Irish Build Memorial to Choctaws Who Helped in Famine 160 years ago (Today's good news)

[PatrickforO]

14. The potato famine began in 1846 and for three successive harvests,

nearly the entire potato crop turned into a stinking black goo in the ground. Over 1 million Irish people starved.

What means so much about the Choctaw donation is that the British and Irish capitalists were STILL exporting grain from Ireland during this period in spite of the widespread starvation. Debt ridden Irish landlords got rid of their destitute tenant farmers by evicting them and then paying for them to cross the sea in coffin ships. At least 275,000 Irish emigrants died in those ships from disease and lack of food and water. They were called coffin ships because so many died. One story has it that sharks followed the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.

It started with Oliver Cromwell who invaded Ireland in 1649 and left a bloody trail across the land. He crushed all resistance by 1650, then evicted Irish farmers from their land all across the east coast and in northern Ireland and when they asked him where they should go, he is purported to have said, "Go to hell...or Connaught."

The laws the Irish lived under weren't designed to protect them; rather they were meant to exploit them and to extort the uttermost farthing of profit from an already poor populace. No one in power cared about the Irish. The feeling was they should starve because they were lazy anyway.

This is why the Choctaw gift meant so much. It isn't the amount, it is that they cared enough for another oppressed people to try and help. Bless them!