The Irish Famine in American School Curricula

The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union. Comment: The Return of Revisionism

“…The Emerald, "the first Irish Magazine ever brought out in Liverpool," drew critical attention to "Irish misrepresentations, for the vulgar stage representation of them has contributed more than even their own worse conduct has done towards making our countrymen in England objects of contempt, or of a condescending patronage (like the humoring a lunatic or wayward buffoon) which is far harder to bear than down right contempt." 14 Once rescued from derision, the "stage Irishman" was to be recast and reclaimed for "national regeneration" not only in literary endeavor on the boards of licensed theaters but also in popular format across Liverpool's ever-growing entertainment sector: "authentic" images of Ireland and its people were offered in dioramas, waxworks, and music-hall spectacles with casts of up to a hundred. While much of this commercial provision operated on a Liverpool-Dublin circuit, popular entertainment in Liverpool was enlivened by influences beyond the "inland" Irish Sea, Liverpool's private Celtic empire.…”

“…13 Reversing the angle, the more recent Irish "ethnic victim" stereotype has paid some recent political dividends, most notably in the inclusion of the Famine under the rubric of "holocaust and genocide" studies in the school curricula of New York and New Jersey. 14 In this variation on the equivalency theme, Peatling's "pernicious political consequences" are all too evident; the British government of the 1840s has many things to answer for, but "genocide" and a "holocaust" are not among them. Lord John Russell's Whig cabinet sought to apply the principles of doctrinaire political economy to the Famine; Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot had something rather different in mind.…”

“…Young Ireland deserves much of the credit for helping to construct this idealized Irish identity that continued to be replenished in the next generation by politicians, writers, and dreamers as different as Michael Davitt, Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Sophie Bryant, Alice Stopford Green, Lord Castletown, D. P. Moran, Arthur Griffith, and A.E., or George Russell-not to mention the leaders of the Easter Rising. 14 If Lord Salisbury's affirmation of the Hiberno-Hottentot analogy represents a sample of one, so too does Erskine Childers's case for Home Rule. Curiously enough, Peatling devotes more than three pages to this Edwardian treatise on the necessity of conceding the Irish demand for some form of independence.…”

The Whiteness of Ireland Under and After the Union. A Response to the Commentators

“…And he quotes Maurice Healy as referring to "this great racial conflict, which has been going on so long, which began in blood and suffering 700 years ago, and has continued through seven centuries of oppression and misery." 14 Anglo-Saxons and Celts posited a clear distinction between British ethnocentrists and environmentalists. The latter insisted that "historical circumstances" had made the Irish who and what they were and that they were just as deserving of "free institutions" as the British and Scottish people.…”