Meant to say that none of these postings are for you - nobody on this forum (except the thug) takes you seriously any more, if they ever did.
Your eccentrically dishonest behaviour lately has made sure of that.
Anyway - you said you were going - you've gone (unless you lied about that as well)
There you go - more to come
Jim Carroll

There is no historical evidence implicating the British govern¬ment in a conspiracy to exterminate the population of Ireland, but many government officials, as well as those advising them, looked upon the famine as a God-sent solution to the so-called Irish question. One such was Nassau Senior, professor of polit¬ical economy at Oxford and a staunch supporter of the views of the British treasury. Senior did not hesitate to express him¬self on the Irish question, and after doing so to an Oxford colleague named Benjamin Jowett, the latter remarked: "I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine ... in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good."22
This cool regret that the famine would do away with only a million (instead of the earlier estimated two million, which turned out to be closer to the mark) was shared by those in gov¬ernment as well, who spoke publicly of the Irish as though they were unfit to be included in the human race. Poulett Scrope, a member of Parliament, said that traveling from En¬gland to Ireland was like going back through history "from an age of civilization and science to one of ignorance and bar¬barism." Even Thomas Macaulay, who criticized England for not "elevating" the Irish, called Ireland a perverse and ob¬stinate exception to the progress shared by her European neighbors—"a marsh saturated with the vapours of the At¬lantic."23
Sir Charles Trevelyan remarked in 1846 that "the great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." He then turned not to "popery" or to the "idolatry" of the Roman Catholic Church but to God Himself, that Great Disposer of Events, whose intentions were as unfathomable as they were holy and unas¬sailable, and attributed the famine to Him. Since the Almighty had willed it, the English government would be presumptuous indeed to attempt any rash or precipitous solution. The Irish problem and overpopulation were, in his eyes, one and the same, and "being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Prov¬idence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual."21
Later, in 1848, he admitted that the matter was "awfully serious," but added, "we are in the hands of Providence, with¬out a possibility of averting the catastrophe if it is to happen." By then, though another half-million Irish had died, what Trevelyan perceived as catastrophe had still not happened. Obviously prepared to see the entire population wiped out, he said, "We can only wait the result." He even went so far as to pity the Irish for not appreciating the hopelessness of their situation: "It is hard upon the poor people that they should be deprived of knowing that they are suffering from an affliction of God's providence."25
The idea that the famine in Ireland was the work of Prov¬idence gained more and more adherents among Anglican churchmen and government officials as the crisis deepened and the deaths from starvation and disease increased. God was blamed for the British government's sins of omission, its own dismal failure to act in time with a power and purse com¬mensurate with a disaster that was soon to be ten times greater then the Great Plague of London in 1665, when the Black Death killed off between sixty thousand and a hundred thou¬sand people. Four hundred thousand had already died in Ire¬land, the deaths were on the increase, and the government was still calling it a "local distress." Nor was it forgotten by the Irish that after the Great Fire of London, in 1666, when a blaze lasting five days virtually destroyed the city, including St. Paul's, the Irish contributed for the relief of distressed Lon¬doners twenty thousand fat cattle, whose value in 1846-47, when the Irish were starving, far exceeded the relief sent to Ireland from England and Europe.26
Trevelyan's "affliction of God's providence" remark was made during 1847, the very year that a government statistical commissioner, Captain Larcom, found the total value of the agricultural produce of Ireland for that year to be £44,958,120, enough to feed, at least during the desperate famine months, not only the eight million people living in Ireland but another eight million besides. Trevelyan could not have been unaware of what happened to this produce. In every harbor in Ireland during this period, a ship sailing in with Indian maize from America passed half a dozen British ships sailing out with Irish wheat, oats, and cattle. But in Trevelyan's eyes, and in the eyes of most members of Parliament, England was exoner¬ated from any guilt because all agreed "that there must be no interference with the natural course of trade."
"They call it God's famine!" cried a distraught Bishop Hughes from a pulpit in New York City. "No!—-No! God's famine is known by the general scarcity of food which is its consequence. There is no general scarcity. . . . But political economy, finding Ireland too poor to buy the produce of its own labor, exported that harvest to a better market, and left the people to die of famine, or to live by alms."27
France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Russia all suffered a potato blight in 1846-47. But unlike British-ruled Ire-land, they stopped all other food exports to make up for the loss. With virtually its whole population starving, Ireland under self-rule would have done the same thing. Indeed, the Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century, before the union with Britain in 1800, had more than once in times of distress prohibited the export of grain. But Ireland under British rule was powerless to counter the blight as other countries did. The potato had become the crucial food because all other food produced in Ireland was destined under Britain's economic scheme to be eaten elsewhere. It was the scheme, rather than the lives the Irish were losing, that British government officials held sacred.
Trevelyan had not even taken the trouble to visit Ireland and see with his own eyes the degradation he discussed with such glib simplicity and lofty detachment. Another English¬man who did take the trouble, William Bennett, vehemently contradicted Trevelyan's attempt to exonerate England by at¬tributing the havoc to God's will. The west of Ireland, he said, "exhibited a people not in the center of Africa, the steppes of Asia, the backwoods of America,—not some newly-discovered tribe of South Australia, or among the Polynesian Islands,—not Hottentots, Bushmen, or Esquimaux,-—neither Mohomedans nor Pagans,—but some millions of our own Christian nation at home . . . living in a state and condition low and degraded to a degree unheard of before in any civilized community; driven periodically to the borders of starvation; and now re¬duced by a national calamity to an exigency which all the efforts of benevolence can only mitigate, not control; and under which thousands are not merely pining away in misery and wretchedness, but are dying like cattle off the face of the earth, from want and its kindred horrors! Is this to be regarded in the light of a Divine dispensation and punishment? Before we can safely arrive at such a conclusion, we must be satisfied that human agency and legislation, individual oppressions, and social relationships, have had no hand in it."28
Even English writers and poets were among the critics of the Irish, and if they refrained from rejoicing in the famine's decimation of the people, they did not hesitate to wish that the troublesome island would somehow go away. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in Sweden, England's poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, calling the Irish "furious fools" who "live in a horrible island and have no history of their own worth the least notice," hit upon what he apparently considered a splendid idea: "Could not anyone blow up that horrible island with dynamite and carry it off in pieces—a long way off?"29
These harsh expressions of suppressed English guilt in¬creased as the situation in Ireland became more desperate. Instead of wishing Ireland blown up and carried off in pieces, the English could have given the horrible island back to the Irish. Had they done so, there would have been no starvation, at least not in Ireland, where the produce earmarked for con¬sumption in England would have been beyond the capacity of the Irish to consume themselves.
But Ireland was too close and, after suffering seven cen¬turies of oppression, too hostile to be set free. She was at once a vital and gangrenous member of the British Empire, a back¬yard dominion whose people under any other flag would be a constant threat. Besides, England continued to profit from the arrangement, while Ireland continued to display the same deep and hideous wounds. The wheat, barley, oats, and live cattle, sheep, and pigs continued to flow in only one direction —from Ireland to England. In the other direction flowed the manufactured goods from England, the clothing, saddles, har¬nesses, soap, and machinery that only 10 percent of the Irish population could afford to buy. From 1800, when the union was formed, to the time of this terrible famine, manufacturing of all kinds, and especially of cloth (an Irish specialty), was systematically discouraged until Ireland became an agricul¬tural country dependent upon the manufactured goods of En¬gland. Irish farmers continued to use and mend their old farm¬ing tools and equipment; their wives still wove cloth and made coats for their children, but manufactured goods came mostly from England, at the expense of Ireland's economy and to the advantage of England's.30
As one old, foresighted Irishman put it during these awful years of the famine: "Ah, the answer is in the tea leaves, if only you will wait for them to settle."31