I watched an episode of the series "The Irish in America" last night on C.B.C. and it dealt with the 1840s in rural Ireland. It (sadly) takes so much to shock me these days, but my God, what a sad documentary. I have no idea whether the series is reasonably unbiased or not, but when they talked about Trevelyan and his co-horts not wanting to mess with "God's plan for Ireland" (ie: starvation as some kind of retribution for past sins?) I practically fell off my chair. It reminded me that before TV came along to document on an almost day-by-day basis,various famines and atrocities world wide, we could only find out about them years later from whoever wrote the history books..and what political parties those authors belonged to.

Rick