LISTEN TO CHRISTOPHER FOGARTY DISCUSS THE IRISH HOLOCAUST
As proud Barretts of venerable Irish ancestry, my family and I are multiple-holocaust survivors. If my people were as canny and histrionic as the Jews, we would be cashing in on centuries of reparation payments from the British Treasury. -Kevin Barrett
ENGLAND’S GENOCIDES IN IRELAND
© Chris Fogarty. 2017
450-800 AD was Ireland’s Golden Age. Its schools attracted students from the known world while its saints and scholars revived learning across darkened Europe. Once while attending a Mozartian Mass in Austria’s Salzburg Cathedral a brochure beside me in the pew stated that the original cathedral was built to the same “footprint” by Irish St. Virgil the Geometer (Fergal) in 774. For complete data see How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill.
800-1014 AD Viking Invasions. Ultimately defeated and expelled. Remnants assimilated.
1169 Anglo-Norman Invasion. In power for many years, but ultimately assimilated. Descendants include people named Walsh, Fitz, (Gerald, etc.), Burke, Prendergast, Butler, Power, Barry, Joyce, Costello, Barrett, Nugent et al.
1558-1603) England’s First Genocide of Ireland began under Elizabeth I. Though Henry VIII’s new Protestant antagonism toward Ireland had begun decades earlier, the murder of approximately half of Ireland’s population began under Elizabeth I and continued until her death in 1603. The genocide was executed partly by starvation achieved by destruction of crops and seizure of livestock. Conditions in Ireland remained so dire under James I (1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649) that four Irish scholars made a decision. Observing that English military forces were murdering at random, robbing the Irish of their lands, livestock, and houses, had outlawed Catholicism and had put a price on the severed heads of priests, had enacted a law calling for execution of bards and harpists, had stripped the Irish of legal personhood and criminalized the Irish language, the four decided to leave a record of the Ireland that once existed. Using the available records of Ireland they, three O’Clery brothers and a Mulconry began, in the Franciscan Convent in Donegal Town in 1632 to compile, in Irish, the History of Ireland from its earliest days. They completed their work in 1636. The authors are now called The Four Masters and their priceless work still exists. A few years ago, by means of a book I purchased at an antiquarian book show in Chicago and with information from Martin Joseph Cleary in Ballycroy, Co. Mayo I was able to ascertain to Martin Joseph that the Ballycroy Clearys are direct descendants of Cucogry “Peregrine” O Clery, one of the Four Masters. Seeing that Cucogry was in Donegal Town until 1636 and died in Ballycroy in 1662 “leaving his only treasures, his books, to his sons John and Dermot” it must have been early 1652 when he was forced by the Cromwellian Edict to flee for his life to the infertile bogs of South Mayo.
1649-1658 England’s 2nd Genocide of Ireland was perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell and his army. After a number of assaults upon Irish towns in which he left few survivors, he issued his infamous edict: under pain of death all Irish must relocate to west of the Shannon River by May 1, 1652 (“To Hell or Connacht!”). In a few years Cromwell and his forces reduced the population by about half, taking a few shiploads of survivors including women and children to Jamaica where he established a slave colony with them. Some allege that Cromwell was backed by Jewish financiers. Irish were sent to slavery in Barbadoes, Antigua, and Montserrat; also to North America until banned by the new United States upon which Britain began shipping them to planters in Australia.
1845-1850 England’s 3rd Genocide of Ireland. During Queen Victoria’s administration it took more than half of Britain’s army (67 of its 130-regiment army) to starve some 5.2 million to death and force another 1.5 million into exile of which perhaps one million survived longer than one month after disembarking along the St. Lawrence or a U.S. port. Untold numbers died in Liverpool and region, probably more died on the coffin ships and were dumped at sea. The genocide was perpetrated as in Elizabeth’s days, by starvation. Victoria’s army didn’t destroy crops but robbed the harvests and the processed food from its producers. The genocide was “legal.” Essentially all of Ireland was “owned” by English landlords who claimed ownership of essentially all wealth produced on “their” land which typically comprised tens of thousands of acres. In turn, the landlords were being squeezed by their financiers in London; reported by Mitchel and others to be Jewish. Essentially all were bought out at above market prices between 1900 and 1910 and those not already absentee repatriated to England. Until the late 1960s my father and all of our neighboring farmers in Co. Roscommon were, in addition to paying twice-yearly “Rates” (taxes), were forced to pay an annual “Rent” to amortize the sums given to the departing English landlords some six decades earlier. In the mid-1930s DeValera refused to forward the rent to England, triggering a British embargo against Irish products. The embargo lasted until the run-up to WW2.
Each of the above genocides resulted in the deaths of approximately half of Ireland’s population. For further information on all of the above see some of the basics in my www.irishholocaust.org. For the definitive work on Ireland’s Holocaust of 1845-1850 contact me; Chris Fogarty at fogartyc@att.net for a copy of my Ireland 1845-1850: The Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it “Perfect.” Its second Dublin printing is temporarily sold out but copies are available in the U.S. from the second U.S. printing.
I am extremly interested in reading this book. I would love to order a copy.