One of Curmie’s friends recently posted on his Facebook page a link to a New York Times article entitled “Debunking a Myth: The Irish Were Not Slaves, Too.” Exactly what prompted him to do so, I can’t say. The article is over three years old, after all (it was published in 2017 on St. Patrick’s Day—isn’t that cute?). Perhaps its contents were news to Curmie’s friend. Perhaps he was responding to a recent spate of false claims about Irish slavery that eluded Curmie’s attention. Perhaps someone else posted it and Curmie’s friend thought it was interesting. Doesn’t matter.
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| A depiction of an 18th century Irish wake. |
Here’s what does matter. No legitimate scholar of Irish history believes that the Irish were ever slaves. Not one. This is important. Minority opinions are the essence of scholarship. Virtually any seasoned scholar has written a book, an article, a chapter, or a conference paper that challenges accepted beliefs. That’s what scholars do. Curmie may believe that William Shakespeare really did write those plays attributed to him, but there are some very smart and well-educated people who think otherwise; some are Curmie’s personal friends, whom he respects as both scholars and as people. And Curmie has his own minority beliefs—about the impetus for the Dionysian Festival, the demographics of Shakespeare’s audience, and the dramatic strategies of some early 20th century female playwrights, for example. But in the real world of scholarship, what motivates every argument against Conventional Wisdom is founded on the search for truth. Not so in this case.
This is not to say that the Irish were not mistreated—more on that below. But the two sides of this story—what the Irish endured and what they did not—both resonate in terms of the two major stories of 2020: the BLM-associated anti-racism demonstrations inspired by the killing of George Floyd, and the pitiful US response to the looming (and now pandemic) spread of COVID-19. As of this writing, the US accounts for over 25% of the worldwide deaths from the virus despite our many economic advantages and having only barely over 4% of the world's population. India, for example, has over four times the US population and less than 1/7 of our COVID-19 deaths.
The conflation of Irish indentured servitude (which did indeed exist) and slavery is overwhelmingly discredited, and much of the so-called “evidence” is readily disproven. The Times article, for example, points out that:
Many of the memes use photographs, including of Jewish Holocaust victims or 20th century child laborers, to illustrate events they claim happened in the 17th century, long before the invention of photography. Many reference a nonexistent 1625 proclamation by King James II, who was not born until 1633.
In 2016, group of actual scholars denounced in an open letter the “disinformation” published by a range of journals and websites: “The intent… is thus patently clear; to insidiously equate indentured servitude or penal servitude with racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery.” Irish historian Liam Hogan is even more blunt, describing the “Irish slavery” argument as “racist ahistorical propaganda,” and the claim that Irish women were forced to procreate with African slaves not merely as lacking any evidence, but “part racialised sadomasochistic fantasy and part old white supremacist myth.”
And that, Gentle Reader, is the key. Curmie likes to think of himself as having at least average imagination, and he cannot construct any scenario for the perpetration and perpetuation of the myth of Irish slavery other than racism in its most insidious form. The argument, you see, is that the Irish were slaves, too—indeed, according to some of the more fallacious memes, they were treated even worse than African slaves (!)—and Irish-Americans “got over it,” so Black folks should, too. This calculated mendacity is nothing more or less than an attempt to discredit the notion that African-Americans have suffered disproportionately in America for four centuries.
What is true, of course, is that the history of Ireland reveals centuries-long subjugation by the English. This short essay doesn’t pretend to be a complete course in Irish history, but if you’re interested, Gentle Reader, hie thee to the Google machine and check out Poyning’s Law, or the Penal Laws, or the siege of Drogheda, or even the origins of the term “beyond the Pale.” One of the great lines in Irish history was delivered by nationalist hero Michael Collins, who was chastised for arriving seven minutes late to the ceremony formally handing over Dublin Castle to the new Irish Free State: “We've been waiting over 700 years, you can have the extra seven minutes.”
But there’s one moment in the harrowing history of Ireland that resonates particularly today: the so-called “famine” of the 1840s. Curmie puts scare-quotes around the word famine because there was in fact a lot of food produced in Ireland at the time. In “Black ’47,” the worst year of what many of Curmie’s Irish friends rightly call instead the “Great Hunger,” Ireland produced nearly 700 pounds of grain, mostly oats and wheat, per capita. Yes, really. (Curmie’s source is an article by Thomas P. O’Neill in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. It’s behind a paywall; you’ll have to trust Curmie on this one.) True, both oats and winter wheat were regarded as primarily fodder for animals, but the grass eaten in desperation by many peasant farmers in the west wasn’t exactly designated as the centerpiece of a healthy diet for humans, either.
Curmie’s real point is this: England was perfectly capable of relieving at least some of the starvation in Ireland. They simply chose not to do so. No one suggests that the English intentionally initiated the potato blight, although their economic structures certainly contributed heavily to Irish over-reliance on the potato crop. And there is little if any evidence that England actively sought to deny food to the Irish even as millions starved, although pressure from England did lead to the closing of some soup kitchens. Rather, Britain did nothing when they could have helped, thereby passively signing death warrants for their own subjects.
If, Gentle Reader, you are now drawing parallels to the Trump administration’s slothful laissez-faire response to the COVID-19 pandemic, you’re following Curmie’s line of reasoning. The parallel becomes clearer when we understand that Charles Trevelyan, the British baronet charged with administering the crisis, truly believed the Irish brought the crisis on themselves, arguing that “the judgment of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people, and as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise.”
He took the laissez-faire attitude to extremes, arguing in a letter to Lord Monteagle that the famine provided an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population.” There’s a good deal of debate in Irish history circles as to whether Trevelyan was truly the monster he’s often portrayed as being. His defenders suggest that he really did do what he thought was best in prioritizing the stability of the English economy over the lives of millions of Irish men, women, and children. Curmie, however, finds his actions an ideal example of the “depraved indifference to human life” definition often associated with murder in the second degree. About a million counts. And a lot of people, including Curmie, would say the callous disrespect for science, the emphasis on economic over health concerns, the months-long delay in doing literally anything in response to news about COVID-19, and the refusal to accept responsibility for either their own actions or non-actions by the Trump administration seem a pretty good parallel.
There’s one more resemblance. Who died in Ireland in the 1840s? Mostly poor people. Who today are being disproportionately exposed to the virus? “Essential workers”: delivery drivers, Amazon workers, waitstaff and bartenders, Walmart clerks… and, again disproportionately, people of color. Not the rich, or even the upper middle class. Certainly not the folks who really consider themselves and their buddies “essential,” as evidenced by their outrageous salaries and benefit packages. (You have to pay for talent, after all...) Rather, those most risking exposure fall into two categories: health care workers (and other emergency personnel including, yes, cops) who are being exploited for their skills, and a veritable army of those doing low-paying jobs for no extra remuneration and often a lack of even base-level safety precautions: the people regarded as expendable by the economic elite, in other words. Ironically, the social Darwinists who believe the poor are poor because they deserve to be are the same folks who regard actual Darwinism (you know, science) as a liberal myth because… Jesus.
Curmie is lucky. The pandemic will cost him several thousand dollars in lost salary, but it’s a financial hit he can sustain. The people who are truly living paycheck to paycheck aren’t able to turn down a risky or under-paying job. Plus, of course, it’s the airlines, the banks, and the cruise ships that are getting government support. A pittance is being handed out to actual workers, and some industries—like the one Curmie has spent his entire adult life training people to enter—are crippled to the point that they may never return, at least in the forms we know. Workers in the performing arts, like the 19th century Irish, are to be valued only to the extent that their labor can be exploited for the gain of someone else.
The Blacks and the Irish have much in common, in other words. Chattel slavery isn’t among those intersections, but there are plenty of others. And facts—what the Irish did and did not endure, for example—all tend to fit together into larger narrative, which is why we should know about the parts: so we can better understand the whole.
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