"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."
– Oscar Wilde, Intentions (1891) ‘The Critic as Artist’ pt. 1
8 ESSAYS by James V. Mullin
The following selection of articles on revisionism in Irish history were written by James V. Mullin, author of The Great Irish Famine Curriculum (pdf).
James V. Mullin
Born: Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1946)
Bachelors in English, University of Iowa
Masters in Library Science and Information Studies, UC Berkeley.
Law Librarian, Prison Teacher, Curriculum developer,
Progressive Leftist Humanist
Vietnam Veteran (non-combatant)
James V. Mullin  |
 |
INDEX
Introduction
Selected Essays by James Mullin
1/
Irish Famine Education and the Holocaust "Straw Man"
James Mullin
July 08, 2008
2/
History as Propaganda: The BBC's "Great Irish Famine" Dissected
James Mullin
July 14, 2008
3/
Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers
James Mullin
May 16, 2008
4/
The End of Celtic Christianity in Ireland
James Mullin
January 16, 2008
5/
Roman vs Celtic Christianity: 410 to 813 A.D.
James Mullin
September 12, 2006
6/
Of Original Sin and Irish Heresy
James Mullin
September 12, 2006
7/
Out Of Africa, Out Of Ireland
by James Mullin
August 20, 2002
8/
The New Jersey Famine Curriculum: A Report
by James Mullin
Spring/Summer 2002
Introduction
Remembering the Great Irish Famine – 1845-1852
An Gorta Mór – aka The Great Hunger, Irish Potato Famine, and Irish Genocide.
The 1841 census showed the Irish population at 8,175,124.
40 years later, the 1881 census showed the population had fallen by 37% - over 3 million, to 5,174,836. The Irish population continued to fall to 4,228,553 by 1926.
Food Exports from Ireland – 1846-47
According to a report by world renowned Irish famine expert, Professor Christine Kinealy,
"Almost 4000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland: Ballina, Balyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins (a small cask), each one holding nine gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, some 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the famine."
– Christine Kinealy, ‘A Death-Dealing Famine’: The Great Hunger in Ireland 1997, pp. 32-36
and,
“While it was evident that the government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering, the particular nature of the actual response, especially following 1846, suggests a more covert (secrets agenda and motivation. As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population control and the consolidation of property through various means, including emigration . . .
Despite the overwhelming evidence of prolonged distress caused by successive years of potato blight, the underlying philosophy of the relief efforts was that they should be kept to a minimalist level; in fact they actually decreased as the Famine progressed.”
– Christine Kinealy, The Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52, Roberts Reinhart, Boulder, 1995, p. 352-3
~ On Brehon Law
The Lost Legal System:
Pre-Common Law Ireland and the Brehon Law (2011)
By Dr Noelle Higgins
Abstract
Prior to the adoption of common law in Ireland, a native legal system, known as Brehon law, had applied throughout the country. This legal system dated from Celtic times and was passed down orally from generation to generation. It was written down for the first time in the seventh century and survived until the seventeenth century when it was finally replaced by the common law. The Brehon law system was highly complex and sophisticated. Rights were accrued based on societal status and punishment / restitution was based on the status of the person against whom an offence was committed. The legal system was administered by judges but the legal system was essentially self-enforcing with no prisons or police force. This paper will describe the roots of the Brehon legal system and its primary actors and will compare it to the common law system. It will analyse its main facets and subjects and will trace its development through Irish history up until it was finally supplanted as the legal system of Ireland by the common law in the seventeenth century.
~ The ultimate "Malthusian catastrophe"
English priest and economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) outlined his theories on population growth in 1798: "An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society [Archived]” was cited as a key influence by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection which led to Britain's first foray into colonialism - in Ireland - leading to The Great Irish Famine.
Britannica biography:
Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer:
Excerpt: In 1798, Malthus published anonymously the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. The work received wide notice. Briefly, crudely, yet strikingly, Malthus argued that infinite human hopes for social happiness must be vain, for population will always tend to outrun the growth of production. The increase of population will take place, if unchecked, in a geometric progression, while the means of subsistence will increase in only an arithmetic progression. Population will always expand to the limit of subsistence. Only “vice” (including “the commission of war”), “misery” (including famine or want of food and ill health), and “moral restraint” (i.e., abstinence) could check this excessive growth.
Malthus’s thought reflects a reaction, amiably conducted, to his father’s views and to the doctrines of the French Revolution and its supporters …
~ Teaching the Irish Famine in America
by Tara Dougherty
Irish Central
May 10, 2010
Excerpt:
Prior to the efforts to include the Irish Famine in social studies classes in New York schools, James Mullin, a former teacher, lobbied to have Irish potato famine included in the genocide curriculum of the state’s public schools, along with Native American history, North American slavery, the Ukrainian starvation, the Armenian genocide and the killing fields of Cambodia. >>> more
~ Sites Remember the Irish Potato Famine
by Michael Pollak
In March 2000, the New York Times published a review of websites dedicated to the Irish Famine:
Excerpt:
Perhaps the most thorough treatment is a 117-page curriculum guide for teachers sponsored by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education. … It was prepared by James V. Mullin of Moorestown, N.J., a former teacher and law librarian. In 1995, he began putting together a synopsis on the famine for the Holocaust Commission, which was assembling similar guides on the persecutions and mass deaths of Cambodians, Armenians, American Indians and African slaves. The online curriculum is free. ... The heavily footnoted and attributed guide takes Ireland through Neolithic times through the Viking and Norman invasions and into the era of colonial domination, British plantations and the absentee landlord system, laissez-faire economics, the poorhouses, the relief efforts and the anti-relief efforts, and the emigration in what were called coffin ships. >>> more
Submitted to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
on January 11th, 1996, for inclusion in the Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum at the secondary level.
Prepared by the irish Famine Curriculum Committee, James Mullin, Chairman: 757 Paddock Path, Moorestown, NJ 08057
THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE
TEACHER’S INTRODUCTION
"Between 1845 and 1850, more than a million Irish people starved to death while massive quantaties of food were being exported from their country. A half million were evicted from their homes during the potato blight, and a million and a half emigrated to America, Britain and Australia, often on board rotting, overcrowed 'coffin ships'. This is the story of how that immense tragedy came to pass.
The necessary historical and political contexts for a study of the Irish Famine is provided to you in the Teacher’s Synopsis, immediately following the Table of Contents.
Following they Synopsis is a Student Summary, covering much the same material as the Teacher’s Synopsis, but without footnotes or bibliography. It would be very difficult for the student to understand any of the six study units that follow without first reading the Summary. If time constraints only permit the study of one or two sections of this curriculum, the Student Summary should be used first
Thank you for all your efforts to make this history come alive.
Sincerely,
(Signed) James Mullin
Chairman
Irish Famine
Curriculum Committee
Download The Great Irish Famine curriculum (PDF) |
Selected Essays by James Mullin
1.
Irish Famine Education and the Holocaust "Straw Man"
James Mullin
July 08, 2008
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When I first contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and asked him to consider adding the study of the Great Irish Famine to the state curriculum, he asked me if I was claiming Genocide. I said I wanted the teachers and students to make up their own minds. He agreed with that approach.
On Feb. 11th, 1996, a full seven months before New Jersey became the first state to approve a curriculum on the Irish Famine, the Sunday Telegraph of London published an article, "US Schools Say Irish Famine was Genocide".
As expected, the Telegraph article was filled with misrepresentation, willful errors, and sentences like: "Hard-line Irish-American Nationalists have been increasingly vocal in their demands that the Famine be recognized as a Genocide".
Still, it was surprising to read that, "the issue has divided the Irish-American community, with some moderate groups concerned that comparing the famine with the Nazi-inspired Holocaust will cause offense to Jews." I had not made, nor had I heard of any such comparisons; in addition, I had an excellent working relationship with the Commission, some of whose members were death camp survivors and former hidden children.
The Holocaust comparison theme appeared again in an October 16th, Sunday Times article, "American Pupils Told Irish Famine was Act of British Genocide". It said that, "British diplomats in America are dismayed at the portrayal of the Irish famine as a genocide comparable to the mass extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis." Who was responsible for this "portrayal"?
Since I subscribed to the Irish People, Irish Voice, Irish Echo, (New York) Irish Edition, (Philadelphia) and the Irish Democrat, (London) and had not read or heard of anyone making any such comparisons, I concluded that analogy was a propaganda device called the "straw man". Rather than answer to credible evidence of genocidal acts during the mass starvation, the British would argue that the "Famine" was not a genocide because it was not Holocaust.
In October, 1996, New York Governor George Pataki signed an education law mandating instruction on the mass starvation in Ireland. He was attacked in a Sunday Times of London editorial entitled, "An Irish Hell, but not a Holocaust".
Here was the propaganda masterstroke full blown. The Times editorial said, "It is true the British government does not come out particularly well from the tale…but to compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, its policy with that of Hitler toward the Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. (Not least to the Jews, the tragedy of whose Holocaust is necessarily lessened by comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor man-made.) To mistake these human errors and shortcomings for a Nazi-style policy of deliberate racial extermination is absurd." So absurd that the "straw man" can be easily knocked over.
Governor Pataki had not mentioned the Holocaust in his speech on signing the bill into law, nor had his subsequent press release. The comparison was based on the simple fact that the newly signed Act added the words, "the mass starvation in Ireland from 1845 to 1850", to state education law which mandated instruction on "human rights issues, genocide, slavery and the Holocaust."
British Ambassador John Kerr then carried the misrepresentation to the highest diplomatic levels, by attacking Governor Pataki in a letter he released to the press. It said: "It seems to me rather insulting to the many millions who suffered and died in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to the natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike the Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated, not man-made, not genocide."
On March 10th, 1997, the Washington Times Magazine, Insight, carried a full-page editorial, "You say Potato, They say Holocaust", illustrated with a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire. It attacked Governor Pataki and the whole idea of Irish famine education: "The Holocaust was Hitler´s inhuman policy to eradicate Jews in Germany and from his Thousand-Year Reich. To equate the potato famine with that barbarism makes Pataki a contender for the title of "The Greatest Liar in America." The British-fabricated analogy was proving itself stronger than the truth because it made better copy.
On Aug. 26th, 1997, the Boston Globe opposed Irish Famine education in a staff-written editorial entitled, "Unnecessary Curriculum Bill". It said, "As the Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat the Irish famine on the same level of moral depravity as the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. That would be a misreading of the historical record. While the British approach to the mass starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling. No state-run death camps disfigured the Irish countryside." Did tens of thousands of homeless, starving people, their ruined hovels and mass graves "disfigure the countryside"?
The argument that classroom discussion of the mass starvation in Ireland should be discouraged because British criminality did not match the barbarity of the Nazis during the Holocaust, is a pervasive and virulent virus imbedded in every dose of propaganda against Famine education. The perpetrators hope to convince everyone that because the Famine was not the Holocaust, it could not have been genocide.
Instead of the British being forced to explain massive commodity exports and evictions during mass starvation, Irish Famine education activists were left to defend a "Famine is Holocaust" argument they never made.
On September 17th, 1997 the Washington Post published "Irelands Famine Wasn’t Genocide" It was written by Timothy W. Guinnane, associate professor of economics at Yale University, and author of The Vanishing Irish: Households, Migration, and the Rural Economy in Post-Famine Ireland. It said, in part:
"Several states have mandated that the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1850 be taught in their high schools as an example of genocide, sometimes in courses originally intended for the study of the Holocaust… The reinterpretation of the famine as genocide has not been well received by scholars who study the Irish famine. Those who view the famine as genocide claim either that the government engineered the crisis or that its reaction to the blight promoted as many deaths as possible. …But does the government’s inadequate response to the famine constitute genocide? The contrast with the Holocaust is instructive. The Nazis devoted considerable resources to finding and murdering Jews. The regime’s stated intention was the elimination of the Jewish people. Nothing like this can be claimed against the British government during the Irish famine. The British government’s indifference to the famine helped cause thousands of needless deaths, but it was indifference nonetheless, and not an active effort at systematic murder… To call the famine genocide cheapens the memories of both the famine’s victims and the victims of real genocides."
While the Holocaust is the best documented, most systematic, ruthless and brutal genocide of the 20th century, it is not the definition of genocide. Since the United States and Britain are parties to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition that applies is contained in Article II: ´In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its phyisica1 destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.´
Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, has experience arguing matters of genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. He wrote to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on May 2, 1996, saying, in part:
"Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, and racial group commonly known as the Irish People, as such. In addition, this British policy of mass starvation in Ireland clearly caused serious bodily and mental harm to members of the Irish People within the meaning of Genocide Convention Article II (b). Furthermore, this British policy of mass starvation in Ireland deliberately inflicted on the Irish People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part within the meaning of Article 11(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of genocide against the Irish People."
In December, 1848 (one hundred years before the 1948 Genocide Convention was signed) Cholera began to spread through many of the overcrowded workhouses, pauper hospitals, and crammed jails in Ireland. On April 26th, 1849, the Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote to Prime Minister Russell: "...it is enough to drive one mad, day after day, to read the appeals that are made and meet them all with a negative...At Westport, and other places in Mayo, they have not a shilling to make preparations for the cholera, but no assistance can be given, and there is no credit for anything, as all our contractors are ruined. Surely this is a state of things to justify you asking the House of Commons for an advance, for I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." No advance was granted.
2.
History as Propaganda: The BBC's "Great Irish Famine" Dissected
James Mullin
July 14, 2008
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When D.W. Griffith´s epic silent film "Birth of a Nation" was shown in American theatres in 1915, it changed film making and film viewing overnight. President Woodrow Wilson called it "history written in lightning." Griffith not only created spectacular Civil War battle scenes, he glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and demonized the freed slaves. For the first time, millions of people realized that film was an extremely powerful medium for spreading propaganda.
Two decades later, Adolf Hitler and his brilliantly demented propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, realized that cinema was potentially the most powerful mass medium of the new age. They both knew that a documentary film that entertained would be more effective than heavy-handed propaganda.
At Hitler´s request, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl produced a pseudo-documentary, "Triumph of the Will", about the 1934 sixth Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg. A torch-lit parade by tens of thousands of uniformed German soldiers led viewers into a futuristic Nazi amphitheatre, setting the stage for Hitler´s speech. His personal charisma was gloriously enhanced in close-ups, as was his emotional grip on the German people. Susan Sontag, a commentator on modern culture, has referred to the film as 'the most successfully, most purely propagandistic film ever made.'
Six decades later, Hitler´s propaganda classic is still powerful, but it pales next to the sophistication demonstrated in the BBC´s "Great Irish Famine". It is a masterwork of revisionist propaganda disguised as history.
The "documentary" aired on the A&E and History channels in 1996, shortly before St. Patrick´s Day when Irish people everywhere were marking the 150th anniversary of their national tragedy, An Gorta Mor - "The Great Hunger". The opening narration assures viewers that the film will explain "how the people of a green and fertile land came to starve." That is the first misrepresentation.
The film begins with footage of an outdoor Mass commemorating a time when Irish Catholics were forbidden to practice their religion. A BBC narrator explains: "Since the early 18th century, a series of laws penalized Irish Catholics. In practice, few of the laws were rigorously enforced, and all were repealed by 1829. They were an insult to Irish Catholics who were made to feel like second-class citizens in their own land."
Can this be a description of the Penal Laws? These "ferocious enactments" brought the Irish closer to being serfs than "second-class citizens".
Under these edicts, all Irish Catholics (and therefore all native Irish People) were prohibited from attending schools, keeping schools, or sending their children abroad to be educated. They were barred from practicing their religion, engaging in trade or commerce, voting, or entering a profession. The laws did away with primogeniture, the exclusive right of the eldest son to inherit his father´s estate, causing Irish-held estates to be subdivided again and again for generations.
After the Penal Laws were enacted, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland confidently said: "The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic." The Irish were completely disenfranchised.
Jonathan Swift, (1667-1745) the author of Gulliver's Travels, described the cumulative effect of the Penal Laws in his essay, "A Short View of the Present State of Ireland":
"Ever increasing rent is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars. The families of farmers who pay great rents are living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or a stocking to their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hog sty to receive them. These may, indeed, be comfortable sights to an English spectator who comes for a short time to learn the language, and returns back to his own country, whither he finds all our wealth transmitted." Swift made these observations 100 years before the great mass starvation in Ireland.
A contemporary and friend of Swift's, philosopher George Berkeley, wrote in a 1736 journal wondering "whether a foreigner could imagine that half of the people were starving in a country which sent out such plenty of provisions".
Historian Edmund Burke, (1729-97) an Irish-born Protestant who became a British Member of Parliament, (MP) described the Penal laws as being, "well-fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." All this the BBC film refers to as "an insult"!
Since the enormously destructive effects of the Penal Laws lasted until the mass starvation, the laws would easily meet the modern criteria for Genocide by Attrition as determined by Helen Fein, past president of the Association of Genocide Scholars. That is: "stripping citizens of a particular national, ethnic, religious or tribal group of political and civil rights, which lead to their lack of entitlement to food (and conditions essential to maintain health) producing mass death."
In the film, "Great Irish Famine", the BBC narrator says, "In western Ireland farmers had to contend with poor stony ground, and the only crop they could raise was potatoes." Why did they? Unfortunately, the film makes no mention of the native Irish being driven off millions of acres of fertile land to provide estates for Cromwell´s parliamentary soldiers, or how Irish landowners found east of the river Shannon after May 1, 1654 faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies and Barbados. Surely this would help explain "how the people of a green and fertile land came to starve."
During the BBC film, Irish-American nationalist Mary Holt Moore is allowed to make some very strong statements about Irish crops of wheat, corn and oats being exported to England during the Famine, but the segment immediately following undercuts everything she says.
It shows contemporary Irish farmers gathered at a cattle market. The narrator says, "Nothing generates more rage and controversy over the Famine than the fact that the Irish farmers continued to export food, not just beef, but bacon, butter, cheese, and many other products to England throughout the years of hunger, even though their own people were starving at the time." The film would have us believe that the Irish starved themselves.
The terms, "Irish farmers" land "Irish landlords" are misnomers because they apply to English-born Protestants who owned agricultural land in Ireland. Many were absentee landlords living in England who employed middlemen in Ireland to ensure that rent crops were collected and exported to the more lucrative English market. British soldiers were garrisoned in Ireland to guard the granaries and food shipments leaving Ireland.
Regarding landlords, the film points out that, "the effect of the Poor Law Extension Act was to ensure that any landlord who didn´t want to be ruined had almost no alternative, but to evict as many people as possible." (Over 500,000 Irish people were evicted during the mass starvation) The narrator then states that, "Ultimately, many landlords became victims of famine, just like the tenants." No doubt many landlords went bankrupt, but did they become "victims of famine" to the extent that they starved to death? No records of such deaths exist.
How much food was exported during the mass starvation? In "Ireland Before and After the Famine", author Cormac O´Grada documents that in 1845 (a "famine" year in Ireland", 3,251,907 quarters (8 bushels = 1 quarter)) of corn were exported from Ireland to Britain. That works out to be over 25 million bushels! That same year 257,257 sheep were exported to Britain. In 1846, 480,827 swine, and 186,483 oxen were shipped to Britain.
Dr. Christine Kinealy, the author of "This Great Calamity" and "A Death-Dealing Famine," published an article in "History Ireland" in 1998 which documented the commodity exports from Ireland to England during "Black'47".(1847) In that one terrible year, 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases.
Dr. Kinealy found that nearly 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London in 1847. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland: Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport.
She found that the total amount of grain-derived alcohol (porter, ale, whiskey and stout) exported from Ireland in just nine months of Black'47 was 1,336,220 gallons. Could the starving Irish have been fed on this grain? Not profitably.
A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard and honey, but the most shocking export figures concern butter.
Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding nine gallons. According to Dr. Kinealy, exactly 91, 409 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol and Liverpool during the first nine months of "Black '47. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter. If the other three months were at all comparable, we can safely assume that a million gallons of butter left Ireland while 400,000 Irish people starved to death!
The "Great Irish Famine" film has an astonishing segment that shows beef being cut up in a modern day butcher shop. The narrator tells us that when the new Whig government of Lord John Russell refused to bring fresh grain supplies from warehouses, prices soared. In fact, they became so high that the Irish could not buy grain even when it was available for sale. This is horrifying and true, but it is a gross injustice to imply that the food Irish peasants could not afford was beef!
"The Great Irish Famine" does refer to British neglect, greed, and incompetence during the Famine because it makes for more effective propaganda to do so. But at each juncture, where a critical point about responsibility is to be made, the film obfuscates and equivocates. British culpability is denied, avoided, or minimized, just as it is in all written revisionist accounts.
Toward the end, the BBC film attempts to debunk the "local legend" of 400 starving people being swept into the waters of Doo Lough by a storm. The film authoritatively informs us that, "in fact, six people died here in an accident." This segment also shows footage of a local drama group retracing the route of the victims with many dramatic gestures of supplication and much keening.
These closing images send viewers a powerful subliminal message. The Irish are like the drama group, commemorating a "myth" with emotion and theatrics, while the British are the "objective" scholars, sticking to the historical "facts", and producing unemotional, "value – free", history.
This final point is, in fact, the subtext of the entire film. The proof is contained in a BBC book, The Great Famine: Ireland´s Potato Famine, 1845-51, designed to accompany the film, and written by the film´s producer, John Percival
In the Introduction, Percival writes: "The Irish Diaspora, that great migration across the face of the Earth, was given a massive impetus by the famine. The Irish immigrants, especially those to the United States of America, arrived full of anger and distress, then preserved those memories, like old photographs, to be handed on, only faintly blurred, to their children and grandchildren. Today, the President of the United States has to take those memories into account when he considers which way forty million people of Irish descent are going to vote, and the IRA knows where to look for money if political reconciliation fails to work out." He goes on:
"The memories of Irish people, like the folk memories of people everywhere, are an inextricable tangle of history and mythology, of slogans, songs and stories picked up on grandma´s knee. Myth is painted in stark whites and blacks, images of good versus evil, and such stories are often more potent than history in shaping events. Unscrupulous leaders use them to sway the mob and motivate the terrorist. History is far more ambiguous. Motives are often mixed, bad actions are fired by good intentions, the villains turn out to have some redeeming features and their victims are not all saints or martyrs. So it is with the history of the Great Famine."
Mr. Percival, the BBC, and the British government that financed the film, want viewers to conclude that the horrible facts of the mass starvation carried out under British rule in Ireland are merely "local legends", embellished "myths" and fanciful "stories". Those who repeat them are the "unscrupulous leaders who use them to sway the mob and motivate the terrorist."
The "Great Irish Famine" is a pictorially beautiful film, made with imagination and skill, but the images and the script must be analyzed frame by frame for gross misrepresentations, lies, and distortions. The film does stir the emotions, but some of its powerful images are contradicted by a narrative voice. The viewer must decide in a fleeting instant which message is to be believed. The subconscious makes its own decisions.
Written history is about what the historian chooses to omit, treat lightly, or emphasize, and the reader is free to pause and consider each statement. However, a film viewer is being acted upon to a much greater extent. He or she is a temporary captive, swept along by a flow of disturbing images and a reassuring narrative voice.
The BBC's "Great Irish Famine" is more visceral than intellectual. It is "history written in lightning" just like "Birth of a Nation" was, but it is far more sophisticated in its use of propaganda devices and editing techniques. "Triumph of the Will" is crude by comparison.
Winston Churchill once said, "Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Obviously, the BBC still adheres to that belief. The narrative of the "Great Irish Famine" is so well attended by propagandistic bodyguards that the historical truth is nowhere to be seen.
The Irish Famine curriculum I prepared is available in full text on the web site of the Nebraska Department of Education: www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish_famine.html
3.
Ireland's Revisionist Historians: A Generation of Vipers
James Mullin
May 16, 2008
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The traditional view of Irish history is based on the premise that the Irish people had a moral right to fight for their political, economic, social and cultural independence from imperialist Britain.
An opposing view began to emerge in Ireland in the 1930s, according to Dr. Christine Kinealy, author of A New History of Ireland. At that time, a number of leading Irish Academics began following the lead of earlier British historians, in setting an agenda for the systematic revision of traditional Irish History, which they claimed was rife with "nationalist myths". Their declared mission was to replace this so-called mythology with objective, "value-free" history.
In her essay, "Beyond Revisionism", Dr. Kinealy says that the revisionist movement gained a new prominence in the battle for Irish hearts and minds during the 1960s when the IRA campaign intensified. Challenging nationalist mythology became an important ideological preoccupation of a new generation of historians.
A strong opponent of the revisionist school is Peter Berresford Ellis, author of Eyewitness to Irish History, and A History of the Irish Working Class. In his essay, "Revisionism in Irish Historical Writing", Ellis argues that a more correct term to describe revisionists is "neo-colonial" or "anti-nationalist".
"In its mildest form, this school of thought apologizes for English imperialism, and in its strongest form it supports that imperialism" he wrote. "These anti-nationalist historians accept the thesis that England’s invasion and conquest of Ireland is not a matter for moral judgment. It is simply a fait accompli."
One of the most popular arguments of the revisionist school is that there was no Irish national consciousness when the invaders arrived. Ireland was a land divided into warring factions, and the arrival of one more such faction is not a matter of importance nor of moral speculation.
These revisionists argue further, that English colonial rule in Ireland was beneficial to the Irish people, although their imparting of civilization was at times, a bit too brutal.
Finally, these revisionists use their interpretation of history to justify the status quo in Ireland today: The Six Counties of North-East Ulster are depicted as a democratically formed unit in which the political majority is represented by Unionists. Partition, imposed by bloodshed and violence, and threats of bloodshed and violence by Britain against the democratic wish of the Irish nation is not considered in such histories. (Ellis)
Two books emboldened the revisionist movement in the early 1970s: States of Ireland by Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Towards a New Ireland by Garrett Fitzgerald. Both books made peace with British imperialism, maintaining that the real Irish independence tradition was a "home rule" philosophy.
The lesson they attempted to hammer home, according to Ellis, was that separation from England was never a popular concept in Irish historical development, and that the republican tradition was a minority view. These revisionist authors would have us believe that the Irish People simply wanted a greater say in their domestic affairs within English colonial structures. (Ellis)
O’Brien wrote that the 1916 rebellion was despotic: "a putsch with no pretense of popular support". His words are echoed by a contemporary revisionist, Ruth Dudley Edwards. In her book, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, she portrays Pearse as a deluded romantic obsessed with a desire for revolutionary "blood sacrifice" and heroic martyrdom.
Pearse "glorified war", she says, and "sanctioned the sacrifice of self and others". He was "part of a despotic tradition" and "acted and died for a people that did not exist."
Dr. Marianne Elliot’s book, Wolfe Tone, Prophet of Irish Independence, continues in the same revisionist vein. One reviewer, Dr. Anthony Coughlan, called her work, "a fundamentally hostile interpretation of Tone", saying, "the author evidently has little sympathy for the ideal of an All Ireland Republic which Tone and his fellow Protestants came to adopt in the 1790s."
The work of these anti-nationalist historians has been accurately described as, "the historiography of the Irish counter-revolution", yet they want the public to believe that they hold the moral high ground above all nationalists and unionist factions. They try to disguise their partisanship under the cloak of academic objectivity, Ellis says.
Today, the unchallenged demigod of the anti-nationalist school is Roy Foster, head of the Irish History Department at Oxford University. Born in Waterford in 1949, he burst on the academic scene in 1989, with the publication of the 600-page revisionist tome, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972.
The book was hailed as "a work of gigantic importance" by the Irish Times, "a revisionist milestone" by the Irish Literary Supplement, and a "masterwork" by several historians who reviewed it. If Foster read these press clippings, he must believe he has a divine gift for historical interpretation.
Desmond Fennell, an Irish critic, said the underlying message of Modern Ireland was Foster’s revisionism. He called it "a retelling of Irish history which seeks to show that British rule of Ireland was not, as we have believed, a bad thing, but a mixture of necessity, good intentions and bungling; and that Irish resistance to it was not, as we have believed, a good thing, but a mixture of wrong-headed idealism and unnecessary, often cruel violence."
Discussing the aftermath of the Easter Rising, for example, Foster wrote: 'The draconian reaction of the (British) authorities to the rebellion should be understood in terms of international war and national security."
Maybe the execution of 16 Irish Republican leaders had nothing at all to do with the history of Britain in Ireland!
Foster is the author of The Oxford History of Ireland, and the Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, and other quasi-historical works. His fluid writing style and talent for omitting entire periods of Irish history because they do not conform to his revisionist thesis have made him an author much in demand.
In his strangely titled work, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland, he adopts the patronizing position that the Irish have "misused" their own history. It seems that the mischievous Irish have taken the great events of their history - the 1798 Rising, the Famine, the Celtic Revival, Easter 1916, the Troubles - and dropped them into a fanciful narrative that includes elements of myth, folklore, ghost stories and romance.
The result, according to Foster, is nationalist fiction - the "Story of Ireland" - complete with the novelistic elements of plot, drama, suspense, and a heroic victim. One review of the Foster book concluded that traditional Irish history is "manipulated for political ends, and Irish poverty and oppression are sentimentalized and packaged."
In The Irish Story, Foster claims that "the new modernized and liberated Irish consciousness feels a sneaking nostalgia for the verities of the old victim-culture, which was also, in its way, a culture of superiority. The concept of a perennial victim produces a very emotionally powerful and emotionally coherent story, but it also leads to a kind of denial that any other elements in the Irish Story have any part to play."
Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe obviously bought into Foster’s attack on the simple, myth-filled narrative about Ireland. In his review, Shea wrote: "That story stars a holy island nation. It suffered under English rule for centuries, nearly died, and then rose, liberated and reborn, in 1922, with partial independence. The story, in its basic shape, mirrors the life of Christ. And the story, in Foster's view, has bred boatloads of sloppy thinking and historical myopia - and a whole lot of wallowing".
One of Foster's acolytes is Irish author Colm Toibin. In a 1993 piece for the "London Review of Books" he recalled the heady days of his youth when he first read Foster.
"I became a revisionist. I remember feeling a huge sense of liberation. I was in my late teens and I already knew that what they had told me about God and sexuality wasn't true, but being an atheist or being gay in Ireland at that time seemed easier to deal with as transgressions than the idea that you could cease believing in the Great Events of Irish nationalist history. No Cromwell as cruel monster, say; the executions after 1916 as understandable in the circumstances; 1798 as a small outbreak of rural tribalism; partition as inevitable. Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction, how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self."
Then he gets to the real heart of the historical darkness: "This revisionism is precisely what our state needed once the North blew up and we joined the EU, in order to isolate Northern Ireland from us and our history, in order to improve relations with Britain, in order to make us concentrate on a European future. Foster and his fellow historians' work became useful, not for its purity, or its truth, but its politics."
Here is a revisionist historian who puts politics on a higher plane than the truth. Foster’s disciple makes it clear: "value-free history" is nothing more than a euphemism for partisan political propaganda.
4.
The End of Celtic Christianity in Ireland
James Mullin
January 16, 2008
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More than a century after the Synod of Whitby (664) ostensibly resolved various conflicts between Celtic and the Roman Christianity, the two churches continued to grow apart.
The Celtic Church, with its strong tradition of monastic schools, missionary outreach, and ascetic self-denial, remained at odds with the hierarchical, urban-based, and materialistic Roman church.
Ireland´s geographical isolation had allowed it to sustain a separate religious existence, even as it sent holy men and women to spread the faith in Europe. Oddly enough, the end began when the Vikings invaded Ireland at the beginning of the 9th Century.
When the Nordic raiders plundered the monasteries at Glendalough, Bangor, Moville, Clonfert, Clonmacnois, and Kildare, they caused many monks to move to safer settlements inland, and others to flee to mainland Europe. Viking coastal communities would eventually grow into the cities of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Limerick and Cork.
During the 10th and 11th centuries, Scandanavia was converted to Roman Christianity, and many Nordic Christians settled in the cities founded by the Vikings. These became centers of Roman Christian belief, while the countryside, where the majority of native Irish lived, remained largely Celtic Christian.
The Roman Christians in Ireland, like their brethren in Europe, were becoming "increasingly intolerant of all other beliefs, whether pagan or alternative versions of Christianity", and they acted to ensure that their brand of Christianity triumphed over all others. The Irish called these intolerant Christians "Romani".
One of these was Malachy, Bishop of Armagh (1095-1148). He reorganized the Irish church into a territorial hierarchy, following the example of the church in England. He traveled to Rome to seek the pallium, a papal vestment, for newly created Irish archbishops.
Malachy wrote that Irish Celtic Christians were, "so profligate in their morals, so uncouth in their ceremonies, so impious in faith, so barbarous in laws, so rebellious to discipline, so filthy in life, Christian in name, but Pagans in reality." (Nothing But the Same Old Story, Liz Curtis, p.8)
Malachy had been born the same year in which Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade (1095-99) to recover the Holy land from infidels, and he died during the Second Crusade, (1147-49) which was led by Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III. Throughout Malachy´s life, the Roman church actively encouraged temporal war against unbelievers on another continent.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Pope Adrian IV, (1154-59) would grant King Henry II authority to curb the practices of Irish Christians which did not conform to Roman Christian doctrine. Pope Adrian was an Englishman named Nicholas Breakspear, and the only Englishman who ever became Bishop of Rome. He issued a bull, Laudabiliter, which gave Henry II, full permission and support to "enter the island of Ireland in order to subject its people to law and root out from them the weeds of vice."
Henry agreed to pay in return an annual tribute to Rome of one penny for every house in Ireland. This tax became known as "Peter´s pence" because the money went to St. Peter´s successor, the Pope.
In the bull, Pope Adrian addresses Henry as "the most dear son in Christ" and as "a Catholic prince", saying: "It is not to be doubted, that the kingdom of Ireland, and every island upon which Christ the sun of justice hath shone, and which has received the principles of Christian faith, belong of right to St. Peter and to the holy Roman church…"
This same Henry II, a "Catholic prince" and "most dear son in Christ", had St. Thomas a´ Becket murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29th, 1170.
Peter Berresford Ellis, a contemporary Celtic scholar, says: "many Irish Catholics (today) find it hard to accept that the Church of Rome, as a temporal and feudal institution, was not a friend to the Irish nation. It is hard to accept that there was something other to the Church of Rome than its professed spirituality. The Popes regarded themselves as temporal princes, with more feudal power than most emperors, and they often led their own armies into battle to assert that power and reap tribute from those they subjected."
In 1172, Pope Alexander III wrote that he had heard how Henry II had conquered "with God´s aid, that Irish people, who put aside the fear of God and wander unbridled through the rough and dangerous ways of vice," and urged Henry "to recall the Irish, through your power, to the observance of the Christian faith."
"When the militarily powerful Anglo-Normans arrived ostensibly on a mission from the Pope, the "Romani" – who were Roman Christians – seized the opportunity to attack Celtic Christian practice and beliefs." (Wandering, p.101)
Gerald of Wales, a Norman-Welsh churchman whose family was deeply involved in the invasion of Ireland, wrote a History and Topography of Ireland and dedicated it to Henry II. Echoing Malachy, he wrote:
"This is a filthy people wallowing in vice. Of all peoples it is the least instructed in the rudiments of faith. They do not pay tithes or first fruits or contract marriages. They do not avoid incest." (Celtic laws allowed a man to marry his deceased brother´s wife, which was regarded as incest by Rome.)
About Gerald, Liz Curtis wrote: "His ferocity was probably in part explained by his need to undermine the widespread view of Ireland as a center of Christianity and civilization."
The Anglo-Norman Roman Christians viewed the religious practices of the native Irish as potentially deviant - even the rituals and beliefs of those who claimed to be Roman Christian. "In the eyes of the Anglo-Norman clergy, it mattered little which sect a priest or monk adhered to if the blood flowing though his veins was Celtic Irish." (Wandering, p.101)
In the parts of Ireland under English control, the Anglo-Norman Roman Christians established a diocese system, which placed all clergy and religious institutions under a bishop appointed by the Pope.
They also invited the newly-formed Dominican and Franciscan orders, who were directly under Papal authority, to come to Ireland to replace the monks of local Celtic monasteries.
In 1321, an English-born Franciscan monk, Richard de Ledrede, was appointed bishop of the Ossory Diocese near Kildare, by Pope John XXII. In an earlier bull, Pope John equated heresy with witchcraft. Because witch hysteria was sweeping across Europe at the time, Bishop De Ledrede was led to accuse Celtic Christians of being witches.
The first person targeted was Alice Kyteller, who was accused of being the leader of a group of heretics, and "consorting with a demon incubus named Robin mac Art, who was in fact probably her Celtic Irish lover by that name." Her real crime was her open practice of Celtic Christian customs and beliefs.
Fortunately for Alice, she was the daughter of a prominent Anglo-Norman knight, and she was related by marriage to the Viceroy of Ireland, appointed by King Edward II of England. She fled to the Viceroy´s protection in Dublin.
Undeterred, de Ledrede tried to prosecute Alice´s son in her place. This landed him in jail for violating due process of civil law. However, when he was released from jail he prosecuted Alice´s maid, Petronilla of Meath. "The hapless maid was the first person burned at the stake for witchcraft in Ireland.
The Anglo-Norman civil authorities refused to share power with de Ledrede, and he found no support among the Irish who accepted Roman Christianity. He still sent Adam Dubh, a Dubliner, to the stake in 1327, "for denying the doctrine of the Trinity and the authority of the Pope." (Wandering, p.104)
The few public burnings did not amount to a pogrom, but the open persecutions forced Celtic Christians to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes.
Eventually, the Anglo-Norman clergy´s repeated denunciations of their faith, underscored by civil and cannon laws favoring Roman Christianity, brought a 1,000 years of Celtic Christianity to an end in all of Ireland.
5.
Roman vs Celtic Christianity: 410 to 813 A.D.
James Mullin
September 12, 2006
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When Rome fell to the Visigoths in A.D. 410, it ushered in “The Dark Ages” for most of Europe. But as the “matted unwashed barbarians descended on Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature…” (Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization p.3)
According to Bede the Venerable, many pilgrim scholars came to Ireland from Britain and the continent of Europe to study and learn during the early middle ages. (450-750) “The Irish welcomed them all gladly, gave them their daily food, and also provided them with books to read and with instruction, without asking for payment.” (Wisdom of the Celtic Saints, p.22)
Celtic Christianity also pursued intense missionary outreach among the common people. Monks worked hard to maintain greater intimacy among church members, and built numerous small churches made of wood or stone in remote rural areas. Religious leaders ate sparsely and spent long hours in prayer. This ascetic privation was called “Green Martyrdom”, as opposed to the “Red Martyrdom” of suffering death for one’s beliefs.
In contrast, European Christianity had been greatly influenced by the social structure of the declining Roman Empire. Their church territory was divided into dioceses, with large churches and basilicas built primarily in urban areas. Their bishops wore fine vestments, and grew increasingly materialistic.
These same bishops used their influence as religious leaders to arrange alliances, which helped win wars for the Frankish and Lombard kings, who favored them in return. They also appropriated exclusive use of the title “Pope,” which had previously been used for the religious leader of any Christian community. “The Bishops of Rome often banned as heresy competing interpretations of Christianity, and the Irish often came dangerously close to official condemnation.” (Wandering Irish in Europe, p.64)
In the Roman Christian Church, women were increasingly isolated from positions of authority and kept from all religious relationships with males. But the Celtic Church, which was still influenced by the Celtic belief that women were equal to men and had similar legal rights, encouraged their leadership. The oldest monasteries of women recorded in Ireland are those of Brigit of Kildare, Moninne at Killeavy, and Ita at Killeedy.
Many more women held powerful ecclesiastical positions in communities consisting of both women and men. Monks and nuns lived in separate quarters, but worshipped together in a common church in which lay people joined them for liturgies. These “double monasteries” were evidently a normal feature of the earliest monastic life in Celtic Ireland and England.
In 521, the greatest Irish religious figure after Patrick was born. Columcille, prince of the Clan Conaill, and great grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages, founded his first monastery in Derry in 546. Over the next 15 years, he set up 40 more monasteries in Ireland. Each began with an abbot and 12 ‘apostle’ monks.
He founded the famous monastery in Durrow in 551, and a church at Swords, where he left a gospel book written in his own hand. The spirit of these Irish monasteries was reflected in the supremely beautiful calligraphy, which they used to copy books.
In 560, Columcille’s abbot, Finnian, returned from Rome with the first copy of St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the bible - “the vulgate” - to come to Ireland. Columcille borrowed it and made a single copy of the book of psalms – a “psalter”. Finnian found out and demanded its return. The matter was submitted to the High King Diarmait, and he ruled in Finnian’s favor: “To every cow its calf; to every book its copy.” Columcille refused to part with the book with disastrous results.
Near Ben Bulben, a battle was fought between the forces of Diarmait and Clan O’Neill. Many were killed, and Columcille was either forced into exile or went voluntarily. In either case, he felt he must convert a pagan for each man who died, and never see Ireland again. He traveled north with 12 followers in 564, and founded the monastery at Iona. By the time of his death in the last days of the 6th century, sixty monastic communities had been founded in his name in Scotland.
His greatest spiritual heir, Aidan, did much the same in Northern England. With Columcille as their model, “Irish monks set off in every direction, bent on glorious and heroic exile for the sake of Christ.” This was “White Martyrdom” – going into voluntary exile to spread the word of God.
Following in Columcille’s footsteps, Columbanus departed Ireland for Gaul, (modern France and Belgium) along with 12 companions. They founded monasteries in Annegray, Fontaines, and Luxeuil.
Before long, Columbanus clashed with Roman-appointed bishops, who were upset by his presence. They were “still employing the old Roman Episcopal pattern of living urbanely in capital cities and keeping close ties with those who wear crowns.” Columbanus was not impressed by them: “a man who will take no step to proclaim the Good News beyond the safety and comfort of his own elite circle is a poor excuse for a bishop.” (Cahill, p.188)
The bishops held a synod in 603, and demanded that Columbanus come in for questioning. He answered them with a sharp letter, taking the bishops to task for their worldly habits and lack of spiritual industry. He urged them to “choose to be humble and poor for Christ’s sake”.
The bishops then conspired with the Visigoth princess Brunhilda to have Columbanus deported. He made his way to Northern Italy, and there wrote letters chastising Pope Boniface IV, and later Pope Gregory.
To Columbanus, the pope was one of the brothers, a father abbot worthy of respect, by all means – but also in need, like any man, of an occasional jab in the ribs.” (Cahill, p.191) To Irish Christians, the bishop of Rome was “a distant figure whose wishes were little known and less considered.” (Cahill, p.181) They also
believed that abbots and bishops should not be appointed by either church or secular authority, but in keeping with Celtic traditions, the people should elect their own leaders.
Celtic missionaries evidently traveled quite frequently with women companions, called “conhospitae”, who sometimes helped with the celebration of the Eucharist.
This practice was condemned in a sixth century letter to Irish missionaries written by Roman bishops in Gaul:
We appeal to your charity, not only to restrain these little women from staining the holy sacraments by administering them illicitly, but also not to admit to live under your roof any woman who is not your grandmother, your mother, your sister or your niece.” (Wisdom, p. 20)
In 664, sixty-seven years after the death of Columcille, the Synod of Whitby was held to resolve various conflicts between the Celtic and the Roman churches. The only professed issues were the date for celebrating Easter, and the tonsure, or haircut, of Irish monks.
Bishop Colman spoke for the Irish church regarding Easter. He said they were all
following the example of Columcille of Iona and his followers, “men beloved of God.”
Wilfred, speaking for Rome, said: “Though your fathers were holy men, do you think that a handful of people in one corner of the remotest of islands is to be preferred to the universal church of Christ, which is spread throughout the world? Even if that Columcille of yours – yes and ours too, if he belonged to Christ – was a holy man of mighty works, is he to be preferred to the most holy chief of the apostles, to whom the Lord said, “You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and I give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven?” (Wisdom, p.142)
When Colman did not deny Christ’s words to Peter, and could not show an equal authority given to Columcille, the Synod ruled in favor of Rome.
Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, says, “It will be seen that in the contest between Rome and Ireland for the privilege of becoming the creator of the new western civilization, Rome only just succeeded in getting the upper hand.” (Columcille, p.46)
Celtic and Roman Christian leaders often operated at cross-purposes, according to historian Kenneth Clark. While Irish monks made copies of all the classics they could find, “St. Gregory himself was credited with having destroyed many volumes of classical literature, lest they seduce men’s minds away from holy writ.”
Whenever Irish monks explicitly criticized the relative luxury and political involvement enjoyed by Roman Christian priests and bishops, they, in turn, would be condemned for some deviance from Roman Christian doctrine.
In 813, the Council of Tours censured these wandering Irish monks – “Hiberniae epicsopi vagantes” – for their extreme asceticism. “The ostensible reason for this censure was that in following such a strict, forbidding ideal, the Irish ascetics presented a remote, harsh picture of Christianity, which could interfere with the aim of converting the pagan populations of Europe to the religion. But the real reason the Irish were censured, so it seems, was that their asceticism sharply contrasted with the comforts and political influence enjoyed by Roman Christian clergy.” (Wandering, p.65)
6.
Of Original Sin and Irish Heresy
James Mullin
September 12, 2006
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Concerning the New Testament origins of the doctrine of original sin, The Catholic Biblical Encyclopedia (CBE) points to two statements by Jesus which it says indicate “a universal sinful condition on the part of mankind”.
In Matthew 19:17 Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God,” and in John 3:6 he says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again.”
This evidence is far too flimsy to bear the weight of a Christian doctrine that bestows an inherited sin on every child at birth. The best refutation comes from Jesus himself. Whenever he encounters mankind’s children, he expressly and repeatedly says they exemplify spiritual perfection.
In Matthew, (18:1-6) one of the disciples asks Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them. And said, Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.” Jesus makes no mention of an inherited sin.
Later in the same chapter, Jesus adds: “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” (18:10)
In the following chapter, little children are brought to Jesus so that he may put his hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said to his apostles: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (19:13, 14)
Later, after Jesus had performed many miracles, the children in the temple began crying out: “Hosanna to the son of David”. The high priests were sore displeased and said to him, “Hearest thou what they say?” And Jesus said, “Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast perfect praise.” (Matthew 21:15, 16)
Jesus never refers to any original blemish on the character or soul of the children he encounters. Instead, he praises their innocence, perfection, and humility.
I submit that it is not Jesus, but Paul, who authors the concept of original sin. In Romans (5:12-14) he says: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned…death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.”
Several centuries later, St. Augustine (354-430) read Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, and saw “not only a primal sin by Adam, but an inherited sin, a sin in which every human being has from birth, an original sin.” (Christianity, p.293)
In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill says that Augustine taught that God condemned to hellfire all the unbaptized – “even infants who die without the sacrament.” He also says that Augustine believed that original sin “is passed along in the very fluids of procreation and that sexual intercourse, and because it (intercourse) involves a loss of rational control, is always at least venially sinful…”
Original sin is thus the fruit of Augustine’s views on sexuality. He once wrote: “Nothing is so powerful in drawing the spirit of man downwards as the caresses of a woman.” Cahill calls him a “reformed profligate,” who deemed women’s embraces, “sordid, filthy and horrible.” (Cahill, p.65, 66)
St. Jerome, a contemporary of Augustine’s, wrote this about marriage: “To take my meaning quite clear, let me state that I should definitely like to see every man take a wife – the kind of man, that is, who perhaps is frightened of the dark and just cannot quite manage to lie down in his bed all alone.” (Columcille, p.40)
Some of these same church fathers taught that the apostles, including Peter, “put away” their wives once they received the call from Jesus. Professor Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at Notre Dame, says this has no historical basis. “Rather, it arrives from the mistaken and essentially unchristian assumption that celibacy is more virtuous than marriage because sexual intimacy somehow compromises one’s total commitment to God and the things of the spirit.” (Lives of the Popes p. 28)
Proof that Peter was married and remained so even after becoming a disciple of Jesus can be found in the account of Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31) and from Paul’s reference to the fact that Peter and the other apostles took their wives along on their apostolic journeys (1 Corinthians 9:5)
Paul also wrote that, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife…” (1Timothy 3:2-4) In the same chapter he says: “Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.” (3:12) Obviously, Paul did not believe that church leaders were going to be celibates.
In the early 5th century, during the lifetime of saints Augustine, Jerome, and Patrick, the church was brought into a theological crisis over the nature of original sin. The man who contradicted church teaching and brought on the crisis was a Celtic monk named Pelagius. By all accounts, he was a brilliant scholar who spoke and wrote Latin and Greek. He was also a devout Christian ascetic, who practiced self-denial.
According to Dr. Douglas Hyde, “Pelagius was an Irishman, descended from an Irish colony in Britain.” Jerome describes him as “a great mountain dog through whom the devil barks”, who was “full of Irish porridge.” (The Wandering Irish in Europe, p. 50-51)
When Pelagius visited Rome between 400 and 411 AD, he was shocked by moral laxity he found among so-called Christians in upper class Roman Society. He blamed this moral corruption on the doctrine of divine grace promulgated by Augustine.
Pelagius recoiled in horror at the idea that a divine gift (grace) is necessary to perform what God commands.” (R.C. Sproul) He believed that man has a moral responsibility to obey the law of God, and the moral ability to do it.
Augustine, on the other hand, argued that mankind is a “mess of sin” incapable of raising itself from spiritual death. He said that fallen man has a free will, but has lost his moral liberty. The state of original sin leaves us in the wretched condition of being unable to refrain from sinning. We are able to choose what we desire, but our desires remain chained to our evil impulses.
Pelagius categorically denied the doctrine of original sin, arguing that Adam’s sin affected Adam alone and that infants at birth are in the same state as Adam was before the fall. Pelagius also argued that though grace may facilitate the achieving of righteousness, it is not necessary to that end.
For Pelagius, grace was the forgiveness of sins, which was an unmerited gift of God. The moral admonition and example of Christ were also grace. He also believed that men and women were justified in baptism without works or merits, but once they became Christians they had to make their own way to salvation by their own actions, aided by free will, the Ten Commandments, and the example of Jesus Christ. Pelagius taught that though we are by nature temptable, we sin only by our own choice.
Pope Zosimus declared Pelagius a heretic in 418. In the word’s Greek origins “hairetikos” means “able to choose”. In the end, “Rome rejected Pelagius, opting instead for original sin and the Fall. Humans needed sacramental grace to be saved. With this came the apparatus of the papacy and priesthood, to minister to the weak.” (Columcille, p.41)
But Pelagian ideas continued to be spread, so that Jerome and Augustine and other bishops were compelled to take a resolute stand against them. In 431, Pope Celestine sent Palladius, the first bishop, (St. Patrick was the second) to Ireland. His mission: stamp out Pelagianism.
Augustine’s teachings about grace and original sin became a fundamental part of the Roman version of Christianity, but Celtic Christians continued to incorporate the teachings of Pelagius into their beliefs. During the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., they accepted personal responsibility for improving their own spiritual condition as well as the spiritual condition of others.
Because the Celts believed that the Gospels, along with their own cultural traditions, should dictate the nature of Christian doctrine, they rejected the ideas of Augustine that either supplemented scripture or did not conform to Celtic customs.” (The Wandering Irish in Europe, p. 50-51)
7.
Out Of Africa, Out Of Ireland
by James Mullin
August 20, 2002
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For centuries, England dominated both the African slave trade and Ireland. The parallels are too numerous and haunting to ignore.
W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and preeminent historian on slavery in the Americans, wrote:
"Any attempt to consider the attitude of the English colonies toward the African slave trade must be prefaced by a word as to the attitude of England herself and the development of the trade in her hands." Amen.
Du Bois gives America's "Dialogue on Race" a logical starting place. Racism is the legacy of slavery, and slavery in the Americas began with the "Mother Country's" dominant role in the Atlantic slave trade. Before all white Europeans are lumped together with the British as colonists and slave keepers, let us consider Britain's tyranny in Ireland and the many parallels of subjugation and enslavement to be drawn.
Britain first entered the slave trade with the capture of 300 Negroes in 1562, and pursued it with religious zeal for three centuries. She introduced the first African slaves to Virginia on board a Dutch ship in 1619. In 1651, she fought two wars to wrest the slave trade from the Dutch. In her book, Black Chronology from 4,000 B.C. to Abolition of the Slave Trade, Ellen Irene Diggs wrote: "The final terms of peace surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to become the world's greatest slave trader."
In 1662 the Company of Royal Adventurers was chartered by Charles II. The Royal Family, including Queen Dowager and the Duke of York, contracted to supply the West Indies with 3,000 slaves annually. This company was later sold for 34,000 pounds and replaced by the Royal African Company, also chartered by King Charles II. Diggs says that in 1655, "Oliver Cromwell, in his zeal for God and the slave trade," sent an expedition to seize Jamaica from Spain. It soon became Britain's West Indian base for the slave trade.
In 1649 Oliver Cromwell and his 20,000-man army invaded Ireland. They killed the entire garrison of Drogheda and slaughtered all the townspeople. Afterwards, Cromwell said, "I do not think 30 of their whole number escaped with their lives. Those that did are in safe custody in the Barbados. "Under Cromwell's policy, known as "To Hell or Connaught," Irish landowners were driven off millions of acres of fertile land. Those found east of the river Shannon after May 1, 1654, faced the death penalty or slavery in the West Indies. Cromwell rewarded his soldiers and loyal Scottish Presbyterians by "planting" them on large estates. The British set up similar "plantations" in Barbados, St. Kitts and Trinidad.
The demand for labor on these distant plantations prompted mass kidnappings in Ireland. A pamphlet published in 1660 accused the British of sending soldiers to grab any Irish people they could in order to sell them to Barbados for profit: "It was the usual practice with Colonel Strubber, Governor of Galway, and other commanders in the said country, to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies, and by computations sold out of the said country about a thousand souls. "In Black Folk Then and Now, Du Bois concurs: "Even young Irish peasants were hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put aboard ship, and sold to plantations in Barbados."
According to Peter Berresford Ellis in To Hell or Connaught, soldiers commanded by Henry Cromwell, Oliver's son, seized a thousand "Irish wenches" to sell to Barbados. Henry justified the action by saying, "Although we must use force in taking them up , it is so much for their own good and likely to be of so great an advantage to the public." He also suggested that 2,000 Irish boys of 12 to 14 years of age could be seized for the same purpose: "Who knows but it might be a means to make them Englishmen." In 1667 Parliament passed the Act to Regulate Negroes on British Plantations. Punishments included a severe whipping for striking a Christian. For the second offense: branding on the face with a hot iron. There was no punishment for "inadvertently" whipping a slave to death.
Between 1680 and 1688, the English African Company sent 249 ships to Africa and shipped approximately 60,000 black slaves. They "lost" 14,000 during the middle passage, and only delivered 46,000 to the New World. As Diggs points out, "Planters sometimes married white women servants to Blacks in order to transform these servants and their children into slaves."
This was the case with "Irish Nell," a servant woman brought to Maryland and sold to a planter when her former owner returned to England. Whether her children by a black slave husband were to be slave or free occupied the courts of Maryland for a number of years. Petition was finally granted, and the children freed.
The "custom" of marrying white servants to black slaves in order to produce slave offspring was legislated against in 1681. How many half-Irish children became slaves through this custom? How many black Americans have Irish ancestors because of it? If a servant is forced to mate with a slave in order to produce slave children for her slave master, is she not a slave? In 1698 Parliament acted under pressure and allowed private English merchants to participate in the slave trade. The statute declared the slave trade "highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and to the Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging," according to Du Bois.
English merchants immediately sought to exclude all other nations by securing a monopoly on the lucrative Spanish colonial slave trade. This was accomplished by the Assiento treaty of 1713. Spain granted England a monopoly on the Spanish slave trade for 30 years. England engaged to supply the colonies with "at least 144,000 slaves at the rate of 4,800 a year," and they greatly exceeded their quota, according to Du Bois. The kings of Spain and England were to receive one-fourth of the profits, and the Royal African Company was authorized to import as many slaves as they wished.
In Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer says, "Slave trading was no vulgar or wicked occupation that shut a man out from office or honors. Engaged in the British slave trade were dukes, earls, lords, countesses, knights — and kings. The slaves of the Royal African Company were branded with initials D.Y. for the Duke of York. "In the late 18th century historian Arthur Young traveled widely in Ireland. He wrote, "A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier dares to refuse. He may punish with his cane or horsewhip with most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense. "When the Irish rebelled in 1798, Britain shipped thousands of chained "traitors" to her penal colonies in Australia. Many Irish prisoners were convinced that the masters of these convict ships were under orders to starve and murder them by neglect on the outward voyage. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes writes, "They had reason to think so," and points to the 1802 arrival of the Hercules, with a 37-percent death rate among the political exiles. That same year, the Atlas II sailed from Cork, with 65 out of 181 "convicts" found dead on arrival. Irish sailors who mutinied to help their countrymen were flogged unmercifully, and "ironed" together with handcuffs, thumbscrews and slave leg bolts.
In Slavery and the Slave Trade, James Walvin writes: "In 1781 the British slave ship Zong, unexpectedly delayed at sea and in danger of running short of supplies, simply dumped 132 slaves overboard in order to save the healthier slaves and on the understanding that such an action would be covered by the ship's insurance (not the case had the wretched slaves merely died).
"The Church of England supported the slave trade as a means of converting "heathens," and the Bishop of Exeter held 655 slaves until he was compensated for them in 1833. Trader John Newton had prayers said twice a day on board his slave ship, saying he never knew "sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion.
" Francis Drake's slave ship was called Grace of God. In The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson says, "The value of British income derived from the [slave] trade with the West Indies was said to be four times greater than the value of British incomes derived from trade with the rest of the world." Diggs says that the greater profits from the trade "helped make possible the British Industrial Revolution." The tables from the Royal African Company indicate that between 1690 and 1807, they took 2,579,400 slaves out of Africa.
By 1839, the year of the Amistad incident, Britain was no longer active in the slave trade, but it was about to engage wholeheartedly in the drug trade! British warships and troops fought the Opium War (1839-42) and forced the Chinese to accept British opium trafficking. "The British opium trade in China amounted to millions of silver dollars and hundreds of tons of opium annually." What a lucrative replacement for the slave trade, and how much more ethical! In 1845-52, over a million Irish people died of starvation and related diseases while enjoying the benefits of direct rule from London. The mortality rate was increased by the forced eviction of 500,000 souls. A million and a half more left Ireland, many on "coffin ships." During "Black '47," the worst year of the so-called famine, almost 4,000 vessels left Ireland carrying food to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London, according to Dr. Christine Kinealy. During nine months of that year, a total of 1,336,220 gallons of grain-derived alcohol were shipped from Ireland, she says, along with 822,681 gallons of butter!
In Forced Famine Genocide? Peter J. Parish, director of the Institute of U.S. Studies at the University of London, recently wrote Slavery: History and Historians. The index contains no entry for England, Britain, Great Britain or United Kingdom. He wrote: "Indeed, in the 16th and 17th centuries, slavery was very much an institution of the tropical and subtropical latitudes, and in the new world was a product of the Spanish and Portuguese empires rather than the British." Indeed?
Walvin says, "The picture described here has been too charitable toward the slavers and does not fully underline the inhumanities endemic in the slave trade ... The slave trade was an exercise in cruelty and inhumanity to a degree scarcely imaginable to modern readers. "Let us use our imaginations to face the horror of history, and overcome the legacy of racism bequeathed to us by "the Mother Country."
8.
The New Jersey Famine Curriculum: A Report
By Mullin, James V.
Spring/Summer,
2002, pp. 119-129
Eire-Ireland: a Journal of Irish Studies
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"The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it." OSCAR WILDE
In 1995, when I first learned that the New Jersey Holocaust Education Commission had been empowered by the legislature to consider course materials on "a wide range of genocides," I contacted Dr. Paul Winkler, Executive Director of the Commission, and asked him if the Great Irish Famine could be included. He immediately asked me, "Are you claiming genocide?" I said, "I would like the teachers and students to make up their own minds." He agreed, and encouraged the development of our Irish Famine Curriculum. The 116-page curriculum is available on the Web site of the Nebraska Department of Education. Any teacher or student with a computer and modem can read, print, or download all of it using HTML or PDF formats. The Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Idaho Departments of Education have linked to the curriculum on the Nebraska site, along with the National Archives of the Republic of Ireland and the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) at Syracuse University. The curriculum is indexed by the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) at Indiana University, which has distributed microfiche copies to one thousand subscribing college and university libraries.
The New Jersey curriculum was approved by the state Holocaust Commission on 10 September 1996 and distributed to state schools. The following month, New York Governor George Pataki signed a law mandating instruction on the mass starvation in Ireland. The Sunday Times of London responded on 13 October with a staff editorial entitled "An Irish Hell, but not a Holocaust," which stated:
To compare, as Mr. Pataki has done, Britain's policy to that of Hitler
towards the Jews is as unhistorical as it is offensive. Not the least to
the Jews, the tragedy of whose Holocaust is necessarily lessened by
comparison with an Irish catastrophe that was neither premeditated nor
man-made.
Yet Governor Pataki had not compared the Great Famine to the Holocaust in either his written or spoken remarks. A week later, British Ambassador John Kerr wrote to Pataki, saying:
It seems to me rather insulting to the many millions who suffered and died
in concentration camps across Europe to imply that their man-made fate was in any way analogous to the natural disaster in Ireland a century before. The Famine, unlike the Holocaust, was not deliberate, not premeditated, not man-made, not genocide, (1)
On 10 March 1997 the Washington Times published a full-page Insight magazine editorial deriding Pataki as "the greatest liar in America" and ridiculing the idea of Irish Famine education. “You say Potato, They say Holocaust” was illustrated by a photograph of a potato wrapped in barbed wire.
On 26 August, the Boston Globe published “Unnecessary Curriculum Bill,” attacking Massachusetts State Senator Warren Tolman for promoting instruction on the Great Irish Famine, the Armenian Genocide, and the Holocaust: As the Tolman bill is now worded, teachers might be encouraged to treat the Irish famine on the same level of moral depravity as the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. That would be a misreading of the historical record.
While the British approach to the mass starvation was often brutal, arrogant and unfeeling, no state-run death camps disfigured the Irish countryside. The argument that classroom discussion of the mass starvation should be discouraged because British behavior did not match the barbarity of the Nazis during the Holocaust is central to all objections against famine education.
Because the Holocaust is the best documented, most systematic, cruel, and ruthless genocide of the twentieth century, it has almost become the very definition of genocide. Opponents of famine education raise the Holocaust with the intention of demonstrating that, if the Great Irish Famine was not comparable (“no state-run death camps”), then the famine was not a matter of genocide.
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