Description Sacred Wrath
Two million of us left the land;
Another million died;
You can?t deny the sacred wrath
That calls this genocide.
The priest who bids you perish ?
To be patient and beseech
The providence of God ? has naught
But blasphemy to preach.
He?s sold his soul to England,
Her perfidy to prate:
He says that you must waste away;
It?s your God-given fate.
Political economy
Left a million dead.
The grain we grew was not for you;
They exported it instead.
The starving flocked upon the pier,
The Blight smell, it grew rank,
And still they carried wheat and barley
Up the old gangplank.
The British car of conquest
Rides on, and we have rushed
To stop it in its tracks;
We fear not to be crushed.
A Paddy with a blunderbuss
Will never flinch or run.
It took a nation shamed
To turn a hurley to a gun.
Lyric by Giles Watson, 2010. This song is written in the voice of John Mitchel (1815-75), and Irish nationalist journalist, historian and revolutionary activist, whose post-1850 writings promoted the view that the British government committed genocide against the Irish people in the Famine years. Revisionist historians have argued that his insistence that Ireland had more than enough food to be self-sufficient, were it not for massive exports, was exaggerated. It is, however, true nevertheless that profiteering merchants made fortunes out of exporting thousands of tons of valuable foodstuffs whilst the people starved. Whatever the exaggerations made by nationalists like Mitchel, there can be no doubt that the violence of their language was provoked by the rapacious activities of capitalists, whom the British government did nothing to discourage, at a time when the number of British troops occupying Ireland was greater than those stationed in India.
The nasty little cartoons which appear in this slide-show are mostly from the British periodical Punch, which was rabidly anti-Irish throughout the Famine years.
