Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak on this Bill and the event it seeks to commemorate on a regular day each year. The Great Famine was an event of earth-shattering and tragic significance and long-lasting consequence for this entire country. Its impact still reverberates today. It fundamentally altered the historical trajectory of this country and had devastating human consequences for those who fell victim to it. It is also the first example of a particular type of famine unique to the modern era. Therefore, there are lessons in the Great Famine and the reasons it occurred which, if not learnt, will mean that such events will continue to be repeated. Tragically, they are repeated again and again across the world because we have failed to understand fully what happened in the Great Famine and what led to it. This has not only caused tragedy for this country, but also has allowed for similar tragedies to be repeated again and again in different countries across the world.

I wish to dwell on this point but I should first pay tribute to those who have campaigned for this national day of commemoration for the Famine. I was not aware - perhaps I should have been - that other Bills on this matter have been brought forward. I do not know the truth of the matter but, if true, it is a little strange that the Government rejected a Bill of the same character only a short while ago. If this is true, the Government should acknowledge it and acknowledge it was a mistake. I hope petty politicking was not at play. People can give their explanations later. I do not know the truth of the matter so I will not prejudge it, but it would be terrible if petty politicking played any part in establishing a national day of commemoration for the Great Famine.

Deputy Paul Murphy sends his regrets that he is not able to be here. He asked me specifically to give a shout-out to the Committee for the Commemoration of Irish Famine Victims as a committee that has been campaigning for many years for the Famine to be commemorated properly and for a day to be established on which that commemoration would take place. I therefore pay tribute to those who have campaigned for this, and they are absolutely right in doing so. Not only was it an event of enormous, earth-shattering significance for this country, as I said, but it also has a significance for the world we live in today. This is so important because of the human tragedy of a million people losing their lives through hunger, disease and exposure.

One million people were forced out of the country in those years - made exiles and refugees from their own land - and the population of the country was slashed in half over decades.

Of enormous significance beyond that immediate human tragedy is the fact that it was unnecessary. This was the first famine of its type. Famines had happened previously but what is unique is that for the first time, a famine occurred amidst plenty. It did not happen because the level of technological, economic and social development was not great enough to ensure sustenance for all of the people. That had been true in previous periods and epochs. At times, notwithstanding that, there were great divisions in the distribution of wealth and inequality, there were objective problems with humanity's capacity to feed all citizens. At the time of the Irish Famine and the advent of modern capitalist society this was not the problem. This famine occurred under the rule of the wealthiest country in the world. It had an enormous empire. This famine was not a natural disaster, it was a man made disaster and was the result of a misguided belief in a particular view of political economy, laissez faireeconomics, what we now call market economics. We have still not broken our addiction to this when addressing the great levels of poverty, inequality, homelessness, suffering, hardship and so on that affect billions of citizens across the world. Those people needlessly suffer and die from malnutrition, starvation, exposure and a lack of water and medicine, something that has become a feature of the past 200 years - the wealthiest period in the history of civilisation. The Irish Famine was the first example of that obscenity, that 1 million people could die even when there was more than enough food and wealth to ensure that did not happen. That is what is shocking, obscene and extraordinary about it.

The British very reluctantly spent £7 million on famine relief. That did not avert the disaster. To put it in context, in 1833, some years previously, the British spent £20 million on compensating slave owners when slavery was abolished. They did not compensate the slaves but they spent three times as much as they spent on the Famine on compensating slave owners to protect the interests of property and the wealthy. Shortly after the Famine, the British spent £70 million, ten times more than they were willing to spend on famine relief, on the Crimean war in order to ensure the power of the Empire. When an Irish delegation visited Lord Russell to appeal for more help during the Famine, he told them he could not give them more support and quoted at them Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. That is extraordinary. Adam Smith's philosophy was that government could not interfere with, or in the modern parlance of the EU, distort the market. That would be a greater crime than allowing people to die and another 1 million be driven off the land. Racism was another significant feature of the unwillingness of the British Empire and the ruling elite, ably assisted by some of the big Catholic farmers and middle men here in Ireland. They assisted in the evictions and used the catastrophe of the famine as an opportunity. They took advantage of this extraordinary human misery to clear and consolidate the land of big farmers and land owners for profit and money while 1 million died and a million were driven off the land. It could not be more important to upscale the commemoration of the Famine, not just as a historical curiosity or something in the far distant past of our history but as something that echoes today in the continuing misery, famine, hardship, suffering, starvation that millions across the world suffer, that is totally unnecessary when eight individuals own as much wealth as half the world's population.

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