The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #150911   Message #3609826
Posted By: Keith A of Hertford
15-Mar-14 - 06:18 AM
Thread Name: BS: Irish Potato Blight- Cause found
Subject: RE: BS: Irish Potato Blight- Cause found
What do I mean by intervene?
Jim and another posted as if blame was undisputed.
It is, so I pointed that fact out.

Not a tiny handful of historians Jim.
Kinealy states that the views is dominant and has been for nearly ninety years.
She says she thinks the balance might change in the future, but the issue is not clear cut and you are being dishonest about it.

From your 12th March 3.59 pm quote,
"Revisionism has dominated Irish historiography since the 1930s, and more intensely since the 1960s"

And,"
Thirdly, the issue of culpability has been consistently avoided or denied in revisionist accounts. Moreover, both the landlords and the British government have been rehabilitated; the former frequently being shown as hapless victims themselves, and the latter, as being ignorant of the real state of affairs in Ireland, and lacking both the financial and administrative capability to alleviate the situation anyway.
The arguments regarding the role of the British government are not sustainable. In the summer of 1847, in the wake of the almost total second failure of the potato crop, the British government established soup kitchens throughout Ireland. At the peak of this scheme, over three million people, that is, forty per cent of the population, were receiving free rations of food daily from the soup kitchens (which, even by the standard of contemporary famines, is a tremendous logistical achievement). To make this possible, a comprehensive and nation-wide machinery was created within Ireland in the space of only a few months. As a consequence of this scheme, mortality began to fall as, for the first and only time during the Famine, the problem of hunger was confronted directly."