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Comment by roschdal | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I thought the Irish potato famine was caused by a potato plague. That's all...

Fair enough if you knew nothing else.

In reality it was the last straw after decades of English landowners pushing a rapidly increasing local population further and further into the weeds and denying access to traditional lands and their resources.

"The Irish Question" had been debated at length and from afar in the British houses of Parliment for years prior, and there were a number of small famines before the big crop failures that saw millions displaced.

It's another in a common pattern of invaders colonising a country resulting in dire outcomes for those already there.

During the famine, Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid of the Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 to the Irish people to help ease the suffering. Queen Victoria intervened and requested that he reduce the donation to £1,000 since she had only allocated £2,000 herself.

The vast majority of people who are woefully wrong about history (and current events) are being completely earnest about their beliefs.

W B Yeats, born in Dublin in 1865, put it like this:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

And to add the complex icing to the complicated cake, Yeats was Anglo-Irish, from a family that had come over as part of William of Orange's forces during the 17th century Williamite vs. Jacobite war.

(Technicality trivia - he was born in Sandymount, which wasn't part of Dublin until the 1930s)

Eh, that's probably pushing the technicalities too far. Sandymount was part of a a separate administrative region until the 30s (in much the same way that, say, SDCC is today), but for practical purposes it was part of Dublin, and it was contiguous with Dublin; I'm pretty sure even in the mid to late 19th century you could walk from the city centre to Sandymount without leaving the urban area.

Fair enough, was only like 4km from Dublin proper, and as you say, contiguous.

I just like occasionally being technically correct on the Internet, the worst kind of correct.

Oh, closer than that; walk 2km and you're in Dublin 2. Unless you're a Viking it's be hard to argue that that wasn't Dublin proper.

Haha true. And AFAIK, pretty much everyone in Éire/Airlann has a bit of Viking in them, those buggers were very happy to mix it with the locals.

Which, funnily enough, kinda mirrors how the Irish diaspora tended to interact with indigenous cultures they encountered. They were far more likely to get along with and settle down with locals than the English, who looked down on at that sort of thing.

A friend's Great-Great-Great-Grandad was one such, came out to NZ as a sealer, fell in love with a local wahine, ended up living on an island the local chief had designated for Europeans married to Māori. [0]

And a Māori tribe in the North Island is known for the tendency for the occasional child to be born red headed / blue eyed, thanks again to open-minded local ladies, and open-minded visiting Irishmen.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codfish_Island_/_Whenua_Hou

Thus my comment. I am glad it can help people realize that people’s governments, economic systems and the way people organize through a crisis can play a huge role — to mitigate a major crop failure or to massively exacerbate problems.

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