Ethnic cleansing in Ireland in one form or another is the basis of British rule in Occupied Ireland dating back to 1169. The racist British laws of 1367 were called the “Statute of Kilkenny” prohibiting marriage between the British and Irish under pain of death. The British regarded the Irish as subhuman, indeed some still do and while forced emigration today is their form of ethnically cleansing neo-colonial Ireland, in the 1840's there was systematic calculated British organized Holocaust that created a "disappearance" of 6,257,456 Irish persons which British mentored revisionist historians, airbrushed from history down to a million to a million and a half in one of the greatest examples of history being written by the victors, to hide British genocide and their holocaust in Ireland
Since British war crimes against the Irish are so numerous and their crimes against humanity so frequent, it would require a library to record all of it properly. This article is but a brief summary. When the Briish Oliver Cromwell came to Ireland, he celebrated his carnage of ethnic cleansing from the start, with statements like, “It has pleased God to bless our endeavors,” as he finished the mass slaughter in 1649 of 3,552 Irish inhabitants, after his arrival at the seaport town of Drogheda, arrogantly further declaring, “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.” The Drogheda massacre was just the start of a British policy of ethnic cleansing in Ireland. Cromwellian settlements followed with millions of acres of land, as in 26 percent of Down, 34 percent of Armagh, 38 percent of Monaghan being just an example of lands, re-allocated to English settlers. The owners of Irish birth were murdered or forced to Connacht in the west of Ireland, with the battle cry of, "to hell or to Connacht." where “they would starve to death.” Cromwell's biographer wrote, “by far the most wholesale effort to impose on Ireland the Protestant faith and English ascendancy.”
In just three years, one-third of the population of Ireland was destroyed with thousands of Irish boys and girls, sold into slavery in the West Indies. Irish peasants were forced to pay rent, with home grown industries destroyed, because they “competed with British factories.” The first holocausts under Elizabeth I and Cromwell are forever in the psyche of the Irish race, with Cromwell’s British thinking being, that Irish Catholics are “barbarous wretches” unfortunately, passing onto the British mindset. The British Parliament legitimized the crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing when it stated “The House doth approve the execution done at Drogheda, as an act both of justice to them and mercy to others who may be warned by it.”
When the forces of William of Orange won the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, it was followed by more confiscations of Irish land and the notorious “Penal Laws” of the late 1690s, with the stated intent, “The law does not presume any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.” Over time there were more failed, rebellions in Ireland. In 1845 the potato crop was blighted and a famine started which became the Irish genocide or holocaust in the manner of British management. Thomas Gallagher described this unspeakable British crime in Paddy’s Lament in the following manner. “A famine unprecedented in the history of the world, a chapter in human misery to harrow the human heart, was about to start, and even little children could see its quick, sure approach in the nakedly fearful eyes and faces of their parents.”
While, “Food, from 30 to 50 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint from Ireland by 12,000 British constables, reinforced by 200,000 British soldiers, warships, excise vessels, and coast guards... Britain seized from Ireland’s producers tens of millions of head of livestock, tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry and dairy products-enough to sustain 18-million persons.” While 6,257,456 Irish persons starved to death and some others emigrated, the British occupied and aggravated the situation in Ireland for profit, to prevent famine from potato blight in England and most of all to systematically proceed to ethnically cleanse Ireland of native Gaelic Irish people.
A British journalist of the time, Thomas Carlyle, boasted, "Ireland is like a half-starved rat that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it - by heavens - squelch it." "Total Annihilation;" screamed the Times leader of September 2, 1846 and its editor boasted in 1848 "A Celt will soon be as rare on the banks of the Shannon as the red man on the banks of Manhattan." On 23 March 1849 Villiers was awarded the order of the Garter by the queen of England for ethnically cleansing Ireland so effectively, departing from the usual practice, desired him not to surrender the insignia of the Bath, as he had so fully merited both distinctions.
Author Chris Fogarty placed the numbers “murdered at approximately just 5.16 million people, making it the Irish holocaust.” Distinguished legal scholars, like Professors Charles Rice of Notre Dame University and Francis Boyle, University of Illinois, believe that under International Law, the British pursued a barbarous policy of mass starvation in Ireland from 1845-50, and that such conduct constituted “genocide.” Generally speaking among objective historians, the net population-loss figure of 6,257,456 is not susceptible to any significant challenge, because it derived directly from the British government's own censuses for Ireland at that time which was considerably understated to equate the numbers who otherwise emigrated.
Based on reparations agreed after World War II, according to the Potsdam conference and subsequent reparations made by Germany for the smaller Nazi Holocaust, relative to Britain's Holocaust in Ireland and a US$350 billion calculation in Iraq, a figure of 6 trillion pounds sterling ($10 trillion), is a conservative figure for British reparations with regard to their Holocaust in Ireland. Irish citizens are still waiting for their Neo-colonial governments to take up the cause of the Irish people a the UN fro Holocaust reparations.
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