Genocide in our times
we identify with the crimes
of Hitler, and indeed those crimes were dire.
Yet at risk of being decried,
I suggest that genocide
was alive and well in Ireland some years prior.
Call it 'famine', just for now.
'Experts' will tell you how
most responses were like poorly fitting shoes.
But ask them who it was
CAUSED the 'famine' - there's a pause
and a look like you've broken some taboos.
Was it famine? Was it - luck!
It was free trade run amuck
that forced the native Irish to their knees.
Not Fate and all that crap at all,
but rampant, ravenous capital
brought on the black starvation and disease.
There was corn and cows aplenty
in the green well-watered country,
but commodities was what they were, not food.
There were fortunes to be made
in the export-import trade.
'Self-interest' ruled out the common good.
But revisionists now claim
British rule was not to blame;
'men were following the Spirit of the Times'.
Was Mitchel in his rage
not ONE spirit of that age
when he nailed them to his page for their crimes?
Since their Bull-like Act of Union
they'd held Erin closely pinioned,
dictating all her ills and no solutions.
She was made to grow the food
for the multiplying brood
who slaved in their
industrial revolution.
So the acres under corn,
and under hoof and horn
grew quickly, while the poor were bludgeoned back
to the small plots and the stony
where the pratie was the only
crop to feed them till that terrible attack.
In frightful '45
when the deadly blight arrived
they had no devices left they could fall back on;
denuded of old skills
by a penury that kills
all enterprise, they watched the lumper blacken.
When the nettles were all gone
and the brackish seaweed gnawn
till the bitter juice ran down their useless jaws,
they laid them down and died
with their dear ones by their side -
and now the wrath returns and I must pause ...
At this low-cost holocaust
where the poorest suffered most
much relief was FELT but very little SENT
by those who lived in castles -
all the English and their vassals
who could now let vacant land at twice the rent.
If the blight had not struck, THEY
would have found some similar way
and clothed it in a neat circumlocution -
concentration camps or Clearance,
ethnic cleansing, disappearance -
and always the same Ultimate Solution.
Genocide it was,
though some contest it in the cause
of crass Revisionism's new orthodoxy.
British Interests, British rule
built the trap, then came the tool -
potato blight and genocide by proxy.
[ Shorter poems contents page ]
©Renate Mitchell. May not be reproduced in any form online or offline without explicit written permission.