Irish Farmers are the beneficiaries of Genocide

[Cael]

Michael Davitt wanted the land nationalised, because he know that all that would happen is that a tiny minority of strong farmers would push all the poor farmers off the land and grab it for themselves - which is exactly what happend. There are only 44,000 full time farmers in the free state at present. In Davitt's time there would have been between three and four million. The poor were pushed into the towns and cities to live in squalor - many having to walk back ten miles and more every day and night to work on the strong farmer's land. Of course, many more were forced to emmigrate. Even the Poor Law Commissioners had to send reports to London in the 1860s outlining what a disaster the land reforms had been for the poor. If you ask the question; who really benefitted from the Irish genocide of the 1840s, the answer is clear - the families who now own the land of Ireland. The Nazi genocidists were forced to give back their stolen gold. The Irish farmers have not been forced to hand back their stolen land.

[Jacob Richter]

That perfectly illustrates the poverty of mere land nationalizations. I must indeed say that there are more issues than even economic rent. [BTW, hopefully you got my stuff.]

[Cael]

I agree that more needs to be done than nationalisation of the land, but in Ireland's particular circumstances, nationalisation of the land and direct democracy would be the key stones of revolution. We see how the starvation of a people was used to consentrate the land in the hands of a tiny few. All our troubles with the property bubble and collapse and the fantastic debt the Irish people now have to shoulder, all can be traced back to this genocide.

[FutureTaoiseach]

Are you not aware that the Land Acts under Gladstone/Salisbury/Balfour provided loans to the tenant-farmers to buy out their landlords? I'm not making excuses for the preponderance of colonial-landlordism in the first place. Quite the contrary. But I don't see how the beneficiaries of the land-reforms from the 1870's onwards should be held responsible for the misfortunes incurred by others. Urbanisation is an inevitable consequence of a developing market economy. I don't agree with your references to "genocide" in the context of land-reform under Gladstone and his successors. The Famine was genocide but the land-reform helped prevent another, such as in the 1880's. A key element in the Famine genocide was the rack-rents that forced tenant-farmers to choose between feeding their family or holding onto their plots of land. The removal of landlordism from the picture helped prevent a recurrence of that appalling vista.

[Cael]

Are you not aware that the Land Acts under Gladstone/Salisbury/Balfour provided loans to the tenant-farmers to buy out their landlords? I'm not making excuses for the preponderance of colonial-landlordism in the first place. Quite the contrary. But I don't see how the beneficiaries of the land-reforms from the 1870's onwards should be held responsible for the misfortunes incurred by others. Urbanisation is an inevitable consequence of a developing market economy. I don't agree with your references to "genocide" in the context of land-reform under Gladstone and his successors. The Famine was genocide but the land-reform helped prevent another, such as in the 1880's. A key element in the Famine genocide was the rack-rents that forced tenant-farmers to choose between feeding their family or holding onto their plots of land. The removal of landlordism from the picture helped prevent a recurrence of that appalling vista.

Im not saying the Irish strong farmers caused the famine - though some of them helped make it worse - but there is always an ultimate beneficiary of any crime, and nobody can deny that it is those who own the land today, less than 3% of the population, that benefitted from the genocide of the 1840s.

[youngdan]

Cael, I figure you are a young man. Why don't you become a farmer yourself, if you can't beat join im.

[Cael]

The principal distributional effect of the 1881 and subsequent land acts has been to broaden, and thereby make more durable, the proprietorship of Irish land. They hardly transformed that proprietorship. Instead of 10,000 Anglo-Irish landlords owning all the land, now some 20,000 graziers own half of it and 95% of the people continue to own none of it. The principal production effects of the land acts has been to make Irish agriculture, which had been highly responsive to market forces, quite unresponsive to those forces.

Raymond Crotty
The Failed Modernisation of Ireland in the Late Nineteenth Century

[Cael]

Cael, I figure you are a young man. Why don't you become a farmer yourself, if you can't beat join im.

Even if I was the biggest landowner in Ireland, it wouldnt alter the basic truth of what this thread is saying.

[Cael]

Are you not aware that the Land Acts under Gladstone/Salisbury/Balfour provided loans to the tenant-farmers to buy out their landlords? I'm not making excuses for the preponderance of colonial-landlordism in the first place. Quite the contrary. But I don't see how the beneficiaries of the land-reforms from the 1870's onwards should be held responsible for the misfortunes incurred by others. Urbanisation is an inevitable consequence of a developing market economy. I don't agree with your references to "genocide" in the context of land-reform under Gladstone and his successors. The Famine was genocide but the land-reform helped prevent another, such as in the 1880's. A key element in the Famine genocide was the rack-rents that forced tenant-farmers to choose between feeding their family or holding onto their plots of land. The removal of landlordism from the picture helped prevent a recurrence of that appalling vista.

Actually, getting rid of the Anglo-Irish landlords did not help to prevent famine. All that happened was that the land was transfered to highly Anglicized strong farmers, who continued to send their profits to England - as they still do today. It was the massive emmigration that prevented another famine happening. The bottom line is that Ireland could never sustain a large population without industrialisation, and British policy made sure that industrialisation could never happen. It still cant - because a few landowners continue to send Ireland's capital to England and other countries instead of investing it in industry.

[Supermanpolitician]

Michael Davitt wanted the land nationalised, because he know that all that would happen is that a tiny minority of strong farmers would push all the poor farmers off the land and grab it for themselves - which is exactly what happend. There are only 44,000 full time farmers in the free state at present. In Davitt's time there would have been between three and four million. The poor were pushed into the towns and cities to live in squalor - many having to walk back ten miles and more every day and night to work on the strong farmer's land. Of course, many more were forced to emmigrate. Even the Poor Law Commissioners had to send reports to London in the 1860s outlining what a disaster the land reforms had been for the poor. If you ask the question; who really benefitted from the Irish genocide of the 1840s, the answer is clear - the families who now own the land of Ireland. The Nazi genocidists were forced to give back their stolen gold. The Irish farmers have not been forced to hand back their stolen land.

What a load of bullcrap.