It could not be clearer: Ireland is not free; not a sovereign nation.
No truly sovereign nation would conceal a five million person genocide of its own people by an occupying power. Why did and do Ireland’s government lie about it? Ireland’s consciences such as GBS have railed against the lie of “famine,” unavailingly it seems. That old lie is plausibly re-planted in “Famine got under my skin.” (Irish Independent/The Kerryman 17/6/2017).
Meanwhile, multitudes are learning the truth; that it took more than half of Britain’s military (67 of its 130 regiments total) to perpetrate that Holocaust* (An t-Ár Mór).
In recent years the otherwise conscientious Marist Brother who had taught for generations in Co. Roscommon was asked; “If you now say it was genocide, why did you teach us all famine?” His tragic, unacceptable answer: “I had no choice: I had to teach the curriculum as provided to me by the government.”
The Irish did not go down easily; the at-gunpoint robbery of Ireland’s producers of its abundant livestock, meats, grains and other food crops required more British soldiery than had conquered the Indian Subcontinent. The genetically-Irish Connaught Rangers were kept overseas throughout 1845-1850. The Munster Fusiliers did not exist yet.
*”Holocaust” from the 1847 Cork Examiner, from Michael Davitt, and other published works at the time.
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