BTW, I gather from Wikipedia that in the US there are “Scotch Irish Americans” but the people who live there would be “Scots Irish” or more usually “Ulster Scots”. Over this side of the pond, Scotch is a drink.
or an egg 
They were starving because they were monoculture farmers, and they were monoculture farmers because of the absurdly large number of subtenancies and because relying on potato cultivation led to Ireland supporting a population of farmers greater than they could normally support.
The Scots-Irish in Ulster either owned their own land, or if they were tenant farmers, didn’t engage in the high level of subtenancy that their Catholic neighbors did, so they weren’t so dependent on the potato, were able to diversify their crops and weren’t as badly affected by the potato blight.
So while it’s a mistake to view what happened as due to “lazy man” farmers, it’s also a mistake to blame the English and Anglo-Irish landlords.
[quote=“Sablicious, post:23, topic:549654”]
[Moderator Note]
Sablicious, religious jabs are not permitted in GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
samclem has already issued a reminder about this. Further posts of this kind may be subject to warnings.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
As being political in nature, this is probably better suited for GD than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
There’s also the importance of the economic aspect of this. As An Gadai points out, middle class people weren’t involved. The recruiting grounds for the IRA and assorted Protestant paramilitaries were the unemployed and the underemployed. Ulster’s economy was hard hit, and the Troubles only magnified this, forming a downward spiral as more and more people were laid off, and investment baulked at the area. Ulster’s industrial base had a large shipbuilding element, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the British shipbuilding industry was brutalized.
Now Catholics beforehand had never been given fair access to the skileld workign class jobs in the North, but if you start taking away such jobs, then the trickle down is huge. Poverty and unemployment push young men towards violent solutions throughout history.
As for the Famine, there is a side of it (and later Irish poverty) that tends to be ignored. The terrible conditions for Irish people provided an opportunity for British based capitalists to break nascent unions (such as the mining unions in Scotland) by importing cheap scab labor. As a result, Scots mining was deeply segregated, with local Protestants seeing the Catholics as scabs and thus excluding them from the union.
I wonder if someone could enlighten me. Would it be correct to say that Catholic churches have always existed in Northern Ireland and Protestant churches always existed in the Irish Republic? As I read this thread, it seems that the conflict isn’t really over religious oppression but rather cultural and economic discrimination. Would that be a fair assessment?
I’m not in a position to enlighten, but that sounds about right to me. They’re not fighting over their religious beliefs.
Yes, that’s correct. There are Catholic Churches in Northern Ireland and Protestant Churches in the Irish Republic, but there’s a much higher percentage of Catholics in Northern Ireland than Protestants in the Republic of Ireland.
Thank you. That seems to make sense to me.
That is one of the most ignorant assessments of the Troubles I’ve ever heard.
Well, remember what board you’re posting on. We’re pretty strident atheists here. 
Seriously, thanks to An Gadaí, yojimbo and all others who’ve discussed the issue in this thread. It’s been interesting and enlightening.
Meh, good point. 
(But seriously, if someone WERE to claim it’s purely religious differences, that would be a vast oversimplification and show major ignorance of Irish history)
Heh, thanks. It happens to be a topic of immense interest to me as my father was from NI and most of my relatives still live there.
It really began, which I mean the latest incarnation of troubles in the sixties with the civil rights movement in the USA. It got exported and a lot of Irish in the North got with the program. Tensions slowly raised in the latter part of the decade to the point where Prodestants were burning out Catholic neighborhoods and and vice versa.
My Mom was telling me , of one such night were she was alone with us (my dad had since moved to Canada to get the job that would pave the way for the rest of us) and the neighborhood was in the process of a riot that could have turned out very badly.
The fact was that the British Govt deployed the airborne regiment in order to protect the Catholic population from what we would call now , as ethnic cleansing. Would it have gotten that bad, I don’t know. But you can see in the old television documentaries that these troops were greeted like liberators, so at the time I’m guessing that it was very reassuring to the population.
Deploying the airborne stablized the country for a brief period of time, but the civil affairs follow up that we hear about now with Iraq and A-stan , either was not present or just simply did not do a good enough job.
Secondly, the airborne should have been pulled out and a line regiment deployed in place. Being the aggresive shock troopers that the airborne are, is not a regiment condusive keeping the peace, they tend to make it. But they were the guys on the short end of the stick and then bloody sunday happened.
From that point on, you had an incoherent British policy towards NI that threw in everything up to an including the kitchen sink in trying to make something stick, while trying to keep apart two squabling sectarian factions.
Declan
All packed into a very small area and easily targetted.
The Troubles were nothing to do with religion and everything to do with nationalism and history that left the Protestant government and the Protestants denying civil rights and employment.
The non-violent civil rights movement got nowhere and was met with force by the Protestant-loyal RUC and the B Specials. Then the Bloody Sunday massacre by British paratroops (British troops were originally deployed to protect Catholic communities) then functioned as the best possible recruitment drive for the Provisional IRA.
And then the tit-for-tat killings started. And once that happens its difficult to stop.
Don’t forget Internment*.
There were three major recruiters for the Provisional IRA (previously a fringe movement based on left-wing revolutionary ideals mixed with historical links to the “old” IRA):
- Bloody Sunday
- Internment
- The death of Bobby Sands
Each of which was, sadly, a ham-fisted error on the part of the British government.
Not excusing the terrorists at all, but those three things inflamed the community, and precipitated huge surges into terrorist behaviour from people who were politically apathetic, or at most formerly civil rights activists.
*While not ignoring that the government of the Republic had also indulged in this policy in the past.
ETA: and precipitation for the Civil Rights movement was that to vote locally, you had to be a householder - and since most nationalists were tenants, they had no vote, thus ensuring a unionist majority in many institutions, and all the biases that would be expected in a divided community. Though on the flipside, in the 1980s a republican friend of mine had a friend who joined the RUC - and this guy’s former friends walked into the pub, surrounded him, and threw thirty silver coins at his feet before ostracising him forever.
jjimm
I’m no defender of the bitch Thatcher, but I’m not sure I would count the death of Bobby Sands as ham fisted error on the part of the UK government.
Sands and the others who died were criminals who wanted to be treated as if they were special. They chose to starve themselves, the consequences of which are dying. Although I have heard some of the later ones to die only remained on hunger strike as a result of threats to their families, but I don’t know the truth of that.
What should the British have done in face of the hunger strikes?
I concede that out of the three examples I give above, that’s the most tenuous. Thatcher didn’t kill him personally and the hunger strikes were voluntary acts of suicide, but contrary to the “criminals* who wanted to be treated as if they were special”, they had been treated as if they were special. They had Special Category Status, which had been introduced by Willie Whitelaw in a prior Conservative government. It was the gradual revocation of that status (which commenced under a Labour administration) that precipitated the action that became the Hunger Strikes.
Realised, when the protests began, that it could get big, and negotiated with the prisoners, instead of withdrawing slop buckets and all that other fun stuff.
I’m not singling Thatcher out by the way; she largely inherited the clusterfuck, though was happy to drive home the “common criminals” message with gusto.
Anyway, however you view the morality of the events, tactically, having a sitting Member of Parliament starve to death in a British jail did little good to the British cause in Northern Ireland, and a great deal of good to the Republican movement. Republicans love martyrs, and they got ten of them.
There’s other dumb shit that did more harm than good too but I wouldn’t count as big recruiters, such as censoring the speaking voices of Sinn Féin members on the British news (WTF - how crazy was that?!), which give me the impression of a litany of heavy-handed dumbassery, even before we get to the acquiescence of pre-Major governments to the demands of the more virulent Unionists.
(*Contrast ironically with how terrorists and terror suspects are treated by governments these days, where they’re specifically not treated as criminals.)
Yeah - I just think withdrawing special status was a good idea.
It is a tough one, and it did look horrible PR wise. I just figure I have enough things to hate the witch for without hating her for letting a few terrorist starve themselves to death.
The Dirty Protest was certainly handled badly, though I will admit to not knowing what should have been done short of conceding to the IRA demands that they could basically run their own prisons. But once the hunger strike started, I’m not sure there was a way out. Yes, the deaths created martyrs, but giving in would have made the prison system unworkable.
And yes, the censoring of voices was utter stupidity.