We returned the bastards in England. No, the verse from that's my terrible English accent. Boy, we are both neither of us are very good at this. I remember now being reminded Island calling somebody a ball bag, how much better? Garrett from the Dollar Piss and doing an English accent is an Irish name. I think his mom is actually English if I'm remembering the Dollarp episode that his mom came on um or at least ethnically. I have a friend who's ethnically British. It's a weird situation. His parents you don't meet any of many of those, No, but he has never been outside of the United States, was born and raised here. But his parents are both English who came here in like they're late twenties. So he it's not many people like that. It's weird because he doesn't have like he grew up in Texas, so he like talks like most other Texas well, except for every now in and he'll say like he doesn't say bathroom. He says bathroom like there's there's all there's these little bits where it's like, oh, I can tell that you, Like, we're raised by somebody who didn't speak Texan. Yeah, he exclusively drove sobs most of the time that I knew when we were younger. His dad had like thirty of them taken apart on his lot. That's amazing. He's got a jeep. Now. Last time, gare H Wilkerson, I think that's his last name, but he's very Northern Irish, so he would say stuff like ball bag. I was like, I was like, dude, I love your sling. I got a lot of ship rightfully, So for for by the last time I did an Irish accent on this show. But I will say some of my favorite moments in Ireland, and I had another version of this in England is like you get drunk with your friends and you try each other's accents on. And the particular thing one of my buddies who is uh Irish but grew up in England for reason, and that we will be talking about in this episode because that that happens to a lot of people in this period. There's a um But the thing that he couldn't get over was the differences in how we pronounced banana. So there was like a long drunken conversation that would just be me saying banana too, and then then him being like banana because we were making fun of how the others. Yes, I could not get over the banana, um banana. One of the real joys of hanging out with people who speak English but are not from the United States is making fun of how you each pronounced the same words differently. Yeah. I remember I was trying to like tell one of my like my my friend who's like, you know, born and raised in London, but they're Punjabi Indian, you know, and so obviously that's quite a quite a ride situation boys, right, Yeah, but I kept saying, like why your spell stuff like that, like what's this you for? Like, what's wrong this? Yeah? He was like he goes just as calm in the most British way possible. He was just like, yo, it's interesting, how like you keep telling me that we're spelling things wrong. But the language is called English because it's from England. And I was like, touche, touche, touche, I have no comeback, and he just said, in the most British just as a matter of fact ly, like, well, it's called English because it's from England. And one of the things that was always really interesting to me, is you know where I grew up for a decent chunk of my like adolescence. Um, the school that I went to in North Texas had a really high population of people from the Indian subcontinent because like their parents worked for Texas Instruments or for Raytheon or something, um, and so they were people most of them had been born in India but had come over here pretty young, and they had learned English from Americans. And then I went over to India where the people that I was talking do who spoke English had learned English from British people generally, and so and it's really it's interesting, like how the how how differently people say especially since as an American, like most of your contact with people who speak English is the second language is people who learned it from an American And it really is like a different beast. And there's different types of like, um, different idioms that people pick up and stuff, as as as a second language speaker when they get taught, you know by one of the when he picked me up, when he picked us up from an airport, he was like, hey, I hadn't seen him. He was like, hey, you know look look, look we're we're we're two brothers were Asian dudes. I was like, all right, I walked by them dudes three times because I'm like, hey, man, you said you was Asian. Yeah, because we yeah, we use it differently than they do over Yeah. He was like, oh yeah, he goes, he goes. Yeah. Americans for some reason don't think India is a part of Asia. Yeah, which is weird, but didn't. Yeah. You look at a map and it's like, well, yeah, it's it's right in there. It's just the most British just like condescend but nice way to say. Yeah, well because India is a part of Asia. Yeah, because it's like you know how they share that giant land border with China. Yeah, Asia, Like oh yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess, I guess you're right. Yeah yeah right whatever you guys are saying that wrong, Okay, So yeah, anyway, let's talk about this horrible crime against humanity, um, the coming of the blight. This this potato mold and it's airborne, Like this is a nasty fucker to hit you. And now there's ways to deal with these now, Like I think it's a copper sulfate solution that you can spray on your tubers and stuff. There's people have like developed ways since and obviously one of the better ways to deal with it is to grow more than one kind of potato, because there's that one kind of potato maybe vulnerable, but another kind won't. And if you know, you can cross. But whatever, there's there's options, but we didn't have a lot of that. They are they do start to figure them out, and in fact, there's some very smart people when the blight hits who are starting to figure out that, like, oh, there's from things you could spray on these. So it it hits Ireland and it's it's obviously it's not great, but six it doesn't hit that hard yet. Um there's only six counties in Ireland that lose more than a third of their crop, which is significant. It is devastating in a lot of ways, but it's not as bad as it's going to get. Um. Now, what this does mean though, and it all kind of compounds. So one of the things about potatoes, I've been growing potatoes for a couple of years. I'm not an expert at it, but one of the things that you do if you're growing potatoes and you're not somebody you can just go to a gardening store and pick up seed potatoes. Every year is when you harvest potatoes, you set aside a chunk of your harvest as seed for the next planting season, and you don't eat them. You like keep them and let them kind of chill in a cool, dry place so that they you can plant them next year. Um and generally the broadly a lot of factors can affect this, but broadly speaking, for one pound of potatoes you plant, you can get between five and ten pounds of yield right at pends on a lot of factors. But that that's kind of back of the envelope math. So usually you might set aside like a third a quarter of your harvests something like that as seed potatoes. Well, if people are losing a third of the harvest, and we as we have established, Irish farmers do not have extra of anything, so you lose. And as a side note, city boy here checking in first time caller on time listener, Um, what's a potato seed? It's like a potato You could just like if you were a potato, right, if you were to have a bag You've had a bag of potatoes, and like you leave rotting on the bottom of the Yeah, if they start rotting and get all like goopy, then that's not good. But if they just start to usually first what they'll do and it kind of depends on how you store then, but they'll they'll sprout, right, You'll see, like the ear, if you play those under like an inch or two or so a dirt with like you know, four or five inches underneath it, Um, it'll grow into more potatoes. Um. Not an incredible crop, it's pretty cool. Now, the one the potatoes you do buy in the grocery store, they don't tend to your best off buying generally buying seed potatoes because they're meant to actually grow. Whereas like there's a bunch of compliment as a general rule, Yeah, you plant that if you if your potatoes start to sprout and you throw them in the dirt, you'll get some more potatoes. Um. But so part of part of how they people survive in Ireland is you know, you set aside this chunk of your crop for seed for the next harvest season or for the next planting season. But when they lose a third of their crop to this plague, they have the same coloric needs they had the year before, but they have less potatoes. And at some point, when you start to get hungry, you're going to dip into those seed potatoes, which are just as they're fine. If they're normal potatoes, you can eat them. But when you eat your seed potatoes, what are you gonna do next year? You have no exact tato, or at least you have It's yeah, and there's another problem. Some of these seed potatoes get infected with the blight and people don't realize it until they like go like unseal it to go plant and they realize that, like they don't have as much to plant, or they don't have anything to plant. Um. But as a result of all this, like the first year of the so called of the so called potato famine, right, Um, the first year of it is the least devastating, right because it hasn't killed as much of the crop yet, and people have because of these kind of seed potato stalks, they have a little bit of like um, a little bit of like wiggle room. The other thing they have is the English government at this point is headed by a guy named Robert peel Um and peel is not the worst guy that there's going to be running the English government in this period. There's a lot of criticisms of what he did too, but he's he's we'll talk about him in a second. Here. It is important that I reiterate here as we talk about this famine, as we talk about what's happening to these farmers in the desperation they're entering. In Ireland has plenty of food to feed everyone living in Ireland. The famine is not caused by a lack of things that to eat that are being grown on the island. It is caused by the failure of a crop that causes a surge in food prices, which puts avoiding starvation outside of the budget of most Irish families. It is not that there isn't food, it's that they can't afford not to starve. That is an important distinction. Um At the time the famine started, one quarter of all Irish grain crops were being exported. Three fifths of the island's total agricultural output is being sold outside of Ireland, So six of the food produced in Ireland does not stay there. Yeah, yes, so yeah. During the years of the famine, the population of Ireland at the start is about nine million, and Ireland is growing enough food to fill an estimate to feed an estimated eighteen million people. So again, when people say you shouldn't call it a potato famine, that's because there shouldn't have been a famine. Shouldn't have been There's plenty of food, There's ample food. There's plenty of food. Yeah, when like, so I'm working on I just did it, recorded two of them. Uh, sort of like for politics, kind of like an economic version of hood politics. I'm kind of just calling it like how much of dollar cost and really just this idea of how inflation and commodities, goods and service, like how that stuff kind of works like and and and what you're explaining right now, to where it's like essentially like my caloric intake, which is the equivalent of like my cost of living, like it hasn't changed. There's just not enough stuff anymore that is available for me to consume because all the stuff that I have, I don't really own. I gotta give it to somebody else. So it makes for a situation to where it's like if I can only if I only have thirty of what I'm producing to work with. But my thirty percent just became fifteen percent. I don't I don't end up being less hungry. Nope, you know what I'm saying. I just have to make less last longer. But that's impossible because it costs more than it did when I had more. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's what's happening here, kind of in in broad um And and most of the food that is being grown in Ireland. Then while there is this famine developing, most of the food being produced in Ireland is being shipped out of the island as soon as it's harvested. One observer at the time noted a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo. So like ships bringing in food aid are seeing larger amounts of food leave the island for export. It's got to be maddening, Yes, it is. It is maddening. This will become part of the justification for decades of insurgency and rebellion. It really does piss some people off. Um So, the obvious at question you're probably asking here is couldn't they have just stopped or reduced exports and thus kept food prices low enough that people wouldn't have starved to death. And the answer to that question is yes, it would have been extremely easy to do that. It had been fine, it would have been very easy. But food exports were how Irish farmers paid their rent. So if you stop food from being exported, you would have to stop evictions too, because otherwise you would have people who could not pay their rent and landlords who weren't allowed to kick them off their land, and that would be violating the rights of the landlords. So nothing new. There's nothing new. Bro. Since the English government is not willing to do that, they decide the next best option is to bring more food into the country, which is producing enough food, but bring in worse food, cheaper and lower quality food, and put enough of it onto the market. Again, they're not trying to they don't when they're importing food aid. It's not that they need to bring in enough food to feed people. It's that they need to bring in enough food to reduce the price of food that people can afford it, you know, and that aid organizations stuff can afford it, and whatnot, Like a lot of a lot of the way people get aid food is like the Catholic organizations will buy up a bunch and then distribute it and stuff and like one of the things we're not really going to get into it a lot. But like the Catholic clergy in Ireland. And there's a lot of criticisms to make of the church in Rome, but in Ireland the Catholic Church clergy is supported by the people who live there, um, and they do. The Catholic clergy in Ireland do a tremendous amount of aid work to try to deal with this, whereas the Protestant clergy, who are paid for by like Irish taxes essentially right, the Irish is supposed to are paying for the Protestant faith to an extent, are not doing that. Um. Not to say that none of them do, because there are in fact Protestant ministers who do quite a bit. But like in broad this is one of the things that seems happened. It contributes to like a lot of the anger and hatred that's building in this period between Catholic and Protestant. Right. Um, So the peel offerment decides, all right, we can't forgive rent and stop exports. So let's just bring in shitty food, right kind of that's the idea. It just seems like like, Okay, if this you're your purposefully choosing the hardest way to do this, ye like just well, but even if guys like they it's the hardest way for the people who have to live on the island, it is the easiest way for British politicians who then do not have to fight a politically powerful class of landlords as much as much as much so. The thing that the food that they, specifically the people government brings in is what they call Indian corn, and this is corn grown in the United States. Obviously, the Irish are growing corn to the Indian coin they're importing is a course, is a courser and harsher grade of corn than the Irish are used to. It has to be milled in order to make it edible. You have to mill it in ways that they had not been They didn't need to mill the corn the corn that was grown on the island that they couldn't easily do with the existing equipment. A lot of workarounds have to be found in order to make this corn they're importing edible for Irish people. Um, they have to soak it for like days to make it soft enough. Like. One of the problems is that when people start really starving, they won't soak this stuff enough and it'll tear up their stomach. Some people die because like their bodies can't handle how how coarse and harsh this corn is while they're starving, right, Um, but still importing this Indian corn. When when the Peel government does this and they sell it cheap, they don't give it away, but they sell it very cheap and fairly small quantities. This does enough to lower prices that a lot. It stops mass death in the first year or so of famine. This is broadly speaking Tim pat Coogan, and there's some historians that disagree with him. There are people who are a lot more critical of Peele. Cougan's attitude is that by doing this, Peel stops a lot of people from dying right away. That this is a broadly effective aid strategy. Um and I yeah, we'll talk little bit more about that later. Um. But yeah, this starts. This is not popular within English politics, and in fact that kicks off what is maybe at the time the most vicious political fight in like modern English parliamentary history. Um, it was perfectly legal for government, for the government to buy corn and sell it in Ireland, but selling it cheaply enough that the Irish could afford to consume it could be seen as a violation of what are called the Corn Laws. Now, these are first put in place in eighteen fifteen. There are a set of tariffs meant to protect English farmers from being ruined by cheap foreign grain. And the effect of these laws it's not just about corn. It's about the price of corn, barley, wheat and other grains. But the purposes too. So it ensures that grain only gets more expensive in Ireland in order to protect English farmers from being ruined by imports of cheap Irish grain, right or cheap foreign grain. Right. Like, that's the purpose of these corn laws. They are they keep food very expensive in Ireland, but they ensure profits for the English are kept at a certain level. Um. To me, this again, this goes back to being like you choosing the most complicated way to solve this problem, because I'm like you, just oh now I can't get okay, so we gotta okay. So you won't let me, you won't let them eat what they grow, so I'm gonna have to take what they grow and then give them worse versions. They're gonna have to do all this other stuff to eat. But then you're mad that I'm lowering the price because you can't sell yours like this is so listen uh. When but my daughter was younger, she did not want her door to be shut to her bedroom. But she also didn't want our door to be shut to our bedroom. But she didn't like the light coming out of our bedroom, nor did she the temperature from the living room changing. So her solution was everyone like the temperature in her room wasn't happy. She wouldn't happy temperature in the room. So her solution was, everyone else shut the door, and I can leave mine open where I'm like, here's a simple solution, baby, shut your door and all the problems are solved. You don't have to see our light, you don't have to experience the temperature in the living room, you don't have to hear the sounds coming from outside. Just shut your door. And her solution was, how about everybody shut? Everybody else shut their doors. And I'm like, well, baby, we're not gonna all We're not gonna do that just because you won't shut your just shut your door. It'll be fine. So to me, I'm like, this is what this is what I'm picturing. I'm just like, fam, lower your rent, just lower your rent, and the problem is solved. We'll talk about We're about to talk about why they don't do that, but it is worth noting that like one of the reasons why they opt for this coarser kind of seen as like worst grade of corn is that maze is not being which is the kind of corn that like they're they're bringing, because there's types of corn, but like the kind of corn that they call Indian corn is not being sold by English farmers and so it's not it doesn't fall under these corn laws. That's why Peels. Yeah, that's why Peel is able to get away with it. Um. But again he also wants to Peel wants to get rid of these corn laws in order to make it easier to bring food aid into Ireland, which pistoles is drives people insane. There is vicious resistance to them. And to understand the resistance to this plan, we have to talk about Lazai fair capitalism. Um. You do because people that are mad that you can't sell at a certain price. But hey, numbnuts, you're selling to your no one can afford your price point. Well, so I don't understand. What the hell, why what are you talking about? Anyway, Yeah, we're about to get into that. So the most foundational mind of this school of thought is an economist named Adam Smith. UM and Smith believed that, in short, that healthy economies are made up of individuals who are working for their own self interest, and that this benefit society by creating competition in the free market. Right, we're all broadly familiar with these, Yeah, yeah, we all. Smith's most influential work, The Wealth of Nations, is published in seventeen seventy six. His work is very influential to the people generally generally referred to as the founding fathers of the United States, and he was very much beloved by English politicians. UM in eighteen twenty one, a group of them formed the Political Economy Club to discuss his ideas and to try to come to more conclusions about the principles of political economy. Right, people are in this period starting to think about economics and kind of a more scientific sense, and the Political Economy Club it's actually today is the oldest economics association in the world. Um, so this is one of the first places where people are really trying to like put together organized theories of how economic life and policy works. In eighteen forty five, when all this starts to happen, um, this is where some of the most influential parliamentarians and government officials in the British Empire would go to like shoot the ship out of what should be done in terms of economic policy. And these guys are all in very strong agreement that England should not intervene directly in the famine in a way that would allow people to get Irish people to get food without paying. Right, you cannot funk with the free market, that's their attitude. You cannot make any do anything that you do that interferes with the free market. It would be worse than just letting people start to death. That's the i That is the conclusion, broadly speaking, that these folks all come to. As Club member Jeremy Bentham wrote, quote lazy fair in short, should be the general practice. Every departure, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil. Now you might take from that that, like, while stopping a lot of people from starving is a great good, but he does not feel that way, and that's what we're about to get into. Tim pat Coogan writes a central figure in the debate was a classical economist, Nassau Williams, Sr. The first professor of political economy at Oxford University, preached, among other things, that it was not the duty of the state to alleviate poverty that came through the fault of the individual. English poor law owed a great deal to his theories, and during the famine, wig apologists would see to it that the idea of Irish culpability for Irish poverty would become widespread among the British public. Lazy beds was used as a term of derision to indicate that the Irish even brought their laziness to bear on their potato cultivation. Nassau Senior criticized Irish landlords for neglecting the duty for the performance of which Providence created them, the keeping down population. So Nasa was like this number one, we can't do anything. We shouldn't do anything here. But also this is only a problem because these landlords did not do enough to make it impossible for Irish people to breed. Yes, so listen like I am. Like when we started the first episode of this, I was like, I'm ready to be triggered, and now I'm at this trigger because we're still to this day trying to explain to people how dumb they saying when they say this um because I, like I say all the time. In my credentialing program as becoming a California high school teacher, the third part was you have to take you have to pass this test on economic experience e high school and I failed it three times one three times because I understood the principles, but I didn't understand the the vocabulary, Like I just didn't know the words, you know what I'm saying, which was again some of the genesis of the politics where it's like I know what I'm talking about, I just don't know how to talk about what I'm talking about. But but some of it was because your theory is absurd to me, and I'm like the idea that because because look at and what you just read. The founding principle is the government shouldn't solve a problem created by the individual the but the individual didn't create the problem. The government did. And that's and That's that's why I'm like, I don't understand your principle. You made the problem, So how are you your free market? Ain't all is already not free in the first place you created? Like, so I'm just like, I don't understand how this is a prince. How is this a four three hundred year old principle when the foundation axiom of it don't exist. So I'm always like, I don't that. So I think whenever I had to like answer questions about this in school, I would be like, but it don't make no what you're saying don't make sense, you know. I'm like, just here's the thing though, Like, yes, we can say obviously, the problems that people are saying or is the fall to the Irish people are like problems as the result of the policies the state has enacted in this imperial government has enacted uh, And it's not their fault that they are suffering. That is not the attitude of these intellectuals who are This is way prior to the development of like prosperity Gospel and that kind of stuff. The same idea is feed into it. This idea. It's like the same if you have money, if you're doing well, it's because God wants you to be. And if you're impoverished and you're suffering, it's because you have done something in morals that has caused God to and which is like even even with the prosperity Ship, It's like, I mean, the the oldest manuscript in the in the in the Bible is Job, and Job is shooting down that. The whole point of that that book is to shoot down that idea. I mean, I can't think of anything that matters less in terms of public religion than what's actually in the Bible. It seems as though, why would that matter reading what I read, because even like this book is basically saying the principle you just said is wrong. It seems like it seems like Jesus of Nazareth probably would not have been a big lazy fair economics to I don't think you would like me back into the past. But I'm saying, it's just it just and it's like this you feel like, I mean, I always felt like even in discussing this stuff, it's just like you made the comparison to like the plight of black and brown people in indigenous people in the in in America saying that like, well, y'all lazy y'all can't get this stuff that you got the same opportunities where And it's like, are y'all serious, Do y'all remember the law y'all made? Like what do you you understand? You you understand you made those laws. So how are you saying, like, I don't God made about principle? You know? And if I if I know one thing about Jesus of Nazareth, it's that he would never have given free food to people. Apparently that's what I'm saying he did repeatedly in the Bible. That's not a part of the gospels. Yeah, she happened. Jesus set up of a fish stand where he sold fish and chips for you know, a tidy pro that everybody there was legal citizens, and then he reinvested the profits into purchasing apartment houses, which he used in order to fund the startup of blood testing company called I don't know why I took this to the thorns direction. Um, that's an amazing spin anyway, it's fun. So as ho, Senior, this this guy who is this major proponent of las A fair economics in this in this economics club, Um was in agreement. Like one of the other dudes who was prominent in this club is a fellow you've probably heard of named Thomas Malthus. Um, we should probably talk about malthas someday he he deserves an episode of his own. But but Malthus is the first intellectual um who really expounds upon the idea that overpopulation causes famine. Right. Thus, if a famine occurs anywhere, it is because of overpopulation, and if you take steps to alleviate that famine, all you will be doing is ensuring that overpopulation gets worse. And so you should not take steps. You should let the famine run its course, right, otherwise you're just gonna make the problem worse. Now, as we have established the famine, this is not the result of overpopulation right at all. Um. Because again, as the Irish population does triple over the course about a century. But economic they're they're they're the the amount of food they are producing also increases pretty massively, right, they are growing plenty of food. Um. But mauth Is his idea is that the work, it is the responsibility, the moral responsibility of the working class to not breed too quickly, and if they breed too quickly. It's nobody's job to take care of them. Right. Mauth Is famously said this when discussing the plight of poor men. Quote. If he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, has no claim of right, He has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact, has no business to be where he is. And what Mauthis is saying here is that, like the only people who owe you anything of your parents, right, and you can ask them for food and they've got to give it to you, but you have no right to exist inherently, and you certainly have no right to food. Yeah now now, now gone hand met him cucumbers you just grew for me, Not that exactly. And this is part of what makes it so messed up, Like it would be messed up if he was just saying this to like starving refugees, but he is saying this to the people growing the food as he's much as he's much Yeah, as he's h tell you, bro, you shouldn't had autumn kids. Let me get that tomato. Oh that looks good. Yeah, yeah, that the tomato you just grew for. But that's my land though, so like I mean and Malthi's there's this other because he's he's also very specifically anti Irish. UM. He argues that because of how close Ireland and England are, England is always a threat of poor Irish people like flooding into England and draining the economy by driving down wages and fucking up trade. Right. Just history, so many historical experts are just there's the same kind of yeah, like you've got a million people saying the same thing today about different groups of people, but it's always the same adult welfare about It's just just the same argument. And alpis maintained quote, the land in Ireland is infinitely more people than in England, and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil. So you you see these people there, it's not just that like they've built a system that is leading to famine. There's a conscious understanding that they want to depopulate Ireland through policy. Um. Another big advocate of this UH is a fellow named um Edmund Burke um and and and Edmund Burke is an irish Man now he's a he's a wealthy Irish person, um. But he he's also against government intervention in this this growing famine, um. And his basic attitude is that, like, you shouldn't intervene, have the government intervened when there's a problem. Quote, it is not by breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer. So Burke's attitude is, if there's a famine, if there's any kind of problem that a population is suffering under our economy, that is the will of God. And if the government steps into help people, that is a violation of Like you are, you are sitting against God. You're sitting against the God of the universe. I just I just don't understand what God wanted them to eat. They've beaten, you know, I just don't. Yeah, I'm just like, what what pages? What page? Alone? You know what I'm saying, YEA, where did you find that one? What page? We are? I know, I thought we was all yeah, yeah, I don't know what chapter is this? Edmund Burke. By the way, is the dude commonly credited with the quote you'll you'll see this on like every Holocaust movie or something that came out in like the nineties. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for goodman to do nothing. Um. Now, he never said that. It was probably from John Stewart Mill, although he never said exactly those words. It's one of those, you know how, like nine of the things that Thomas Jefferson gets quoted for saying, We're never said by Thomas Jefferson. Whatever, It's one of those. It's one of those quotes. Um. But anyway, he kind of sucked. Um. Not not a cool dude in my opinion, Edmund Burke. Another guy who sucked and loved himself some lazi fair economics was Charles Travellion. Now, okay, this is probably the single most famous name associated with the Great Hunger in Ireland. Um. There is a song called the Fields of ath and Ride that is today it's for whatever reason, it's become like popular with a couple of different football teams. But it's a song about the Great Hunger. It's a song about like a dude who tries to steal um food. Basically that's owned by the government in order defeat his starling, starving family, and he gets forced into transportation. He gets shipped away to Australia. Um. It's very sad song, but it mentions Travali in specifically, and he is kind of he is the face of the English causes of the famine in Ireland in a lot of ways. Now this is not entirely fair, not because Trevalion deserves less shipped than he gets, but because a lot more people had to come together to make this. But like he's all he's absolutely a monster here, don't get me wrong. Um. So again, Um, he's a central enough figure that I think we should peel back a little bit and I'm gonna give you an overview of his life before we continue. So, Sir Charles Edward Trevellion, first Baronet was born on April two, eighteen o seven, in Ponton, England, which is probably pronounced something like Terry or whatever, but like fuck it. His father was a clergyman um, and his family had ancient noble origins in Cornwall. His mother was also from a fancy family. They were very very rich. Um. They did not get this because his dad was in the clergy. Their family money comes from slave dealing in Granada. Um yeah, good stuff, good stuff, chuckie chuckie t um. So he was educated locally before his family used some of them slave dollars to send his ask to charter House School in central London. He did well enough there that he gets admission to Haileybury, which is the East India Company's training college. So the British East India Company has like a college which I think Amazon dot Com is like four months away from doing that. Um yeah. And while Travalian is at hailey Berry learning how to work for the East India Company, one of his teachers is Thomas Malthus. So he graduates or I don't know if he's graduated, but he leaves hailey Berry at eighteen and he gets sent to India to study at another company college where he learns And this is one of those things that's interesting about him as as British administrators in India go, he's actually like pretty plugged into the culture. He learns several he's fluent in several dialects of Hindi um, which is impressive, not an easy thing to do. Um. And he's given a post in Delhi in eighteen seven. I found a right up on him for the Irish news agency RTE, which notes Trevillian had a very successful career in India, including famously denouncing one of his superiors for bribery, a case which was held and led to the subsequent dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrook in eighteen twenty nine. This event established his credentials as a fearless and opinionated public servant who was not afraid to challenge his master's He was later appointed to the Political Department of the Government of India, working closely with the reformist Lord Bentwick, the Governor General of India, who later said of him that man is almost always on the right side and every question. And it is well that he is so, for he gives a most confounded deal of trouble when he happens to take the wrong one. So he is a principal man. He is very anti corruption, but he is also kind of incapable of seeing himself as being wrong. Yeah, I was like, what a what an interesting quote about a person. You want him to be more of like a goblin than he is in his earlier life, But he's not there, he's actually probably more understanding of Indian people and like injustices being done to them than he is to what's going to happen to the Irish, which is not a unique story. Weirdly enough, it happens sometimes. It's bizarre. Just yeah, it's like it's it's so yeah, it's it's like there's racism in both cases, right, There's they're races against Indians, but they're different kinds of racism, and there's kind of more of a like the the the Indians are like, are are kind of like our children, and like we have to take care of them, and they're they're like our beloved little like kids basically white man's whereas the Irish or these like violent quarrel quarrelsome like uh monsters kind of at least that's not entirely accurate. Like there's like there's different kinds of racism at work, right, and so a guy like Travelli In is probably a lot more understanding of problems that that Indian people are encountering. Right, That's why he's so anti corruption within the company that he will be about what's happening in Ireland. Um, but you know who's not racist. No, I don't. Actually we don't know who at all who's not racist? I mean you mean YouTube. I think it's a good safe safe I would say, really, if you want to be safe the products and services that support this podcast, because as as as products, they have no minds of their own and are thus incapable of the intentionality necessary for racism. You know, they do not have the institutional power to act any forces upon based upon their prejudice. It's fair to say that a mattress cannot be racist. But the Washington State Patrol, the Washington now that said, is a Washington State Highway patrol of the authority to enact on their thoughts. But if it's a mattress, you can feel confident knowing that that mattress will never commit a hate crime. Probably safe. Maybe I'm not going to say the same about oh we're back, so um yeah. The perfect example of like how two things too opposing things can be true about a person, you know what I'm saying, Like that which I'm finding so much more the more that I understand, like grow up and just become a more mature adult, just like this idea of like you can in in one part of your life, be understanding, welcoming, you know what I mean, and kind and at the same time of vicious monster. And it's like it's not it's not that you're protecting it hiding one side of you. It's just you're both. And it's like, like you say, like this the type of like racism that shows up in a person like that, which is difficult when you want to do when you want to make history be like comic books where you're One of the best examples of this is if you look at like if you you can find quotes from some of the Americans, and I'm assuming the same thing exist in some of the Russi and sources of people who liberated concentration camps. And we're also pretty anti Semitic, at least prior to that point. And like there was like a peard like Patton wrote some like weird because he was like had some real regressive attitudes towards Jewish people. But it also people could be capable of being racist and also look at Auschwitz and go what the fun But but that right, like because human beings contained multitudes anyway. Um, So Charles Travalli in um broadly speaking, one of the better employees of the British East India Company, probably from the perspective of a lot of people who are indigenous Indians. Not to again we're summing up a lot of history here, but but broadly speaking, not like not corrupt or anything like that. Certainly, So he marries this this broad Hannah McCauley, who was the daughter of one of the men who had helped to abolish slavery in the British Empire, which is like, if your family money comes from slave money, that's a nice way of of morally divvying up your inheritance, right, you know, marry somebody who helped en slavery. That's good. Um. And the two seem to love living on the subcontinent, so I I you get the feeling they probably would have been happy staying there for the rest of their careers. But in eighteen thirty eight they go back to have a vacation in England. And like, when you do that working for the company, it's like you're you're gone for a couple of years, right, because it ain't it's not easy to get to England in the eighteen forties. You don't like pop back for a holiday. Um, So they go back in eighteen thirty eight, and actually in eighteen forty, rather than go back to India, he gets a job as the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Um so again eighteen forty, not long before the potato blight's kind ahead. So he does a bunch of stuff while he's in that job. In those first kind of like five years, he reduces corruption. He one of the things he does is he creates some reforms government. Civil service jobs before travalion are heavily based on like who knows who, and who your family is and who your friends are, and he's a big part of actually changing that so that there's legitimate competition for civil service jobs, which is probably good. Um. Again, the civil service in this case is a ministering a British empire, so you could argue he's just making this horrible engine of blood work a bit better, which is fair to say to um. But the thing obviously that he's going to go down in history for doing is the fact that because he's the Assistant Treasury Secretary or whatever, he is effectively the management the guy in charge of the government's purse strict for any kind of relief efforts in Ireland. He's going to be the dude in charge of of of that. He's going to basically be the point man for Irish relief UM, even though there is like there's a relief agency and he's not heading that, but he's like, you know, he's the money man essentially. UM. His primary concerns then when it came, when this, when this, when the potato crops start to fail, when people start to go hungry. His primary concern when he's looking at AID is to limit British financial exposure in funding relief for starving people. UM. He also wants to be the fact that he's anti corruption. He's really obsessed with the fact that people might get AID that they don't deserve. UM. That like government funds might go to people who are like conning the government out of it. UM, which is like not a non issue, right, like a lot of COVID money like got Condata people like yeah, yeah, yeah, you should care about that. But him carrying it is part of what leads him to adopt this really lazi fair economic policy UM towards famine relief, because the safest way to make sure nobody scams AID money is for them to not be aid money. Yeah, yeah, it's the it's the same, Robert, it's all the same. That's the yeah. Yeah, And like we're not going to get into this a lot, but like one of the characteristics of this period is like they pass work schemes because you can't just give people money to take care of themselves. They have to work for it, and so they have. But for a variety of complex reasons, having people do things that would actually have improved life or infrastructure in Ireland is not popular. So a lot of the aid schemes take the form of paying people to build roads to nowhere. A lot of dumb ship gets done. Do that, Yeah, let's build a road. We don't need a road, no one needs in the middle of nowhere. A bunch of dumb sh it happens like that. Um so because of men like these, like all of these guys, we've gone over Peel again. This Prime Minister who does the Indian corn deal, he has to be really careful with all this stuff. So again he's able to avoid running a foul of the corn laws. With this initial he imports a hundred thousand pounds sterling worth of corn, and he's able to avoid running a foul of the corn laws um, and it's worth noting in terms of how easy it would have been to stop massive starvation and death. The loss of the potato crop in Etive is estimated at three and a half million pounds. A hundred thousand pounds worth of imported corn is able to stop mass famine that year. It does not take a lot, like it does not take a ton um. But Peel's actions cause outrage among his fellow Conservatives. He had himps to repeal the corn laws because again he's like, this isn't going to stop after a year. We we have to like take some more proactive steps. And the resistance to this is so titanic that he retires in December of eighteen forty five. He's like, I can't, I can't get anywhere with this, Like this is nuts. The Duke of Wellington, who's the guy who beats Napoleon and is his friend, says I have never witnessed such agony as what he sees Peele go through trying to get these corn laws repealed. He is sort of successful. They do kind of repeal these laws, but it's debatable as to how much it helps, because a bunch of other ship gets done that like kind of minimizes whatever. You know, it doesn't work as well as it should have worked. Um. So when Peel quits, he's like, funk this ship. I'm I'm out. Queen Queen Victoria brings in a member of the opposition, Lord John Russell, and she asks him to form an administration and I'm not gonna English parliamentary politics are always very frustrating. It doesn't work, and Peel gets brought in for six months or so before Russell finally does succeed informing a government. For most of the famine that follows, Russell's government is the one that's in charge. Um. And so guys like Coogan will generally say that, like Peel did all right at famine relief, um, but Russell is where things really got nasty. Now, other analogies I found will point out that like a lot of the economic policies that were that were used with such disaster in responding to the famine were things that Peel had helped to set up prior to the famine, and that he actually deserves a lot of blame for why it. It's just that once it started he was more reasonable. But he did lay a lot of the groundwork for why it got so bad. So I don't want to be like pretending he was just purely a positive figure the past, you know, But I'm like, this was a solvable problem, Like every time I hear someone like it really was. It was not beyond their meats, would not this would not have been a blip in history, like it it's an easy problem. You hear about stuff like the bubonic play right, which kills just this nightmarish chunk of the population, and it's like, yeah, looking back in history, we can say, well, if this had been seen to that everything, it wouldn't have been as bad. But based on their knowledge at the time and the level of resources, it's like, I can't I'm not like, you can't really be like someone engineered this to be so bad, Like no, it was just like a thing. It was a it was a thing that hit that they were not they were not ever going to deal with well, you know, because there just was not possible. It's just a plagues happen, you know, um and there have been in the past. Again, part of why a lot of Irish people get really angry at calling it the potato famine. Is that like there have been real famines in the fast there's just no food. You know. This is not that there was plenty of food being made, you know. Um So yeah, um So, during this kind of interregnum period almost where Peel quits, but then he's back because Russell can't form a government during this period of time. Um how to deal with the famine becomes the chief question acts of English leaders because from eighteen forty six, the plague, the blight only gets worse and it becomes clear that like we have to figure out a longer term solution to this, like we're we're this is not going to get better anytime soon. Um So. Travellion travels to Ireland himself during this period to like see what's going on. Um and he kind of, you know, he does this thing that you see shitty journalists do where he like goes to the place where the bad thing is happening, and then he only hangs around rich people and just kind of writes down whatever they say about what's happening to poor people in Ireland. Um And he's very pleased that when he goes to Ireland he does not encounter anything that makes him feel differently about the plague or about the famine. So his conclusion is that, um, we shouldn't do anything right. That there's there's there's this is like the Irish people's fault and you've just got to kind of let this run his course. Um. And while this is happening, that guy O'Connell we talked about, right, O'Connell still in Parliament. He is old and kind of sick at this point, he's passed his prime. He's not capable of like really working to the same extent that he had, but he's desperately trying to get Parliament to do something right. It is not the case that everyone in Parliament is just like asleep at the wheel. And he's part of like a coalition in Parliament who's like, we've got to do something and TRAVELI in rites this basically open letter type thing, um, where he's like, uh, O'Connell is a demagogue who's trying to stir up trouble and it's going to be fine. Just just don't we don't got to deal with this ship. Um. Near the end of eighteen forty five, O'Connell gets together a group of nobles and parliamentarians to suggest that the government adopt emergency measures. These included stopping the export of food and allowing food to be imported to free of taxes. Right, pretty reasonable seeming solution. Um. O'Connell also wants a tax on landlords to fund a public works program that will give people jobs so they can afford food. Right, he's he's like, Okay, you don't want people getting shipped for free. What if we tax landlords to fund the public works program and then they and buy food and pay their rent. Um. This pisses off an awful lot of people. So the guy they have to go to for whatever reason of parliamentary ship, there's a dude they have to bring this proposal to to try to get him to introduce it in parliament. He's a he's a motherfucker named Lord Hatesbury. Yeah it's hyeah, but like hates Burry, I'm assuming yeah, yeah, this is Lord racism. It's done. Um, you've got this moment prop where you the this this guy O'Connell. You know this this kind of near the end of his life when he's sort of fading in his powers as a politician, but he's still got like all of this. He's kind of the he's the only he's really like the only Catholic Irish person with any kind of power, right um. And he gets together this group of nobles and parliamentarians to try to push this raft of emergency measures um, including like stopping the export of food. Allowing food to be imported to Ireland free of tacks is like really basic ship right again, He's if you wanted to kind of put this in modern terms, he's not like a far left revolutionary. He's like one of those like progressive kinds of democrat type dudes where he's like he doesn't want to end he's not trying to end the system of landlord I mean, and O'Connell is personally more radical than that. But these moves are not super radical. Like he's not saying we should up end the landlording system and give everyone the land that they live on and like change this. He's saying, like what if we did these very basic things to stop them from starving to death? Right? Like, these are not radical change minimum that there needs to be a term called that very and I think honestly O'Connell is more of one, um. But but he's he's also very pragmatic, right, and he's old too. He has tried the more radical ship. He did try to like separate Ireland from England. That ship failed. So now he's just like, can we tax the landlords to fund a public works program so people can afford to buy food? Right? Like you know, which is fair enough? Like what it like? It's not like anything did work in this period of the rich. Yeah, I'm not gonna blame the guy for trying more moderate. There's a fun moment with this dude O'Connell. Fun not the the right word, but if I'm remembering correctly, this is just something I read. It's not in the script, but like there's a moment when he's talking about trying to end the Act of Union and separate Ireland in the UK, and some some like poor peasant Farmer sees him and like calls him the liberator and he's like, is this what you do for a living? And the guy's like yeah, and he's like, then why do you care? Like your life's not going to change at all if we there're still going to be rich people lording over you and stuff. So I think he is he is personally like he's pretty aware of things, but he's also very much let's see what we can do within the confines of this system kind of dude. So, for whatever reason, British Parliamentary Ship, neither of us are experts on that, and it's not really important. The guy who has to make the suggestions in Parliament or whatever to try and get this this series of emergency measures together is a dude named Lord hate Spury. Um. Yeah, yeah, and I know that, yeah h E y t E s. But it is it is funny because he's pretty hateful, um my lord. So he yeah, they send this like very modest list of requests to him, and he's like the absolutely the funk not. Um, yes, yeah, of course. And his justification is and this will sound familiar to anyone who's lived through a plague in the last couple of years. Um. I don't know who that applies to, but I'm sure a couple of people. He's like, look, yeah, some of the information about this famine sounds really bad, but some people like Travellion are saying it's fine. So we can't know whether or not it's a problem, and we shouldn't do anything until we get more information. Listen, listen, I can see out my window because Ireland is a mile and a half away. Yeah, it is thirty ft to the left. Yes, but this fool saying is not that. So there's no way of knowing. It's not like any of us could just go to Ireland. Yeah we couldn't. I mean, well, no Travallion went to Ireland, he says, it's all right. Oh yeah, the hommy win he said it was cool. Yeah, oh my lord, it's very it's not funny, but it's you know, yeah, we can't know. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta hold up, we gotta hold up's wait for some more info. Is ron Bergen so in the well the direct translation has been lost in time. It means Saint diego. Yeah, so eighteen forty six, um, you know, you have eighteen forty five, you lose like a third of the crop thereabouts, and then people have to eat a lot of their seed potatoes and stuff, and so eighteen forty six they plant what little they have. But the potato bug moves in again right that where it's not really a bug, it's a fungus, but like it hits again, and it hits really hard this time, and that year the harvest fails pretty much entirely. Basically, a lot of people get nothing right, a lot of folks get absolutely meaningfully nothing um, and a lot of because they're starving. So one of the fund up things about this, if you've ever seen like potatoes that have gotten affected by this, they often you could like pull them out of the ground and they'll look fine, like they look like a normal potato, and then you like grab them and they'll just like mush apart in your hands, and it it's this reeking, filthy, rotting goop soup of potato stuff. It's nasty and it's no nutritional value in this, but people are so desperate that they eat them that there, and of course that gets people sick when some people guy as a result of that and stuff. But like that's the level of desperation they are, where like there's this rotting, massive potato and you're like, fuck it, let's try um, or maybe we can try and cut a piece off and maybe that'll be a little bit you know. Um. People are very desperate. And of course this is so bad that like last year, people have to eat their seed potatoes right in order to like make ends meat and get something in their bellies this year, so little gets harvested at all that there's just not seed potatoes for a lot of people. Right, Um, so there's not only did the crop fail, but people are like, what the funk are we gonna plan next year? You know. Even so, even as desperate as the situation is, the government holds against the idea of of stopping the export of food, right, and their justification is that the Irish grain, so the grain that these people who are starving grew, is more expensive than they can afford. They can't afford to pay for the grain that they grew, they just grew that they grew, They can't afford that. So if it's kept in country, the government's going to have to have to subsidize its purchase in order for people Irish people to afford the grain that again they grew, that wetzel like this just the oh gosh, this is again. This is why Irish people get so pissed when it is referred to as a potato famine, because there's no fucking famine. Really, like there's a famine and like, yes, people are starving to death, but like there shouldn't have been, Like it wasn't that all of the food failed, you know, dog? Yeah, it just yeah, how are you? Yeah? Man, just the getting the getting the words out of your brain with a straight face to be like, well, I mean they can't afford they can't afford it, so we can't get Yeah, what do we what are we gonna do? We're gonna do dogs, I can't afford it. And it's like I can't afford what what they just gave us? What are we gonna do? Pay people to stay home so the plague doesn't spread? Absolutely not not, it doesn't. You know. Elite logic is similar in all times. It's just the same. And again I'm like, you're this is the longest, most horrible route to a very simple solution. It's just over why you can just be like, hey, look tell you what next month, just keep just just keep the grain. Okay, just keep the grain and we'll we'll we'll build back next month. Okay, just keep the grain. Is month will be cool. Well that's the thing, like O'Connell suggesting there's a way to deal with this that keeps the elites in power. If that's your concern, where you're like, hey, you know what, government's going to pay your rent un till this thing's over. You know, we got you that way. Your landlords are still in charge. We're not sucking up the system. They get to stay. But that it would be too much, and it's so stupid because I'm just like, what the hell you care? Whose name on the check? Don't you just want? One of the people who really cares is Charles Travelli in Um and he is firm that you cannot subsident you can't prohibit exports, and you can't subsidize the purchase of the grain that was grown in Ireland. He writes, do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports. Perfect free trade is the right course. I'm just like, okay, why like why just like tell tell me why? So just okay. It's because anytime you hear people talking about lazi, fair economics, free market ship, Adam Smith, it's a religion, you know, it is a religion. It's a religion. Everything is. But when you when you say okay, when you look at like this is another reason why like I had I had such a hard time like like passing these exams, because when you say, when you build an economic model, you build it on you know that the mythical average man. Yeah, so this is the average man. So who is the average man? He's thirty two point one years old, he's got two point five children and three and a half like pets, and and I'm like, the person you're modeling your whole model off doesn't exist. That's not no one has two point five kids. So I'm like, how are you setting? How is this? I don't understand how you can think any of this makes any sense if you building your model off a person that will never be. But you're but you're setting everybody. And I'm like, I get what you're saying, well when you average all this stuff out, but but listen to yourself, like you're what do you mean average that your model is for? It is for a made up person that could never exist in real life because nobody again I can't swess this, and this is nobody got two and a half kids. This is the thing where it it is, It gets to it's it's not rational, right. These people are very obsessed with the idea of like rationality and that this is a science, but it's not because when problems of reality can conflict with what they believe about economics, they are incapable of adapting to that change your model. Yeah, not everyone is same thing with like anything, Like with a normal religion, there are some people who like are raised believing something and then like they reached something conflicts and they managed to without losing their faith. Adapted Peel might be a good example, that first Prime Minister who is very much in with this Lasa fair stuff, but when the disaster hits, he makes alterations because he sees that, like, not everyone is this way, but a lot of these guys like Travalian are. They cannot countants violating some of these economic principles that they believe in um And maybe you could argue that they just really hate Irish people and want to get rid of them, and that's the justification, right. And I'm like you prexellent, all this ridiculous stuff just to say what we already know about you. And I'm just like you, Okay, you just hate them. You don't think they humans, and you frustrated that they actually need food to give you what you need, and you ain't health them motive, you just you hate them. Yeah, I just you doing all this stuff that you and I both know sitting across here, what the hell you say? And don't make no sense? You know it, don't you know? A don't so just but you're gonna keep making it makes sense rather than just saying oh yeah yeah. And that's that's where we're gonna leave for part two. And when part three starts up, things are gonna get real unpleasant, real quick. But prop, yes, before we hit that that moment you want to plug some plug doubles, I do, man, Uh, I am all my all my socials. I am PROP hip hop. Although I've been called before prop e hop and I'm like they're putting the P with the H. So they're prop because you're the professor of of of of hip hip hop apparently. Uh, I don't know how, y'all. I don't know how, y'all? What or whatever? Prop hip hop dot com And again at there's a Music and Books and hood politics pod. Uh yeah, I saw that, saw things all right. We'll check that out and uh check out Ireland when it's possible to go places without the plague. It's it's pretty nice, pretty nice spot. I am, oh Galway, good Town and trim Coast, lovely, A lot of good stuff in Ireland. Fast oh I do like Belfast it is. It is the city. I've been there twice, and both times I have been to Belfast, there just happened to be riots for different unrelated reasons. I love Belfast it is. It is a thing that happens a lot in Belfast. Love it like I've never met nobody. Yes, we're supposed to be closing this show, but I can't say it is like the way I've always felt like. It's very simple, Like Belfast remind me of Long Beach in a sense that I've never met somebody from that city that I didn't like. Well, I was just like, I don't know what it is about your city, but you just make very likable people. You're dangerous, say it like you you are. I know that you could somewhere in that smile. It's into humor is a old blood and murder. Yeah, there's there's a town. As a town. You are good at making Molotov cocktails. That's what I'm trying to say. People. A lot of people with experience melting British armored vehicles anyway. Podcast