July 12th--Famine

I've just realized that I have a week and a half of class left--that's insane! This program has gone by so fast. But there's still time to have plenty of adventures, so we shall not fear. I had a fairly full day of class today, with archaeology in the morning and history and Irish in the afternoon. In archaeology, we've finally gotten to all the early Christian period, so all the sites we've seen over the last five weeks are now showing up in lecture. In history, we've gotten to the Great Famine, which I'm pretty interested in, especially since it's the topic for my paper. There are a lot of qualms about the history of the Famine today, especially in addition to the Unionist/Nationalist tensions. The basic gist is that while the potato blight was a biological disaster, the way the government handled relief was completely inadequate and thus there was mass devastation throughout Ireland. There are a lot of fingers to point in terms of blame for the disaster, from the Irish landlords who weren't able to honor their responsibility for ensuring the well-being of their tenants to the English government operating under a policy of laissez-faire economics that kept them from intervening appropriately. There was also the belief that the Famine was a result of Ireland's weakness as a society and many saw the Famine as a punishment and opportunity to reconstruct the country. We discussed the history of the Famine in the context of current debates over whether it should be included in the school curriculum under the topic of genocides, to be covered alongside the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, to just name a few. The history of the Famine is still very alive in this country, especially with the potential to blame Britain for abandoning Ireland during its hour of need. Speaking of history living on in current tensions, today was Orangemen's Day in Northern Ireland, a day which celebrates the Glorious Revolution (William of Orange, a Protestant, defeated James II, a Catholic). The sectarian tensions between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland are especially volatile on this anniversary when Protestants walk the streets in orange vests. There was actually a bit of violence this year, just proving that everything I'm learning in class is still quite relevant in the modern identity of Ireland.