"Guido" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 17:50:57 -0800, Robert Sturgeon
wrote:

On Mon, 06 Mar 2006 22:42:32 +0000, Guido
wrote:

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 08:55:59 +1100, Terry Collins
wrote:

Northern Raider wrote:
It was the Irish starving the irish,

Bull****, the lords were english.

???

Perhaps in Ulster. However, that is just 6 counties, what of the other
20? BTW the famine was most severe in the South and West.

You might want to brush up on your history. At the time of
the famine the British controlled all of Ireland.

Control is not the same as land ownership.

Actually the system was pretty dire. The main landowners, whether from
Irish, Scottish, or English families were absentee. The land was let
to someone who may or may not have lived in Ireland, who in turn
sub-let the land to others, who in turn sub-sub-let to others. So
where the main land owner might have let the land to two or three
people by the time you got the people that were actually farming it
there could be as many as fifty familes.

A heirarchy of 'middlemen' each taking a slice of the rent. The
epitome of rack-rent.

The British government by the way as introducing laws and regulations
which were responsible for dramatic reductions in mortality rates
amongst the Irish poor.


You guys are at least getting closer to the mark regarding absentee land
lords. However, look up the free trade zones of the 19th century and you
will get even closer.
Rent was paid by feudal tenants to English Landlords in the form of crops,
and exported from Ireland, hence the term cash crops, leaving behind the
potato as the only source of food they were *allowed* to grow for their own
consumption.
Adding insult to injury, the potato crops where destroyed by a disease which
originated in North Carolina which as it happens, destroyed much of the
potato crops in the Northern Hemisphere. Ireland however was the only
country to suffer from mass deaths due in part to the crop failure, but more
importantly the lack of access to the other crops that where part of the
agricultural base of crops that Ireland was also growing at the time. The
potato crop failure was merely the final nail in the coffin.
The cause of deaths are attributed to the Free Trade Zone of the time, with
the powers of the feudal landlords led by the British Foreign Minister Lord
Palmerston.

Best Regards.
Neil George
954-572-5829