Western hypocrisy is a symptom of western selfishness

I am not Irish but I question what Britain is doing in Ireland. There is no Northern Ireland. Ireland is Ireland. Northern Ireland is under British occupation with help from Irish traitors. But what do I know? Get out of Ireland Britain and take your pathetic Irish Christian Jihadists with you.

Source: Western hypocrisy is a symptom of western selfishness

theduran.com

Adam Garrie

June 11, 2017

The western mainstream media once again ignore killing abroad in order to focus on non-issues at home.

Britain’s recent election makes for an insightful case study of western hypocrisy. Because Britain’s ruling neo-con Conservative party (in reality a neo-liberal party with a misleading name) did not win enough votes to form a government on its own. Instead, it will have to rely on the support of the openly sectarian Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from Northern Ireland. For the record, I would be equally opposed to a UK government relying on the support of openly sectarian Catholic parties from Northern Ireland.

But mainstream British opinion has reacted to the reality that the Conservative party will only be able to (barely) govern with DUP assistance in a manner that underlines a deep metaphysical crisis in the western psyche.

The Democratic Unionist Party is worrying as it was one of the only parties in the UK Parliament at the time whose entire Parliamentary membership voted in favour of the illegal war on Iraq.

The Democratic Unionist Party also enjoys close links with Zionist organisations who publish the most extreme variety of anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Northern Irish Protestant militants who at various times had associations with the party even smuggled Israeli arms into Britain for mane years.

Failing to learn their lessons, all DUP MPs voted for illegal strikes on Syria in 2015.

It is fair to say that the DUP is among the most pro-war parties in all of the United Kingdom. However, this fact has been totally ignored by the British mainstream media, many of whom are only now bothering to find out who the DUP are, although their homework has been incomplete at best.

The British mainstream media have been focusing on the DUP’s social policy which tends to be on the extreme side of social-conservatism and I speak as a social conservative myself, one who believes that liberal social values are a kind of deeply sick neurosis. But a party which takes a firm sectarian line on religion, seeks to politicise the private medical procedure of abortion and a party founded by a man who believes dancing is sinful, is too much even for me.

However, these issues are local matters that the Northern Irish voters have to contend with. If they want a party that enforces a ‘no dancing’ piece of legislation, they are welcome to it.

The problem is when such a party has a say in foreign policy, something which affects those far from the disputed province of Northern Ireland. But the liberals in Britain simply do not care how much the DUP votes in favour of slaughtering Iraqi and Syrian children. They do not care that they supported creating a jihadist failed state in Libya, they do not care that they believe that Palestinians are ungodly, they simply are worried that the DUP might turn dance halls, homosexual facilities and abortion clinics into Protestant churches, something that is incredibly unlikely.

The DUP is not in a position to implement its extreme Protestant agenda on Great Britain, but in a tight vote on going to yet another illegal war, their members of Parliament could push the vote over the edge in favour of more bombing, more killing, more instability and more illegality.

This is the real worry, but for the British mainstream media, they are focused on issues which will never come to pass and never effect anyone outside of some parts Northern Ireland. The issues that will effect the wider world and as a result cause ore terrorist blow-back in Britain, are totally ignored.

It is this selfish attitude that has doomed the west to failure at home and danger abroad.

Meet the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Britain’s loyal fundamentalists in Ireland

What are the followers of this medieval party called? Dupes?

Also, rhetorically speaking, what is England doing on Irish soil? Why are these Irish cretins following a foreign Nazi family?

Source: Meet the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Britain’s loyal fundamentalists in Ireland — Puppet Masters — Sott.net

RT
09 Jun 2017  

© Toby Melville / Reuters

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) holds the key to Theresa May remaining in Downing Street but what do we know about this Protestant party drawn from the pro-union side of Northern Ireland’s deeply sectarian political spectrum?

As Britons scramble to learn about the party that will prop up May’s mandate to execute Brexit, a swathe of the online conversation has focused on the party’s past comments on homophobia, Islam and creationism.

The DUP was at the center of a bloody sectarian divide during Northern Ireland’s Troubles – a conflict involving rival paramilitary groups and the British Army which claimed more than 3,000 lives over 30 years.

https://www.sott.net/embed/fXJV6MvDFqF4gt3nlp-ZxUeuwOJ

https://www.sott.net/embed/4J_ggxzPtTK_1Bd1vHCkiXVl0RD

The Conservatives and the DUP won’t form a formal coalition government but the latter will support the government regardless.

“We want there to be a government. We have worked well with May. The alternative is intolerable. For as long as Corbyn leads Labour, we will ensure there’s a Tory PM,” a DUP source was cited as saying in by the Guardian.

Comment: What a telling statement. They detest Corbyn for class reasons, not ethno-religious ones. Corbyn, being protestant English, should be an acceptable leader for them, right? No! He’s ‘of that same mindset we’ve always fought against.’

That statement, incidentally, is the real source of the Irish civil war and subsequent ‘troubles’: most Irish people have known for a long time that the unionists tend towards irrational right-wing extremism. The bigots leading them would sooner destroy the UK than allow a decent government in power.

The party is the creation of firebrand Protestant Evangelical Minister Ian Paisley. Reverend Paisley also founded the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and was characterized by his entrenched Unionist views and his hostile opposition to the Catholic Church.

In its early years, the party was heavily involved in a campaign against homosexuality and fiercely opposed gay rights.

Paisley, who was famed for his extraordinarily fiery speeches, routinely preached against homosexuality and the party picketed gay rights events as part of their ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign.

The campaign was ultimately unsuccessful as homosexuality was decriminalized in 1982.

Paisley became infamous in 1988 when, as a member of the European Parliament for Northern Ireland, he caused uproar by interrupting an address by Pope John Paul II. During his protest he shouted: “I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist with all your false doctrine,” while brandishing posters reading: “Pope John Paul II ANTICHRIST.”

The party has been the largest in Northern Ireland since the Stormont assembly election in 2007.

That election saw a greater polarization in Northern Ireland politics with the electorate shifting their votes towards the hardline Nationalist and Unionist parties (Sinn Fein and the DUP) at the expense of more moderate groups such as the the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

At the age of 81 Paisley and the DUP gained worldwide praise for taking the astounding step of sharing power in the Northern Ireland government with bitter enemies Sinn Fein.

This arrangement was characterized by Paisley sharing the job of leading the government with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, who was once a leader in the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Paisley was succeeded as DUP leader and first minister by Peter Robinson. Robinson’s term was marred by a high profile scandal in which his wife, Iris Robinson, had an affair with a teenager and procured £50,000 in loans for the teen to open a restaurant.

Comment: Classic fundie hypocrisy!

She also failed to declare her interest in the restaurant, despite serving on the council which leased the premises to her lover. Before the scandal broke Iris Robinson had famously said that “gays are more vile than child abusers.”

She was expelled from the party as a result of the scandal and she retired from politics.

Similar views on homosexuality have been expressed by others in the deeply Christian party. Paisley’s son, Ian Jr, who is also a DUP politician, gained notoriety for saying he was “repulsed by gay and lesbianism.”

Peter Robinson himself came in for severe criticism for saying he “wouldn’t trust Muslims devoted to Sharia Law, but I would trust them to go to the shops for me,” and for backing a pastor who labelled Islam “satanic”.

Ahead of the election the party was backed by the Loyalist Communities Council, which is an umbrella body comprised of three of the main Loyalist Paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando. The party’s leader, Arlene Foster, was criticized for being slow to distance the DUP from the paramilitaries.

The DUP support for the Tories looks set to have implications for the Brexit negotiations. In the wake of last year’s Brexit vote, it campaigned against affording a “special status” for Northern Ireland after the UK leaves the EU. Sinn Fein, its ideological antithesis, has repeatedly called for special status.

Comment: This alliance – and possibly the Union itself with it – has nowhere to go but down.

The media tried to smear Corbyn by calling him an “IRA terrorism supporter”. It didn’t work, and now the Tories are planning on forming a government with Loyalist terrorism supporters. Here’s the former leader of the ‘democratic’ unionist party:

Peter Robinson ca. 1980

 

True crime: why the Irish counterfeiting wave of the late 18th century was a myth

The 19th century Irish crimewave that wasn’t: how a change of policing brought the English counterfeiters to book.

Source: True crime: why the Irish counterfeiting wave of the late 18th century was a myth

theconversation.com

Adam Crymble

Lecturer in digital history, University of Hertfordshire

May 19, 2017

Satirical Bank Note (1820), highlighting how easy it was to be hanged for spending fake money, despite how prevalent it was. George Cruikshank and William Hone

The claim that immigrants or minorities are more criminal than the general population is a common trope. From Donald Trump’s claim that Mexicans in the US were “bringing drugs … bringing crime. They’re rapists”, to the frequent portrayal of African-Americans as having a criminal mentality, to how black men are disproportionately stopped by the police under “stop and search” laws in the UK. Other studies have explored how “driving while black” can increase a drivers’ likelihood of being charged with a traffic offence.

People have long blamed those unlike themselves. Are immigrants and minorities more criminal than locals, or just more likely to get caught – or even just more likely to be blamed? An example of Irish living in London at the beginning of the professional police era shows that who ends up in front of the judge is more dependent on how the crime is policed than on who is responsible. If police tactics unduly target minority groups, then this inflation of the criminal statistics can, and has, been used to paint minority groups in a negative light.

Bank notes not worth the paper

London experienced a massive crime wave between 1797 and 1821, linked almost entirely to counterfeiting and forgery. The problem got so bad that people began to worry if the cash in their pocket was real – aware that they could be executed for knowingly spending bad money. Bank notes had only recently been introduced in England and, as historian Randall McGowen has remarked, they were “scarcely more than a printed form with a number, a date and a clerk’s signature”. Forgers even had the gall to produce the fake bank notes in prison, selling them onward for a fraction of their face value to anyone brave enough to attempt to pass them off in the city’s shops.

 

A George III gold sovereign from 1817, when coins were made of gold – unless they were fakes. Classical Numismatic Group, CC BY-SA

Even coinage, then comprised of actual silver and gold, was at risk. Talented button makers and engravers turned their attention to the technically similar processes of making false coins, which would be made with a cheaper metal and rubbed with aqua fortis (nitric acid) or aqua regis (a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids) to make the fake appear either silver or gold respectively.

Soon the city was crawling with fake money, including more than 250,000 forged banknotes. Patrick Colquhoun, a magistrate of the era, estimated 120 sellers were each distributing hundreds of false coins onto the city’s streets. He singled out the Irish as one of the problem groups behind the crime wave.

Justice deserved?

Peter King’s previous research on Irish crime claimed the justice system did not show an anti-Irish prejudice and that the Irish criminals got what was coming to them. Certainly there are records from London’s courtrooms to support this.

For example, Irishmen John Fennell and James Gillington were arrested in 1799 after having allegedly forged more than 600 bank notes with a home-made printing press. But at the other end of the spectrum the records are filled with Irish such as John Brown, who tried to pay for his glass of gin at the pub with a false coin. Looking at the numbers alone the Irish do seem to have been a problem – but these numbers hide the extent to which policing strategy affected who got arrested in the first place.

Initially, the authorities relied almost exclusively on tips from shopkeepers who had been offered false money. It fell to them to detain suspects and call for the watchman who would make the arrest. This meant people spending false money had a far greater chance of getting arrested than those involved in the more profitable aspects of manufacture and wholesale.

The Irish were more involved in the petty but very public act of spending the money – those aspects of the crime most associated with poverty. As new arrivals, the Irish were at a further disadvantage, and cunning locals were only too happy to trick their new “friends” into buying a round at the bar with the false coins they supplied. With the system of policing set up to almost exclusively target these minor players, the courtrooms filled with poor Irish which led to their reputation for criminality.

Enter the detectives

Despite these arrests the problem of forgery worsened. So, in 1812, the Bank of England changed its strategy, encouraging specialist detectives to hunt for the real counterfeiters. With generous rewards as incentives, these detectives soon managed to infiltrate the criminal networks. This often involved using accomplices in the crime to trick the counterfeiters and wholesalers into selling to an undercover agent, in exchange for a reduction in their own sentence.

For the first time the Bank was encouraging local criminals to “out” other local criminals and, as they did so, the ethnic makeup of defendants appearing in the court began to change: the number of English defendants rose 27-fold in the years immediately after the change in policing strategy.

This research highlights what gets missed when policing focuses on crime perpetrated by ethnic minorities. No one at the time noticed the dramatic reduction in Irish defendants but, by the 1810s, the claim that the Irish were behind the forged currency crime wave was unsupportable. This wasn’t because the situation had changed for the criminals, but because the police had changed where they were looking for them – and discovered that the real culprits behind the crime wave were the local English, and probably always had been.

More than half of young people in Ireland ‘would join a mass uprising against the government’

Source: More than half of young people in Ireland ‘would join a mass uprising against the government’ | The Independent

independent.co.uk

Will Worley

April 26, 2017

A mass uprising against the Irish government would be joined by more than half of young people in the country, a survey has indicated.

Fifty four per cent of 18 – 34-year-olds said they would take part in a “large scale uprising against the generation in power if it happened in the next days or months”.

The survey polled nearly 20,000 people in Ireland as part of the European Broadcasting Union’s Generation What? research.

Continue:

More than half of young people in Ireland ‘would join a mass uprising against the government’ | The Independent

A reunited Ireland? That could be one of Brexit’s side effects

Today, after almost 20 years of stability and peace, Northern Ireland is open and borderless, thanks to the EU common travel area policies. When that ends with Brexit in two years, a poorer future lies ahead.

Source: A reunited Ireland? That could be one of Brexit’s side effects – World – CBC News

CBC News

By Don Duncan

Posted: Mar 31, 2017

Northern Irish voted not to leave EU: Rejoining the Republic of Ireland after 96 years apart would let it stay

The Irish flag flies at half-mast in the village of Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, to mark the passing last week of Martin McGuinness, a nationalist political leader and former IRA member. With Brexit underway, there is talk of reuniting Ireland to keep the north in the European Union. (Don Duncan)

When 29-year-old Peter Edgar returned to Belfast in 2009 after a year’s work experience in the U.S., he saw Northern Ireland through new eyes. There were opportunities everywhere.

“What my year abroad taught me was how to connect with people so as to create ventures and opportunities for others,” he said in an interview last week. He now works at Catalyst Inc., a Belfast-based not-for-profit that seeks out inventors across Northern Ireland to incubate and monetize their ideas on domestic and international markets.

Edgar was only 10 when the 30-year civil conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the “Troubles,” ended.

In a nod to the Good Friday Agreement that ended the conflict in 1998, people Edgar’s age and younger are referred to as the “Good Friday Generation,” meaning they grew up freer and less hindered by violence and sectarianism.

A former customs guard hut on the north-south Irish border stands disused as Brexit is triggered on March 29 in Newry, Northern Ireland. It will likely be revived in two years, when the U.K. exits the European Union, leaving the Republic of Ireland in and the north out. (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)

Today, after almost 20 years of stability and peace, Northern Ireland is open and without a physical border, thanks to the EU common travel area policies. Northern Irish young people like Edgar think nothing of the two-hour plus train journey to Dublin to party or to do business, something their parents wouldn’t do. Back then, violence or long queues at the old militarized border made going to Dublin much harder for them.

However, with Wednesday’s triggering of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, this era of mobility and openness in Northern Ireland might be about to end. The U.K. and EU have exactly two years to agree on the precise terms and conditions of their rupture.

The spectre of this divorce has caused ructions throughout the United Kingdom.

‘There’s probably more serious discourse about Irish reunification now than at any time since partition.’ – Kevin Meaghar, commentator

Scotland, which voted to stay in the EU, is adamant about holding another independence referendum rather than being dragged out of the EU against its will.

Northern Ireland, the other region of the U.K. that voted overwhelmingly against leaving, has a failed economy and is unable to survive on its own. It currently receives annual funding from London to the tune of $16.5 billion Cdn — so a Scottish-style bid for independence isn’t viable. Yet there are mounting calls for Northern Ireland to leave the U.K. and reunite, after 96 years of partition, with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

“There’s probably more serious discourse about Irish reunification now than at any time since partition,” Kevin Meaghar, a commentator and former special adviser on Northern Ireland to the U.K. government, said in an interview.

Farmers from the border regions of south county Armagh and south county Down in Northern Ireland gather to bid on livestock at the Camlough cattle mart. Brexit ‘would kill this area, business-wise, says Frank McPolin, the owner of Casey’s Eurospar supermarket. (Don Duncan)

The Good Friday Agreement guarantees a path to reunification through a referendum whereby a majority of Northern Irish citizens must vote to leave the U.K. and join the Republic of Ireland.

Until now, that prospect has held no water economically or politically for most people in the province. A pre-Brexit poll, undertaken by the BBC in 2015, showed that only 30 per cent of people in Northern Ireland wanted to split from the U.K.

Then came Brexit. The entire political chessboard in Northern Ireland was shaken.

As the least developed and poorest region of the U.K., Northern Ireland, with a population of just 1.8 million, stands to suffer the most from a hard Brexit.

Crossmaglen, a village some three kilometres from the border with the Republic of Ireland, was a flashpoint of violence between pro-Irish paramilitary groups and the British Army during the “Troubles.” Today, the peace dividend is everywhere to be seen.

A bus travelling from southern Ireland into Northern Ireland passes a Brexit protest sign along the stretch of road that seperates the two countries at Newry. A ‘hard’ Brexit will likely bring back a closed border with customs checks, wiping out Northern Ireland’s significant cross-border retail sector. (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)

Once signs reading “Sniper at Work” dotted the village’s streets. Today, instead, a glitzy retail complex called Casey’s Eurospar plies its morning trade. Customers fill their cars with gas, pick up groceries or grab coffee in the area’s small café. Some 40 per cent of them come from the Republic of Ireland, south of the invisible border.

A “hard” Brexit will most likely bring back a closed border with customs checks, and this would wipe out much of Northern Ireland’s significant cross-border retail sector.

“It would kill this area, business-wise,” says Frank McPolin, the owner of Casey’s Eurospar, as he dutifully sprays the plants in the window display of the supermarket. “We could handle fluctuations between Euros and pounds, but we couldn’t deal with a cut-off in the circulation of movement.”

Outside, more people furrow their brows over Brexit, but for different reasons.

Disappearing subsidies

“We’d have to stop farming,” says local farmer Patricia Bellow as she carries bags of groceries to her car. Bellow, like the majority of farmers in Northern Ireland, depends on EU farming subsidies that will disappear with Brexit. Subsidies and grants from the EU currently represent some 85 per cent of farm income here.

All told, Brussels sends $630 million Cdn every year to Northern Ireland in the form of farming, infrastructure and peace-building grants. All this will vanish in 2019.

This spectre of hardship is beginning to cause creaking shifts in Northern Ireland’s once dogged, pro-Union majority position.

Unionists — those in Northern Ireland who identify as British and who wish to remain part of the U.K. — have traditionally been the main obstacle to the reunification of Ireland. But Northern Irish Unionism is currently in deep crisis.

Catholic majority coming

Elections held earlier this month for the Northern Ireland regional Parliament saw Unionists lose their absolute majority for the first time ever.

The province’s demographic profile is changing, too. Catholics, once a minority, are expected to tip into majority position soon, perhaps as early as the 2021 census.

And the rigid sectarian culture of Northern Ireland appears to be loosening.

“[Brexit] has changed all the dynamics of what we call ‘soft’ unionist or ‘soft’ nationalist,” said Alex Kane, a unionist commentator and former consultant for the Ulster Unionist Party, in Belfast last week.

“Those people would not have been persuadable to a United Ireland two years ago but they will listen to that debate now.”

This core of “persuadables,” made up of “soft” unionists, “soft” nationalists and non-sectarian voters like Peter Edgar, are thought to constitute between 20 and 25 per cent of the voting population. It is this group that could swing Northern Ireland out of the U.K.

“I don’t know if a United Ireland is the best option. I don’t know if remaining part of the UK is the best option,” said Edgar. “All I can look at is what defines a happy life.”

It’s too early to say for certain if Brexit will bring “happy life” to Northern Ireland. If it doesn’t, as is feared, it’s the province’s “persuadables” who may well speak up, with their votes.

The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Source: The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools | By Bill Bigelow | Common Dreams

commondreams.org

by Zinn Education Project

by Bill Bigelow

March 17, 2017

To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants Hut)

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.

By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

© 2015 Zinn Education Project

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Oregon for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools and the co-director of the Zinn Education Project. This project offers free materials to teach people’s history and an “If We Knew Our History” article series. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the Classroom and The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, and most recently, A People’s Curriculum for the Earth: Teaching Climate Change and the Environmental Crisis.

An old Irish legend about an ancient Egyptian princess (10 min)

Ireland’s long history is riddled with folklore, ancient mythology, and ancient societies, such as the Druids. Scota, in Irish legend, is the name given to the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh. Robert Sepehr is an author, producer and anthropologist specializing in linguistics, archeology, and paleobiology (archeogenetics).