chrimess
Well-known member
This is an absolute standout, Pete! Out of nearly three quarters of a century seasons, that is.
Season 74 -- It's a Fact!
- Thread starter alemarco
- Start date
peewee
Well-known member
Thanks Christian for the praise. I really appreciate it. It felt good to get this one done.
Maybe those outside of the US media bubble don't know what this is referring to..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trayvon_Martin
TCK
Well-known member
We are not worthy. This is unreal Peewee...
GinnyT11
Well-known member
This is a breathtaking blend of music, writing, history and immediacy. It took a perfect communion of all the key brain cells to make this, and you should be very proud.
I especially liked the high-picking extra track.
pabrizzer
Well-known member
Gee peewee - just an amazing video.
Yes we got the most recent news - not guilty.
Was big in the news here.
Your video said it all.
Not guilty .... to quote Mr Zimmerman....."these assholes - they always get away"......
Astoundingly relevant - brilliant work Mr PeeWee sir.
DWitt
Well-known member
Thanks for your work here. Very well done.
myrnaukelele
Well-known member
Going back to the 1800s...
In 1845 nearly 8 million people lived in Ireland. Ten years later just 4 million people remained. It is estimated that 2 million people starved to death and 2 million more emigrated. Many died on the "coffin ships" as they sailed across the Atlantic.
This song is dedicated to my great-grandparents - all eight of whom emigrated from Ireland between 1848 and 1852.
In 1845 nearly 8 million people lived in Ireland. Ten years later just 4 million people remained. It is estimated that 2 million people starved to death and 2 million more emigrated. Many died on the "coffin ships" as they sailed across the Atlantic.
This song is dedicated to my great-grandparents - all eight of whom emigrated from Ireland between 1848 and 1852.
pabrizzer
Well-known member
(sorry for butting in, but) this exchange is just one of the things that makes the seasons so wonderful:
Originally Posted by librainian
Pa, damn this is really good. Really moving. I'm going to add this to my book if you don't mind.
(to which Brian replied)
Go for it - I have PMed you the lyrics.
It gets even better Alan.
I asked for the librarian's arrangement of And She Was which he quickly sent.
If you haven't checked it out it was tops and well worth a look.
Last edited:
decaturcomp
Well-known member
UkerDrew
Well-known member
So sweetly sung! Great performance.
TheOnlyUkeThatMatters
Well-known member
mikef
Well-known member
Just wanted to say, this is a clever and rather excellent theme! 
UPDATE: Just been through the playlist so far... top stuff... keep 'em coming. I feel it's going to be on of those weeks that introduces me to lots of new stuff, which is always a bonus!
UPDATE: Just been through the playlist so far... top stuff... keep 'em coming. I feel it's going to be on of those weeks that introduces me to lots of new stuff, which is always a bonus!
Last edited:
DWitt
Well-known member
Another favorite song of mine, and very well done! I just last night put a bookmark to the chords/lyrics of this one in my to-learn queue, actually!
redpaul1
Well-known member
Long post alert! Facts & more facts!
Christine Kinealy, in her essay “The Great Irish Famine—A Dangerous Memory” (The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Ed. Arthur Gribben. Amherst: U of Mass P, 1999. 239-54), has this to say about how debate on the Famine is conducted today in Ireland, and in the UK:
The relations between the two islands [Ireland & Britain] have now reached a maturity which allows us to look at our history objectively and to tell the story as it was… After all, the Famine is not just an Irish event, it was just as much a British event, a shared experience. (ellipsis original)
As the debates in the NYT show however, that's not a view that is held by many Irish Americans, for whom identity is rooted in the Famine, descendants of the archetypal Irish peasant: desolate, poor and anti-British.
So, not looking to pee in anyone's Cheerios here: these are just the facts, sir and/or ma'am, just the facts:
Let's start with the official census figures for Ireland from 1841-1911 and again for 1926 (no census in Ireland in 1921, for obvious reasons):
In other words, the population of Ireland didn't halve between 1841 & 1851, the height of the famine. It fell by 1.6 million. It hadn't even halved by 1926 (admittedly, at 52%, it was close to halving, but by then the Irish government was using emigration as a macro-economic policy - exporting its unemployment problem to the UK, the US & the rest of the world).
There's no denying that a fall of 20% in any population over a 10 year period is a catastrophic decline. Further, if you make estimates for what the population would have likely been in 1851 had the potato crop not failed, the effective fall in population was nearer 25%-30%. But if you are trying to estimates deaths caused by famine, you can't sensibly count the unborn. No-one was counting the dead at the time (or rather, no-one was collating the, numerous, counts of the dead), so you have to infer that figure by estimating the numbers who emigrated.
All the estimates for emigration during this period that I have seen quote a number of approximately 1 million, yielding a figure therefore of around 600,000 for deaths during the famine. Not all of these deaths would have been caused directly by the famine either - and it's worth noting that most of the deaths caused by the famine were from disease (particularly on the coffin ships), rather than from starvation (though of course starvation is a prime cause of susceptiblity to disease) - but old age and childhood diseases would be killers at any time. In all therefore, you're looking at numbers of deaths resulting from the famine of around (of the order of) 500,000, not 2 million.
500,000 deaths from hunger and disease in the richest and most powerful country in the world is still a shocking statistic - and a shocking indictment. The UK government must have been shamed to see famine relief being sent from the Ottoman Empire, and most notably from the Choctaw nation, whose own quasi-genocidal experience along the Trail of Tears, left them in no doubt what the Irish peasantry were suffering.
As to emigration, however, the famine merely accelerated a trend that had been going on since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Approximately 1.5 million Irish emigrated between 1815 & 1845. Another 1.5 million were to emigrate in the next 10 years. Those emigrating tended to be young and relatively (relatively!!!) better-off (as evidenced by the fact that they could afford passage, no matter how squalid the conditions they endured). Such self-selection also worked to raise the mortality rates among those remaining in Ireland.
So, between 1841 & 1851 about 500,000 died as a result of the famine (500,000 too many), and about 1 million emigrated. The population of Ireland entered a long-term decline (though many in the early 19th Century were already arguing that Ireland was dangerously overpopulated, hence the already high rates of emigration before the famine), bottoming out at around 4 million in the middle of the 20th century. The Famine, catastrophic and terrrible as it was, was responsible only for part of that decline, however, and it (the population decline) certainly didn't all happen in the 10 years following the failure of the potato crop in 1845.
Indeed, emigration has been a constant dimension of Irish identity for at least the past 200 years, as President Mary Robinson pointed out in her ("State of the Union"-style) address to a joint session of the Irish Parliament in 1995:
Turning to the Famine, she went on to say:
Me? I think the Pogues have the best take on all this, so I'll leave you with the last two verses to 'Thousands Are Sailing' ("where e'er we go, we celebrate/The land that makes us refugees" - a line I suspect that would resonate among many an ethnic community), while I go off to oppress some peasants:
A personal note: My family first emigrated in the 1890s. My grandfather worked on the construction of the NYC subway. Family circumstances brought him back to Ireland, to the smallholding situated in the midst of the bleakness of the Burren (Google 'Caherbullog, Co. Clare'). My grandmother never forgave him: my mother (born 1919 i.e., before partition!) liked (sadly, she has acute senile dementia & is now quite mute) to tell the story of her mother on many an occasion flinging open the door to this very view
and crying "And this is what you brought us back to!" I also remember as a young boy being driven around in the pony & trap (exactly like a scene from "The Quiet Man"), with my grandad pointing out the famine pits - as well as the Civil War battle sites.
Four of their daughters (they had 6 girls, the two eldest born in NYC - and then finally they got the boy(!)) returned or emigrated to the US as soon as they turned 16 or 17 - my mum, the youngest, followed her middle sister to London and a career in nursing, beginning in 1936, ending 50 years later in 1986 (she met my Dad, a Welsh steel-worker, in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka in 1946, but that's another story for another day). All my cousins, like all good Irish-Americans(!), joined the police force, although they're all retired now. One was a Secret Serviceman, a presidential bodyguard in fact (Kennedy -> Reagan), another a detective in the SFPD. But, hey, we've all got stories.
About ten years ago, I was reading the exchanges in the comments on a St Patrick's Day Op-Ed in the New York Times (a time when the glow from the Good Friday Agreement was still strong & the roar of the Celtic Tiger in full throat): "Oh for pity's sake," ran the (typical) comments from Ireland. "The Potato Famine was over 150 years ago. Get over it." "Hey!" came the response from Irish-Americans. "Don't piss on our heritage!" (I paraphrase, but you get the idea).
Christine Kinealy, in her essay “The Great Irish Famine—A Dangerous Memory” (The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America. Ed. Arthur Gribben. Amherst: U of Mass P, 1999. 239-54), has this to say about how debate on the Famine is conducted today in Ireland, and in the UK:
The relations between the two islands [Ireland & Britain] have now reached a maturity which allows us to look at our history objectively and to tell the story as it was… After all, the Famine is not just an Irish event, it was just as much a British event, a shared experience. (ellipsis original)
As the debates in the NYT show however, that's not a view that is held by many Irish Americans, for whom identity is rooted in the Famine, descendants of the archetypal Irish peasant: desolate, poor and anti-British.
So, not looking to pee in anyone's Cheerios here: these are just the facts, sir and/or ma'am, just the facts:
Let's start with the official census figures for Ireland from 1841-1911 and again for 1926 (no census in Ireland in 1921, for obvious reasons):
Code:
1841, 8,175,124
1851, 6,552,385
1861, 5,798,967
1871, 5,412,377
1881, 5,174,836
1891, 4,704,750
1901, 4,458,775
1911, 4,390,219
1926, 4,228,553In other words, the population of Ireland didn't halve between 1841 & 1851, the height of the famine. It fell by 1.6 million. It hadn't even halved by 1926 (admittedly, at 52%, it was close to halving, but by then the Irish government was using emigration as a macro-economic policy - exporting its unemployment problem to the UK, the US & the rest of the world).
There's no denying that a fall of 20% in any population over a 10 year period is a catastrophic decline. Further, if you make estimates for what the population would have likely been in 1851 had the potato crop not failed, the effective fall in population was nearer 25%-30%. But if you are trying to estimates deaths caused by famine, you can't sensibly count the unborn. No-one was counting the dead at the time (or rather, no-one was collating the, numerous, counts of the dead), so you have to infer that figure by estimating the numbers who emigrated.
All the estimates for emigration during this period that I have seen quote a number of approximately 1 million, yielding a figure therefore of around 600,000 for deaths during the famine. Not all of these deaths would have been caused directly by the famine either - and it's worth noting that most of the deaths caused by the famine were from disease (particularly on the coffin ships), rather than from starvation (though of course starvation is a prime cause of susceptiblity to disease) - but old age and childhood diseases would be killers at any time. In all therefore, you're looking at numbers of deaths resulting from the famine of around (of the order of) 500,000, not 2 million.
500,000 deaths from hunger and disease in the richest and most powerful country in the world is still a shocking statistic - and a shocking indictment. The UK government must have been shamed to see famine relief being sent from the Ottoman Empire, and most notably from the Choctaw nation, whose own quasi-genocidal experience along the Trail of Tears, left them in no doubt what the Irish peasantry were suffering.
As to emigration, however, the famine merely accelerated a trend that had been going on since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Approximately 1.5 million Irish emigrated between 1815 & 1845. Another 1.5 million were to emigrate in the next 10 years. Those emigrating tended to be young and relatively (relatively!!!) better-off (as evidenced by the fact that they could afford passage, no matter how squalid the conditions they endured). Such self-selection also worked to raise the mortality rates among those remaining in Ireland.
So, between 1841 & 1851 about 500,000 died as a result of the famine (500,000 too many), and about 1 million emigrated. The population of Ireland entered a long-term decline (though many in the early 19th Century were already arguing that Ireland was dangerously overpopulated, hence the already high rates of emigration before the famine), bottoming out at around 4 million in the middle of the 20th century. The Famine, catastrophic and terrrible as it was, was responsible only for part of that decline, however, and it (the population decline) certainly didn't all happen in the 10 years following the failure of the potato crop in 1845.
Indeed, emigration has been a constant dimension of Irish identity for at least the past 200 years, as President Mary Robinson pointed out in her ("State of the Union"-style) address to a joint session of the Irish Parliament in 1995:
After all, emigration is not just a chronicle of sorrow and regret. It is also a powerful story of contribution and adaptation. In fact, I have become more convinced each year that this great narrative of dispossession and belonging, which so often had its origins in sorrow and leave-taking, has become - with a certain amount of historic irony - one of the treasures of our society.
Turning to the Famine, she went on to say:
The weight of the past, the researches of our local interpreters and the start of the remembrance of the famine all, in my view, point us towards a single reality: that commemoration is a moral act, just as our relation in this country to those who have left it is a moral relationship. We have too much at stake in both not to be rigorous.
We cannot have it both ways. We cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past. I was very aware of that when I visited the refugee camps in Somalia and more recently in Tanzania and Zaire. The thousands of men and women and children who came to those camps were, as the Irish of the 1840s were, defenceless in the face of catastrophe. Knowing our own history, I saw the tragedy of their hunger as a human disaster. We, of all people, know it is vital that it be carefully analysed so that their children and their children's children be spared that ordeal. We realize that while a great part of our concern for their situation, as Irish men and women who have a past which includes famine, must be at practical levels of help, another part of it must consist of a humanitarian perspective which springs directly from our self-knowledge as a people. Famine is not only humanly destructive, it is culturally disfiguring. The Irish who died [in the Famine] were men and women with plans and dreams of future achievements. It takes from their humanity and individuality to consider them merely as victims.
An Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas
(Irish Parliament and Senate)
Feb 1995
by President of Ireland Mary Robinson
Cherishing the Irish Diaspora.
.We cannot have it both ways. We cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past. I was very aware of that when I visited the refugee camps in Somalia and more recently in Tanzania and Zaire. The thousands of men and women and children who came to those camps were, as the Irish of the 1840s were, defenceless in the face of catastrophe. Knowing our own history, I saw the tragedy of their hunger as a human disaster. We, of all people, know it is vital that it be carefully analysed so that their children and their children's children be spared that ordeal. We realize that while a great part of our concern for their situation, as Irish men and women who have a past which includes famine, must be at practical levels of help, another part of it must consist of a humanitarian perspective which springs directly from our self-knowledge as a people. Famine is not only humanly destructive, it is culturally disfiguring. The Irish who died [in the Famine] were men and women with plans and dreams of future achievements. It takes from their humanity and individuality to consider them merely as victims.
An Address to the Houses of the Oireachtas
(Irish Parliament and Senate)
Feb 1995
by President of Ireland Mary Robinson
Cherishing the Irish Diaspora.
Me? I think the Pogues have the best take on all this, so I'll leave you with the last two verses to 'Thousands Are Sailing' ("where e'er we go, we celebrate/The land that makes us refugees" - a line I suspect that would resonate among many an ethnic community), while I go off to oppress some peasants:
Code:
Thousands are sailing
Again across the ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Postcards we're mailing
Of sky-blue skies and oceans
From rooms the daylight never sees
Where lights don't glow on Christmas trees
But we dance to the music
And we dance
Thousands are sailing
Across the western ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
And we danceA personal note: My family first emigrated in the 1890s. My grandfather worked on the construction of the NYC subway. Family circumstances brought him back to Ireland, to the smallholding situated in the midst of the bleakness of the Burren (Google 'Caherbullog, Co. Clare'). My grandmother never forgave him: my mother (born 1919 i.e., before partition!) liked (sadly, she has acute senile dementia & is now quite mute) to tell the story of her mother on many an occasion flinging open the door to this very view
and crying "And this is what you brought us back to!" I also remember as a young boy being driven around in the pony & trap (exactly like a scene from "The Quiet Man"), with my grandad pointing out the famine pits - as well as the Civil War battle sites. Four of their daughters (they had 6 girls, the two eldest born in NYC - and then finally they got the boy(!)) returned or emigrated to the US as soon as they turned 16 or 17 - my mum, the youngest, followed her middle sister to London and a career in nursing, beginning in 1936, ending 50 years later in 1986 (she met my Dad, a Welsh steel-worker, in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka in 1946, but that's another story for another day). All my cousins, like all good Irish-Americans(!), joined the police force, although they're all retired now. One was a Secret Serviceman, a presidential bodyguard in fact (Kennedy -> Reagan), another a detective in the SFPD. But, hey, we've all got stories.
elmann
Well-known member
It's everywhere in German news.
DWitt
Well-known member
Okay, I'm following through on my promise to do Sufjan Stevens's "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." for my entry this week. Are you ready for something sad, distressing, quiet, and a bit disturbingly sweet? Yeah, well, here it is anyhow:
Dougf
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2010
- Messages
- 1,967
- Reaction score
- 0
The famine? No, the starvation.
George Bernard Shaw refused to call it a famine, since Ireland was exporting wheat and cattle to England at the time. He called it a starvation.
George Bernard Shaw refused to call it a famine, since Ireland was exporting wheat and cattle to England at the time. He called it a starvation.
myrnaukelele
Well-known member
redpaul- My apologies for misstating the facts. The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith is an informative and comprehensive account of this time in Ireland and the statistics I cited were missremembered from my reading of that text.
Thank you for including the words of Mary Robinson in your response.
I actually considered learning the Pogues 'Thousands Are Sailing' for this Season but that story is not my story. When I discovered the Johnny McEvoy song I knew it was the one I wanted to sing this week - it told the story of my own great-grandparents. Although the verses are specific to the Irish emigration of the 1800s it was the chorus that struck me the most. So many millions have crossed the oceans heading towards an unknown future- the land of their tomorrows. The chorus of this song could pertain to the Chinese crossing the Pacific as well as the Europeans crossing the Atlantic. Emigrants left behind loved ones and homes that most likely they would never see again. But no, their story was not all "sorrow and regret". They dreamed of better lives for themselves and their children and had hopes of brighter days to come.
UkeyDave
Well-known member
We most CERTAINLY are aware of this despicable act here in the UK.
Great and movingly done Peewee.
Great and movingly done Peewee.
GinnyT11
Well-known member
Here's a song referring to the Civil War, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
Apologies to Joan Baez
Similar threads
