Anyone else have "famine years" immigrant ancestors? If you do, you may find my historical column in THE VALLEY LOG, which appeared on Wednesday, to be of interest. I'm just posting it now, and if you are seriously interested in the subject, I particularly recommend Mr. Donnelly's book, which I quote in the article. OUR HERITAGE March 12, 2003 St. Patrick's Day, March 17, is not an official holiday in any American state (so far as I know). But you will agree, won't you, that it's a day with more of a holiday "feel" to it than at least a couple of our government-sanctioned Monday or "long-weekend" observances. Moreover- isn't it interesting that, given the long history of both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic migration to this continent, that there is no day of any sort or kind, when Americans take the time to sentimentally recall their "Englishness"? Just consider this: when it comes to things intellectual, almost any history book is going to point out the great influence that Anglo-Saxon "thought" has had on this nation. But in music, in "popular attitudes," in "matters of the heart," America has looked more to Ireland, than to England. Let's not neglect this point, either: Ireland is only one part of a larger Celtic world. The Scots, the Welsh, the Bretons from France, and other small groups, such as the Cornish, are predominantly Celtic. (The proper pronunciation of the word is "Keltic," and not "Seltic," by the way). Americans also have shown long-standing sympathy for the idea of Irish home rule, especially after our Revolution freed us from British domination. Popular feeling in this country was that British control of Ireland was repressive, cruel and unjust. At the beginning of the 19th century, the English Parliament took Ireland down to its lowest state ever, in a centuries-long, one-sided relationship, by abolishing the Irish Parliament and in theory, at least, the Irish State itself. The "Act of Union" made Ireland just another part of the so-called United Kingdom. In practice, of course, Ireland continued to be treated more like a colony than a real component of the country of Britain. Prejudice against the Irish was as strong or stronger in England than was prejudice against Britain's many dark-skinned, colonial subjects. Ireland was, in fact, viewed as being "lower" than any third-world British colony, in that it seemed destined to always be more of an expense than a source of profit, to the British. Ordinary Americans and Irishmen will always judge British rule in Ireland by what befell a starving population there during its "Great Famine." When potato crops repeatedly failed in Ireland in the late 1840s, ordinary Americans were quick to respond with whatever aid they could send (such as donations of corn meal). The British government's response was adequate only at first. I have been reading a book titled "The Great Irish Potato Famine," by James S. Donnelly, Jr., published just two years ago, in 2001. I am going to quote some items from that work to you. The concluding chapter of Donnelly's well-documented book offers this partial summary: "What is the fundamental truth [about British action during the famine years]? As the great majority of professional historians of Ireland now recognise, it is that a million people should not have died in the backyard of what was then the world's richest nation; and since a million did perish, while two million more fled, this must have been because the political leaders of that nation [England] and the organs of its public opinion had at bottom very ambivalent feelings about the social and economic consequences of mass eviction, mass death, and mass migration. "Too many Britons of the upper and middle classes came to think in the late 1840s and early 1850s, that major long-term economic gains could not be achieved in Ireland without a massive amount of short-term suffering and sacrifice." These are Donnelly's "academic-style" words, which I will put into "plain English" shortly. The key context is, that when it became clear, over in England, that Ireland would need relief on a massive scale for more than just one season, if its poorest souls were to hang onto life, that a policy of "Irish property must pay for Irish poverty" was what England desired. And this, despite the fact that in many places, Irish "property" could not pay- the land was taxed way past the limits of landowners' ability to cough up the rates, and still the poor and sick, in too many counties, were perishing. So... "nature" is providing a "correction" by reducing the number of souls in Ireland, thought the good English folk, as they stood by watching. The attitude that Donnelly refers to as "ambivalence" comes down to this: British public opinion ran strongly against both the Irish landowner and the Irish peasant. And while the English were civilized enough to be upset by the sight of starving and disease-ridden people right on their doorstep, they believed that the fate of the Irish (as a people) was pretty much a deserved one. How so? India and China, in the 19th century, might be saddled with an immense class of persons eking a bare living from small plots of land, but Europeans thought of them as "barbaric" lands. On the other hand, Ireland was in Europe (now this is how the British saw it): it could become a normal and progressive country in time, if only its subsistence farmers were put off the land (meaning driven to the cities or forced to emigrate)- and if its landowning class would then begin to "improve" their country properties by introducing modern agriculture (such as grazing) on to land that formerly had supported human populations. In other words, many Englishmen saw the potato famine as a cruel device of nature, but not an entirely unwelcome one- it was forcing a result they had long favored, namely, the depopulation of rural Ireland. THE LONDON TIMES (in April, 1849) summed it up with these words: "The rigorous administration of the poor law is destroying small [land] holdings, reducing needy proprietors to utter insolvency, compelling them to surrender their estates into better hands, instigating an emigration far beyond any which a government could undertake, and so leaving the soil of Ireland open to industrial enterprise and the introduction of new capital." The English press did not merely report the facts. It also played a role in tilting British public opinion toward an acceptance of mass death in Ireland, by reinforcing popular images of the Irish as a degraded people. The Irish were accused of having earlier done nothing to "improve" their country, so that it could have withstood a calamity of massive proportion. Rebellions against British rule that occurred from time to time seemed to prove that the Irish were not only stupid, but ungrateful for the "best advice" the English upper classes were always offering them. Irish nationalists have long accused the English of a desire to use the famine as a means of exterminating the Irish people. What actually happened in the 1840s falls something short of exactly that. Yet no one can deny that there was a realization in Britain that countless lives would have been saved, if Ireland had- at just a modest expense to British "rate" payers- been flooded with relief. The means for delivering such relief to the destitute were all in place, and had worked fairly well in 1846, when they were allowed to function. Had the "poor law" that was imposed on Ireland by London in 1847 succeeded in ending mass famine, even so, in the words of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS of Nov. 25, 1848, the great mass of Irish peasantry would not have been "elevated above habitual and constant pauperism." They would have continued to experience a hand-to-mouth existence, perhaps indefinitely. That last was the ultimate realization which prevented the Whig government in London from taking effective steps to halt the dying. Only a little over a quarter of the "farms" in Ireland amounted to more than 20 acres, in 1844; and aside from the folks living on tiny "estates," there were the great masses of the poor who leased a few acres from "great" land holders on which to grow potatoes. It was those Irish, uneducated, Catholic, and mostly Gaelic-speaking, that the English, by and large, were not unwilling to see perish, if that was the way it had to be, to force them from the countryside.