgent groups are are building over Ireland, right. And there's different ones, right. As we'll see later, there are. Some kind of secret societies that are are made-up of landlords or in support of the landlords. There's some that are in support of just the Protestant cause and there's others that are basically battling the status quo that are like like actually fighting against the these this absentee landlord system or like Catholic groups fighting against Protestants. Probably one of the more interesting of these groups were called the rock sites. They declared allegiance to a mythical Captain rock. This is not a guy who existed, but like they would the the Rockets would carry out attacks on landlords. Like they would murder or beat up landlords or rent collectors and then they would write letters justifying what they've done. Signed by Captain Rock. It was kind of like an I am Spartacus, sort of, although Spartacus was real, obviously. Yeah. You know, it's that sort of thing. We're claiming that there's like this, you know, my brain is flooding right now with some sort of. Puns and wordplays about ohh, just away in the Rock Johnson or Chris Rockin' slapped. And like, it's so hard to not go with the Chris Rock like, and it's like, you know when you can't land on a joke because there's too many of them firing and that's what just happened right now. You just remember that thing that happened with Chris Rock, folks. Yeah. Yes. In terms of if you if you're looking for something to laugh at, prop. The the the most powerful secret society in this. Were called the White Boys. Alright, this time it's time for head. The star of the de Beaumont, who was a sympathetic French intellectual at the time, wrote this of the White Boys quote. They lived by an atrocious savage code worthy of a semi barbarous population which abandoned to itself and has no light to guide its efforts, finds no sympathy to assuage its passions, and is reduced to look to rude instincts for the means of safety and protection. These are banditti of a singular kind to obtain arms or vengeance. They commit all sorts of outrageous while they abstain from the gold or silver under their hands. So he's kind of pointing out that like they. They're really more interested in vengeance than making money. They're not like traditional they're not like criminals in that sense. They they really want to, like, **** some **** up. And in many ways the white boys are a precursor to a lot of modern insurgent terrorist groups. Some of them were quite erudite too, and in their manifesto, kind of, they have like, this thing that is explaining what they're fighting for. They write, quote, let us strike the culpable not only in their persons, but in their dearest interests and affections. Let not only their cattle be howled, hamstrung. Their houses burned their land. Turned up their harvested, their harvests destroyed, but that their friends and relations be devoted to death, the wives and daughters to dishonor. Which is there's an allegation that when they talk about wanting people's wives and daughters to be dishonored, that they're like threatening to commit rape of. They yeah they may have been. You know this is, this is not not a pretty series of things that are happening. Why boy? So the white boys and they never change see him as like a precursor to the kind of anti colonial insurgent groups that would dominate a lot of late 20th century geopolitics, right. You could see this is like the first stirrings of some things that are going to happen all over the world. But Ireland also in this. Gives birth to what some call scholars consider the first organized mass. Nonviolent resistance campaign in history, OK. It's organized by a guy named Daniel O'Connell, who is one of the very few member Ireland part of the UK right. So I there are it is possible for Irish people to get elected to Parliament. There's a long history of like what because like what we're actually we're about to talk about this. So O'Connell rises to prominence first as a lawyer and he forms an organization called the Catholic Association in 1823 and this was the first semi effective Irish political party. In history, the Catholic Association in O'Connell spent years fighting for Catholic emancipation, which they win in 1829. And that's what makes anticipation. Yeah, because Catholics, you're not allowed to like, hold land or or political office, right? Yeah, like you are. There is like a degree of like apartheid for capital. It's kind of in a legal sense of the word in this. In Ireland. And so O'Connell wins the right in this organization when the right for Catholics to sit on the Parliament, right. So now you can have because Irish people could be on the Parliament. Sure, but they had to be Irish Protestants because of O'Connell you get your first he is the first Catholic Irish legislator in like elected or like in modern elected. I think maybe before **** got all *****. This also opens up like Catholics can be lawyers in ways they couldn't before and they're allowed to be military officers in the British military now. So this is like a big civil rights campaign, right? So O'Connell forms this political party. They fight for like 7 years and they they win. I mean this is a pretty massive victory, you know, for Irish civil rights in this. So the next year, 1830, O'Connell wins election to the Parliament and he becomes the first Catholic in modern history to sit in the English Parliament. And he's a pretty cool dude. He's. Poor by parliamentary standards. Which means he's rich, but not rich compared to the other rich people, right? Like you know, and he dresses like a normal person. So the British elected leaders call him the king of the Beggars because he he looks poor to them. Again, he is not a poor person. There are minimum financial requirements to be in Parliament, right? So he's not, he's not impoverished, but they they see him as impoverished and they also see him as like he is the representative of the hordes of of. Working poor in Ireland, you know Tim, Pat Coogan writes he deserves to be regarded as the founder of the modern, peaceful civil rights movement. His hatred of oppression was universal. My heart walks abroad, he said, and wherever the miserable is to be suckered and the slaves to be set free there my spirit is at home and I do like to dwell in America. He was deified by the anti Slavery movement for his speeches in their favor and for the manner in which he turned down substantial money offers from slave owners who commanded 27 votes in the House of Commons. During the Emancipation battle, saying, gentlemen, God knows that I speak for the saddest people the sun sees. But may my right hand forget its cunning and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. Before, to help Ireland, I keep silent on the ***** question and what he's saying there is, there's a vote like, England banned slavery in this. Right? And a bunch of parliamentarians are like, hey dude, vote with us to keep slavery and we'll help you out in gaining some concessions for Irish people in Parliament. And he's like, I couldn't. Would never be able to live with myself if I did that. Yeah. Yeah. Like our situation is bad, but like, this is I I could not I could not do that. But yeah, it's it's a principled moral stand. He denounces George Washington for owning slaves, which gets him. He get a lot of the the early Irish diaspora in New York hate him because he like, hates George Washington. Because George Washington owns a bunch of ******* slaves. Yeah. You owned a bunch of slaves. Yeah. At this point, he gets attacked a lot by US newspapers, the New York Herald. Accuses him of having a bunch of concubines and illegitimate children because again, he's like, he thinks slavery is bad. Here we go. Yeah. By the 1840s he was an old man who had spent decades fighting for his people. In 1843, he embarked on one last great battle, repealing the Act of Union. Right. This thing that that brings Ireland into the UK. Yeah, yeah. Given total English dominance of Parliament, this was not seen as possible, right? Like in a in a quote UN quote, legitimate way. The English parliament is not going to vote to give up Ireland, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but he decides, well **** I, don't I I'm not going to try and convince a bunch of English rich ******** that Ireland ought to be free. So he he creates what some people will say is the first modern civil disobedience campaign. He holds a series of what are called Monster Meetings, which are where huge numbers of Irish people assemble to protest in favor of of independence. The first one of these is 120,000 people, and crowd sizes grow over the course of the year that he's doing this to 300. 1000 to 500,000 at a meeting in Cork. By August of that year, he's a succeeded in assembling his largest crowd yet, 750,000 people. That's basically 1/10 of the Irish population. More than that really. And this is a 1840s, you said, yeah, this is 1843. He gets 3/4 of a million people to gather to protest for their independence. Wow. And again, there's a lot of I I went over the fact that there's a lot of stereotypes of the Irish is drunk and violent in this. He's very aware of that. And so, yeah, there's this kind of volunteer order police force at these protests to make sure that there's no alcohol and there's no fighting, that people are staying absolutely in line or scrupulously abiding by the laws outside of the fact that they're gathering to, to make this protest. And that makes it really hard for the British Government to, like, stop this stuff, right? Because these folks are so disciplined, they have trouble finding kind of an end to blow this movement up. And and it's this is a real problem. Because like, you know, when you've got 750,000 people assembling for something, well, that's potentially a military issue, right? If you can get 750,000 folks together for anything, you could cause some problems for the government, you know, like that's a lot of mother. That's a lot today. Yeah. There was a ******* protest in the US with 750,000 gang of people. Yeah, that's some **** could could go down. Obviously, we we had like that many people out in the street to try to stop the Iraq war and it did nothing, but it could it could mean could have. Yeah. It's a lot of those if if if they was up on a. The British was up on just, you know, this. Oh no, it hadn't invented yet, but I'm like, no, but what's up with the tear gas? I was like, y'all could have just do what you do now, which is just we are building to that prop. OK, but it is like, I think if you wanted to, if there were a comparable civil disobedience movement in the United States, it would be, it would, it would be putting 20 or 30 million people into the streets in a single location. Dang. Which I don't think could happen logistically. Like, we don't have the roads for that, obviously. But yeah, but it's it. This is a this is huge. So O'Connell plans to hold his most critical meeting on October 8th in Clontarf, near Dublin. By this point, the powers that be have grown terrified of what O'Connell is assembling. So his, you know, they have trouble because the meetings are peaceful. But on October, in October of 1843, they decide, well, **** it, like I don't care. Wait, we don't. We're not going to care anymore. We're not going to pretend to care that he's followed the rules. Yeah, there it is. The Irish do not have a right to organize their independence. Yeah, so they ban his meeting. And then they gather an army and they sail warships into the port and train long range cannons on the meeting site and say if you gather you get a million people together. We are going to show you with naval artillery. Yeah. We're not just like, we are shooting guns into a bad we will pound you with bombs. Like, yeah, wow. Yeah. So yeah, O'Connell has a choice here. And it's a choice that a lot of civil disobedience campaigners have had. It's the choice Martin Luther King made versions of where it's like, OK, if we assemble peacefully here, they're going to **** a lot of people up. Do we do it? And he decides, no, he decides not to risk those lives. And he cancels the meeting. He gets arrested. He serves four months in prison. Your conspiracy and the fact that he refuses to push the British government to force them to either put up or shut up. A lot of future Irish activists are going to see this as evidence that, like, peaceful protest doesn't work right. This is a big part of like, why the things that happen, the 1916 rising, why the decades and decades of insurgent terrorism, stuff like a lot of them will point back to O'Connell and be like we we we tried. Like people tried to do this peacefully and and you threatened to kill us. So what else? What are what are the options? I guess we'll make box. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, that's where you went, you know? Yeah. Wow. I'm always like, I'm always leery. Like, and this is just my own sort of baggage. I'm always leery when I hear like, you know, a book. Say this dude was the first version of something, especially with the white dude. When I'm like, I don't know. But that being said this I when you said O'Connell, like a lot of like things from my. Black studies, like, started popping up of like, no, wait, we we talk about him often. You know, I'm saying I didn't know the story till just now. But yeah, his name, like, rang a lot of bells for me. And it's what I try to be clear here that, like you will, historians will claim that I'm not an expert. Like, I can't comprehensively say no one else ever tried anything like this. Yeah, I know. I'm not calling you on that. He does get credit from a lot of people for this. He certainly like a Seminole figure in the concept of nonviolent persistence. Yeah. But, yeah, this, this, this. Like, yeah, like. I. This is one of those dope moments on this show where like some something that you may know like vaguely kind of like finally comes in view in your like. Ohh, it's complicated and in a lot of ways like I see the way that you're describing like how he like. Didn't take that next step. You know, in apartheid South Africa, like, you know, people make those claims about Nelson Mandela that there was like another step he did, didn't take and that, you know, I'm saying and where Winnie became more radicalized, you know, I'm saying and like, and so you have modern, like activists that are like, I appreciate you. You took the rock far enough or didn't take the rock far enough that you took as far as you could go. But look, you wasn't down to shoot. And this is, I mean you, you'll always. I think that's always going to be the case with everyone who does anything good within the context of like a civil rights movement. There's always and anyone who is like. Anyone who is organizing for radical social change pretty much always hits a point where they reach the end of their personal willingness to fight for kind of radical change. And so, like, nobody's perfect. We all did that. Like, there are things that we all believe right now that in a couple of generations folks would be like, how did you put up with this, though? Yeah, like, I got I get why you were protesting for this and this, but how didn't you have a problem with, you know, that's just, like, the March of time **** right? And I'm not like, I think it'd be unreasonable to condemn O'Connell. For what he did, it's not at all. This is what happened, right? Like, he made the call that he made and then the things that happened afterwards happened. And it's worth understanding that and it's worth understanding that there is a point. I'm never going to be forgiving like the IRA for setting off a ******* bomb bombs and random bars and ****. Like there's a lot of ****** ** things that happen in the the, the armed portion of the struggle for independence. But when some of those advocates go back and say, like, well, we gave the nonviolent **** a try, they're not wrong, you know? And that's where that's worth acknowledging from a historical standpoint. So that's the end of 1843 K in the summer of 1845, an Uma seat or water mold known today as Phytophthora infestations. That's the best I can. I'm sorry that it's like an English name, last name, you know, I'm not going to get it perfect. The last four words you said, I was like, I don't know what you just said. Let's see. Yeah, it's it's a fungus, right. It starts to spread throughout Europe. We're not gonna get into a ton of detail because again, this is like a particularly as a lot of coverage that are like really blame this, this fungus on all of the things that happen. It's not the Fungus's fault. The fungus is like a thing that it it's like it's like blaming the disaster in Hurricane Katrina on the hurricane when it's like. There's that's that's not really what I'm angry about. You know, like these guys, but like, this, this thing like this, this, this is an important part of the story, this this thing starts to hit in Europe, right? Yeah. Crops start to fail it start it. It becomes increasingly clear that, like, not only is there this thing affecting potatoes all over the continent, but it's like pretty bad. It's wiping out large chunks of the harvest. Newspapers and farmers, almanacs note, with fear as it rampages through crops first. On the continent and then in England on August 20th, 1845, it is discovered for the first time in Ireland at the Dublin Royal Botanical Gardens. Obviously it probably came somewhere else first, but you're going to notice it at the Royal Botanical Gardens first because they've got the most eyes on them. The population of Ireland at this moment moment was probably close to 9 million people. You know, you're talking the 1840s. We're not as good at censuses and stuff as we were going, probably around 9 million people, a little bit less. Most of these people are Catholic, 3,000,000. Of them are the kind of peasants that we spent a lot of this episode talking about, eking out a precarious living on the land as renters, utterly dependent upon the continued productivity of the potato for their caloric needs. And that is the stage being set for what's going to happen next, which is not going to be nice, but crap. You know what is going to be nice? He's these plug Gables. Well, you're pluggable. Yeah, you're mugged. Very nice. Absolutely. Yeah, man. Prop, hip hop profit. Pop, pop pop. That's all the socials and the website. There's the hood politics. Pod still popping and cracking and getting some. Sophie's helping me get some doper. Not doper, but some doper. Guests and such. You know, we're having a good time over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Prop hip hop, prop hip hop. Check it out. Check out, you know something else? Yeah, too. Check out good things. Read a book or, I don't know, find an English person and be like, what the **** man? What the ****? Yeah, look at the English person and be like, thanks, yeah, yeah. Go to an English bar and just, like, frown, just sit in the corner and, like, mean mother. His main mug them and be like him. What four. Do it. For O'Connell Gordon Allister, which I learned is like almost like the the Irish like MAGA. Yeah, yeah. For God and Allister which. There you go. There you go. It is a little bit, Maggie, you know, it sounded cool to me because I don't know what Alster means. Anyway. It was, you know, it's that it's that Northern Irish Protestant stronghold that's kind of formed as a a colony, basically, you know? Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. So go colonize. Island. You know, that's what you actually are. Really? What everybody everybody colonized England take. Yeah, **** them up. 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