The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #81145 Message #1488085
Posted By: Grab
19-May-05 - 10:01 AM
Thread Name: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
Subject: RE: Songs about The Potato Famine - Ireland
I would explain it by saying just as you can't use the 'N' word if you aren't black, you can't pontificate about The Great Hunger if you aren't at least of identifiable Irish descent.
Dunno - sometimes it helps to have perspective. To take a risky analogy (at the danger of going wildly off-topic), ancestors of Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust on the basis of race and religion are today persecuting Palestinians on the basis of race and religion, whilst simultaneously commemorating the Holocaust and saying "you can't understand unless you're Jewish".
Similarly, for the Irish who had to leave Ireland, being evicted from their land was an unbelievably personal matter for them, even if it wasn't really anyone's fault, so the evicters (landowners, mostly English) naturally get the blame. It takes someone from outside to see that the evicters didn't have much in the way of options - you evict people that can't pay, or you lose everything and die in poverty too. Even the British government wasn't long on options - do you feed the starving Irish, or do you feed the thousands of people around the Empire who depend on the Empire having the food and funds to do so? And the ancestors of the evicted keep singing "I wish I was back home in Ireland", even though all their family from at least their great-grandparents onwards were born and bred in Chicago or Boston, and they now have ample money to move over there if they want to.
There is a difference between "perspective" and "heartlessness" though. Whilst the failure of the harvests and all that resulted from it may not have been anyone's fault, the fact was that many, many people suffered and died, and no-one must forget that loss. And that's what annoys me about how it seems these songs are sometimes perpetuated - as a racist slur against the perceived oppressors in some romanticised fight, rather than a memory of real loss. If you say "we shall never forget", make sure it's "because too many good people died for no reason, and this must never happen again", and not "because we want a good excuse to keep hating group XYZ".