GREAT events are etched in our DNA.
The most traumatic episodes of history weave themselves into our marrow and define who we are for generations, if not forever.
One of the most defining moments in Irish history was the Great Famine — 1845-1849.
During that time, one million of us, out of a population of eight million, perished, while a further one million fled and sought sanctuary in America and Britain.
A quarter of us either died or escaped a starving Ireland in the space of four terrible years.
The trauma of the Great Hunger had a profound effect on what Ireland and its people were to become.
We are still working it out, if truth be told.
The one million Irish who landed in America between 1845 and 1851 helped to forge the young United States, a country barely 80 years old.
Our people created its nascent police forces. It joined its armies, of the north and of the south.
Take a tour of the battlefields of Gettysburg, where Abraham Lincoln delivered his most famous speech as American democracy lay at death’s door, and you’ll see where hundreds of Irish fought and died.
Their pictures line the walls of the nearby museum, some in the Grey uniform of the Confederacy, many more in the navy blue of the Union. Denied a future in Ireland, its young built America.
Similarly, the 300,000-500,000 Irish who landed in Britain during the same period had a profound effect on the cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham.
The Victorian quarantine, to keep the diseased and starving Irish enclosed around Liverpool, ensured it became a city of the Irish.
When the cordon sanitaire was lifted, in the mid-1850s, the Irish helped drive the British Industrial revolution in the red-bricked cotton factories of Manchester and on the canal barges of Birmingham, a city of woolen mills.
Many of our people in Britain joined her armies and fought in their tens of thousands in the Great War.
They fell by the splintered trees at Verdun, in the bomb-cratered valleys at Longwy and in the mud at Passchendaele.
They also fell in World War II, on the panic-strewn beaches of Dunkirk, in the thick forests of the Ardennes and on the sadistic jungle trails in Burma.
And after the Second World War, we Irish led the charge in rebuilding Britain, of course. Its motorways are forged in Irish blood, sweat and tears. Its gaudy 1960s high-rises too.
Here at home, the Famine had a more profound effect on those who survived. Those who left for America and Britain left behind empty towns and villages.
Everywhere, the emptiness . . . nothing but the Hungry Grass.
My father used to tell me the story of his great grandfather, who never left the house without a slice of bread in his pocket. For fear he’d come across the Hungry Grass and fall down and die.
The story is a part of me.
Mayo, Galway, Clare, Limerick and Kerry on the west coast saw population declines of between 30-50 per cent during the Famine.
The young left. The old remained and died with no-one left to pass on the home, the land, the language. The language, the greatest loss of all. More of that later.
The Famine’s aftermath saw even more people leave.
Between 1850 and 1880, our population shrunk by more than three million people. America and Britain were becoming world superpowers.
Ireland was emptying. Ireland was dying. If it weren’t for its cities, Ireland may not have survived the cataclysm of Famine.
The cities of Cork and Dublin were the only places to see population increases.
And it was in those cities that the Irish fought to survive as a nation.
What started with an idealistic William Smith O’Brien and a band of Young Ireland dreamers in 1848 grew into an irresistible republican movement that championed an Ireland free.
Their dream took another 73 years to come true.
The Famine and its aftermath didn’t just shape our political and economic world.
It shaped our souls.
The trauma of that time was so great that the memories refuse to be extinguished.
We inherited them all.
The Famine is etched in our psyche.
It’s at the core of who we are. It’s in our very DNA.
Not only were our people dispersed across the world, but we lost our language too.
The way we speak today is haunted by that loss. The melancholy of our speech, the way we don’t say exactly what we mean, the way we communicate without saying anything.
We created a new language, full of the poetry of the language we lost.
A unique language.
There’s a reason for that.
It helped us survive.
And now, my point.
At the height of our trauma in 1847, a tiny tribe of American Indians, known as the Choctaw nation, heard of our Great Hunger from an Irish adventurer tasked with resettling people west of the Mississippi river.
They had a whip-round and raised $170 (worth about $20,000 in today’s money).
They spirited the money to a philanthropist in New York, who forwarded the money to the Quakers in Ireland for the relief effort.
It was a tiny gesture, but one that was never forgotten, coming as it did during Black ’47 (in that year three million people were receiving starvation rations at soup kitchens in Ireland).
This week, we returned the favour.
Through social media and news reports, the Irish public got wind of a fundraising drive for the Navajo and Hopi nation — which has been ravaged by Covid-19.
In a spontaneous tribute to the Choctaw tribe, tens of thousands of Irish donations helped push the fundraiser to $3million
The virus has wormed its way into their reservation that straddles the Arizona, New Mexico border.
The death-rate per head of population outstrips New York’s.
In our hour of greatest need in 1847, the Choctaw people stood beside us.
Now, as they battle their greatest threat in four generations, we’ve wrapped our arms around them and said: “We’re with you.”
Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday that the tribe was “gratified, and perhaps not at all surprised, to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi Nations.
“We have become kindred spirits with the Irish in the years since the Irish potato famine. We hope the Irish, Navajo and Hopi peoples develop lasting friendships, as we have.”
People like us — the Irish and the Choctaw — never forget. For memories are all we have.
And if we lose them, we lose our bearings in the world, and it becomes meaningless.
We’re programmed to remember.
The great traumas are etched in our DNA.
They make us stronger. They make us who we are.
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I think another example of this is when the colonists had really just gotten to America and then a very hard winter came and the colonists didn’t know what do. Lots of colonists died until the Native Americans came along and helped them. And now every year we have thanksgiving
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This was a big population and at lest 2,000 of them died or whent out of the country this just shows that depending on how bad it is stuff like this takes a huge pole on population
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They would have to adapt a lot probably to less people and less workers
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During this time it was deadly, a war was happening for the Irish fled for food, and safety. If this never happened, America wouldn’t be itself, today. The Hunger problem was both good, and bad. The good part was, that they came, more people in America to be developed faster, and new ideas came. The bad part, is that there was a war and the great hunger was happening, so many, many people died.
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The Irish are trying to escape something hard in their home country, so they go to the US. However, around this time, things are heating up and leading to the Civil War in the US. These people have to go from one hard thing to another.
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This kind of makes me think that it’s not a positive interaction between the Native Americans and the Irish if they created police forces?
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Or maybe they think that they need new police for making shout that there people aren’t in danger from other things?
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I agree, maybe the Natives didn’t help and they were taking/not giving them recourses. I never would have thought of that
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What did he do to make this his most famous speech? Did people decide on it? Was it republican or Democratic decisions from office? How was it counted this way? And what did he say? What did he do?
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Abby maybe you are right maybe this was an not so good interaction but maybe not with the natives?
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I don’t know why but this seems like it’s going to be important later on?
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This reminds me of the coronavirus, because right now we all have to stay enclosed in a space. I guess people do/did that for different reasons other than a virus.
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That’s a great connection do we have any other things we could connect this to for the first paragraphs I was thinking about the Great Depression
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I noticed it said Quarantine……………… I can relate. I wonder if they had to actually do quarantine like us. Like stay in your houses. Or they had to stay in their own little Irish-British town?
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If they were only restricted to a single area, I wonder how that impacted the way that other British people viewed them. Did that cause them to be viewed as less important or valued?
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Thats a good one. Just kind of all of 2020 is something like that. Wasn’t there a year a while ago that had a lot of natural disasters, or did I make that up?
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This is a French term that basically means that people couldn’t leave a certain area so that they would not spread a disease.
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We’re going to want to focus on this one to support the claim about it maybe not being a friendly meeting
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I’m not sure, so I’m going to take a guess. Maybe the Irish and The Native Americans were fighting over land?
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I wonder which country they were fighting against. Which country would make a bunch of Irish people fall/be killed. It was just a thought that I had.
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The Irish helped rebuild stuff after the war in Britain to give back for what Britain did for the Irish.
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I wonder how people who survived the famine in Ireland view the ones who chose to leave. Were they viewed as heroic or cowardly? Did it start disagreements?
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This reminds me of natural disasters. I hear on the news during hurricanes and tornadoes, everyone evacuates and leaves behind their homes.
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What exactly is the hungry grass?
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Good thought. I’m guessing the hungry grass is a strange way to say nothing left or nothing left to care for the nature and the grass is hungry? Or maybe there is absolutely nothing left, and it’s just a metaphor
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I’m not sure why, but this reminds me of the Cheese Touch.
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Yeah because there were so many places effected by the famine it must have been horrible
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During an in-person class, I think it was science when we watched the video of the population dropping and going up. I remember we did a whole lesson on that, where we looked at graphs and things. The Famine is probably one of the reasons the population dropped during this time.
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I do remember seeing that big drop in population in Serena times this was a big thing that we can now add onto are nolege about that I think that’s also one of the main reasons places like the USA and Great Britain where gaining more people
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When you phrased it this way, it made me think of the global pandemic we’re in right now.
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I wonder if the chose to stay and die in their homeland or if they wanted to go so they could get the proper nutrition and live the ongest they could
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A lot more people are going this means that there’s a lot less workers to make all the stuff and they are going to have to get more Inported goods
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What happened for the 3 million people to die?
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These people are very detemend to make a place where people come together and have a good place to live and work
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We have come really far, if we had the same idea in present day, it wouldn’t token a couple or month Max of a year.
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This shows that they were determined to make their and their childrens lifes better . Maybe even grandchildren. They worked on it for 73 long years and that’s almost a human lifetime
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This just shows that the people who survived the Famon (which probably wasn’t very many) are very strong people. (Or just rich)
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Lol that’s funny abby but your very right those people whent in great numbers but somehow survived and made it into a popular place
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Lol yeah that’s right. I bet the rich were able to get the really expensive food and be fine. I wonder if the poor would beg for food from the rich?
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What does melancholy mean? I’ve heard it before but does anyone know what it means?
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Uhm I think it means in this context the way that we present ourselves or the way we speak
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How did it help us survive? How did a language do that, through poetry.
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I wonder why this needed to be it’s own paragraph instead of just being a sentence in another
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So it says the height of the trauma but I don’t realy know how long this was going on for
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That is so true.
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I think this is so cool that they were able to do this for a group of people they never knew and would never meet. I’m not sure I would know how to raise $20,000 if I had to!
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I know that native Americans didn’t have a lot then so to give up 20,000$ to strangers just because you have is amazing. I know that the Irish will never forget this small but kind gesture.
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I was thinking this article was written a while ago, but then I heard COVID-19. I wonder what year this was written?
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They had a famon but can somehow donate 3 million dollars (like how long ago was this trade made?)
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Would this had make a difference if they did not, or did it a different way?
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I think this shows that if you do something kind it will always pay back. Not only did the Natives get 3,000,000$ but they also got assistance in there greatest time of need. And I’m sure this will be a lifetime friendship
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A few years ago, I remember doing a project on The Potato Famon or something.
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Yeah I remember that it was sort of like all the potatoes rotted in this one country and they couldn’t eat potatoes for a year and everyone got really depressed about it.
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And it can also get you a life long friendship. The natives did something nice and they are repaying them
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There BRAINS are rewarded to remember! We learned about thisssss
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When I read this, I immediately thought of coronavirus. Just think, ten years from now are we going to completely forget about Coronavirus? I don’t think so.
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Your right I don’t think anyone has forgotten about the Great Depression so we’re probably not going to just forget
T about the coronavirus
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They kind of go off topic with this, but I like why they did it. To show to never give up, I’m guessing.
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I think another example of this is when the colonists had really just gotten to America and then a very hard winter came and the colonists didn’t know what do. Lots of colonists died until the Native Americans came along and helped them. And now every year we have thanksgiving
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During this time it was deadly, a war was happening for the Irish fled for food, and safety. If this never happened, America wouldn’t be itself, today. The Hunger problem was both good, and bad. The good part was, that they came, more people in America to be developed faster, and new ideas came. The bad part, is that there was a war and the great hunger was happening, so many, many people died.
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