_______________
Years ago, in the
1980s, I and my wife purchased a
refrigerator from Sears. The grommet
around the door was defective. It
fell off. It happened within the
warranty period. A Sears mechanic
was dispatched to our home to install
a new grommet.
The mechanic was American, but he had an Irish accent. When I made a remark about his accent, he asked me how I felt about the Irish Republican Army. "I feel that their terrorist activities are sinful," I replied, "But I know where the anger comes from. The English caused it. For 800 years, the English have been chewing on Ireland and spitting it out. Cromwell came to Ireland for the purpose of butchering Irish Catholic women and children. The English really caused the Potato Famine deaths. So, I can't blame the IRA guys for what they do."
The mechanic took my words as satisfactory proof that I was sympathetic. He then confided to me something amazing: "Tomorrow I and a friend are sailing an ocean-going tug out of New York Harbor to Ireland with a huge shipment of arms for the IRA."
I made a decision, within myself, to not notify authorities. I didn't interfere.
Why?
Because I know what happened in Ireland, including during the Potato Famine. I am haunted by visions of what my great grandmother and the gentle Irish people around her endured at the hands of the English.
Little Annie Fuller was the child of a Catholic girl and a Nordic man living in Londonderry County, Northern Ireland. I don't know if she was raised Catholic. When she was 16, she married a Catholic potato farmer surnamed Mallon -- we don't know his given name. He undoubtedly lived in a little mud hut with his pigs next to his potato "lazy beds." Most of the Catholics did. Their Protestant lords, who stole the land from their forefathers at point of a cannon, and rented it back to them, forced them into potato farming, and into living unbelievably impoverished existences as they did so.
Annie's marriage occurred in 1845. It was probably a "hedgerow marriage," in the fields by a Catholic priest, because Catholic churches were illegal in Ireland.
In that year, a sailor on a boat from America, berthed on the shores of the Channel Islands, bit into a potato, was disgusted that portions of it had turned to mush, and threw it ashore.
Spores from the disease afflicting that one potato infected and killed the entire crop of potatoes on the Channel Islands. The wind carried the spores to England, and as the potato crops in England began to die the wind carried spores across the Irish Sea to Ireland. And the potatoes inIreland
1846 was different. Potato crops were wiped-out that year.
By the end of 1846, most potatoes in Ireland were mush, and about 1/3 of all Irish potato farmers were in arrears on their rent.
Only 1/3. The other 2/3 continued paying their rent out of savings.
How did the English Parliament respond? By somehow AIDING the Irish Catholics?
Sorry, Protestant friends reading this. The truth is that the English parliamentarians turned into Nazis!
The Parliament in London decided to "pay for" "famine relief" by "taxing the problem." They levied a tax of 4 pounds sterling on every quarter acre of land dedicated to potato farming in Ireland. At that time, 4 pounds sterling was equal to about $3,000 today.
The Irish members of Parliament knew what the reaction would be. The English version of the Congressional Record quotes them as begging and pleading with their English counterparts to not do this, because the English lords in London's West End who "owned" the lands of Ireland would obviously respond by evicting literally every single Catholic potato farmer, even if they were not in arrears on their rent, because English law permitted them to do that. If they did this, they could avoid the tax.
Their English brothers in Parliament knew this, already. They just didn't give a damn. As far as they were concerned, Irish Catholics should die. They callously passed the law, called the "Four Pound Clause," and within a few months every single Irish Catholic potato farming family -- about 4 million children, women and men -- were evicted from their homes by English lords intent on avoiding the tax.
My great grandmother Annie -- pregnant at this point -- and her husband and 4 million neighbors were driven from their little mud huts by local constables backed-up by gun-toting English soldiers. As pregnant Annie and her husband and 4 million neighbors walked the roads, new anti-loitering laws prevented them from camping anywhere, despite their homelessness.
As Annie cried, her husband gave her two-thirds of whatever food he could scrape-up by begging or stealing, for his little one in her womb. Large wagons of crops, protected by English soldiers, carried food past them to Ireland's port cities every day for export. Because potatoes comprised one-third of the calories consumed in Europe at the time, the prices for every other kind of food skyrocketed, making it much more profitable for the West End landlords to harvest and ship-out the balance of Ireland's crops than it was to keep the Catholic Irish from starving to death by feeding them the crops.
Perhaps Mr. Mallon was fed-up with English policy, and he joined one of Ireland's "skeleton armies." Thousands of Irish men and boys, skeletal in their appearance from starvation, gathered together in giant armies, armed themselves with rocks and sticks and dirt balls, lined up, and charged the docks in the ports cities in east Ireland to try to get to the food crates stacked there awaiting shipment, break them open and steal food for their families. Rows of disciplined, heavily-armed English soldiers waiting on the docks for them fired volley after volley at the charging skeleton armies, until the docks were covered with bloodied Irish corpses.
That's where the IRA came from.
That's why I didn't call authorities. It wasn't my fight.
The mechanic was American, but he had an Irish accent. When I made a remark about his accent, he asked me how I felt about the Irish Republican Army. "I feel that their terrorist activities are sinful," I replied, "But I know where the anger comes from. The English caused it. For 800 years, the English have been chewing on Ireland and spitting it out. Cromwell came to Ireland for the purpose of butchering Irish Catholic women and children. The English really caused the Potato Famine deaths. So, I can't blame the IRA guys for what they do."
The mechanic took my words as satisfactory proof that I was sympathetic. He then confided to me something amazing: "Tomorrow I and a friend are sailing an ocean-going tug out of New York Harbor to Ireland with a huge shipment of arms for the IRA."
I made a decision, within myself, to not notify authorities. I didn't interfere.
Why?
Because I know what happened in Ireland, including during the Potato Famine. I am haunted by visions of what my great grandmother and the gentle Irish people around her endured at the hands of the English.
Little Annie Fuller was the child of a Catholic girl and a Nordic man living in Londonderry County, Northern Ireland. I don't know if she was raised Catholic. When she was 16, she married a Catholic potato farmer surnamed Mallon -- we don't know his given name. He undoubtedly lived in a little mud hut with his pigs next to his potato "lazy beds." Most of the Catholics did. Their Protestant lords, who stole the land from their forefathers at point of a cannon, and rented it back to them, forced them into potato farming, and into living unbelievably impoverished existences as they did so.
Annie's marriage occurred in 1845. It was probably a "hedgerow marriage," in the fields by a Catholic priest, because Catholic churches were illegal in Ireland.
In that year, a sailor on a boat from America, berthed on the shores of the Channel Islands, bit into a potato, was disgusted that portions of it had turned to mush, and threw it ashore.
Spores from the disease afflicting that one potato infected and killed the entire crop of potatoes on the Channel Islands. The wind carried the spores to England, and as the potato crops in England began to die the wind carried spores across the Irish Sea to Ireland. And the potatoes in
1846 was different. Potato crops were wiped-out that year.
By the end of 1846, most potatoes in Ireland were mush, and about 1/3 of all Irish potato farmers were in arrears on their rent.
Only 1/3. The other 2/3 continued paying their rent out of savings.
How did the English Parliament respond? By somehow AIDING the Irish Catholics?
Sorry, Protestant friends reading this. The truth is that the English parliamentarians turned into Nazis!
The Parliament in London decided to "pay for" "famine relief" by "taxing the problem." They levied a tax of 4 pounds sterling on every quarter acre of land dedicated to potato farming in Ireland. At that time, 4 pounds sterling was equal to about $3,000 today.
The Irish members of Parliament knew what the reaction would be. The English version of the Congressional Record quotes them as begging and pleading with their English counterparts to not do this, because the English lords in London's West End who "owned" the lands of Ireland would obviously respond by evicting literally every single Catholic potato farmer, even if they were not in arrears on their rent, because English law permitted them to do that. If they did this, they could avoid the tax.
Their English brothers in Parliament knew this, already. They just didn't give a damn. As far as they were concerned, Irish Catholics should die. They callously passed the law, called the "Four Pound Clause," and within a few months every single Irish Catholic potato farming family -- about 4 million children, women and men -- were evicted from their homes by English lords intent on avoiding the tax.
My great grandmother Annie -- pregnant at this point -- and her husband and 4 million neighbors were driven from their little mud huts by local constables backed-up by gun-toting English soldiers. As pregnant Annie and her husband and 4 million neighbors walked the roads, new anti-loitering laws prevented them from camping anywhere, despite their homelessness.
As Annie cried, her husband gave her two-thirds of whatever food he could scrape-up by begging or stealing, for his little one in her womb. Large wagons of crops, protected by English soldiers, carried food past them to Ireland's port cities every day for export. Because potatoes comprised one-third of the calories consumed in Europe at the time, the prices for every other kind of food skyrocketed, making it much more profitable for the West End landlords to harvest and ship-out the balance of Ireland's crops than it was to keep the Catholic Irish from starving to death by feeding them the crops.
Perhaps Mr. Mallon was fed-up with English policy, and he joined one of Ireland's "skeleton armies." Thousands of Irish men and boys, skeletal in their appearance from starvation, gathered together in giant armies, armed themselves with rocks and sticks and dirt balls, lined up, and charged the docks in the ports cities in east Ireland to try to get to the food crates stacked there awaiting shipment, break them open and steal food for their families. Rows of disciplined, heavily-armed English soldiers waiting on the docks for them fired volley after volley at the charging skeleton armies, until the docks were covered with bloodied Irish corpses.
That's where the IRA came from.
That's why I didn't call authorities. It wasn't my fight.
_______________
...I thought to myself, "Now, why in Heaven's Holy Name would that article suddenly be so interesting to people around the world?"
And then it dawned on me: Google, and Halloween.
Thousands of adults in the Western world remember the 1992 movie Army of Darkness, and the the 1963 movie Jason and the Argonauts, each with their skeleton armies ...
http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130210211930/deadliestfiction/images/f/fa/Army_of_Darkness.jpg
... and ...
http://2h3mh837ken53kitqv1co5fh83o.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Jason-and-the-Argonauts-2.jpg
... and as they were searching for them on-line for the children or grandchildren, they came across my piece on the Catholics of Ireland during the Potato Famine !
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