Would the Famine have happened if the Irish were armed?
Not with staves and pitchforks but with rifles and bombs.
Would all of their grain and their British bound beef
Been kept there in Ireland to give them relief?
We were serfs of a sort, slaves in our own land.
Against British oppression we had no chance to stand.
When our subsistence crop failed the absent landlord
Seized our pitiful homesteads and made them sheepfolds.
With the green grass of Ireland their final repast
Irish died by the thousands and their deaths weren’t fast.
Hunger, like Cancer, gnaws a man to the bone
They lie now in mass graves without even a stone.
The poor Irish Catholic was a man with no rights.
No wood for his coffin; No oil for his lights.
What “relief” was provided was cause for despair
as the hungry and the dying built roads to nowhere.
The coffin ships sailed and the old women weep.
Some took the soup and renounce their belief.
Such a strange Famine; it boggles the mind
That food was exported- it was sure genocide.
Then we had no rights they were bound to respect.
Their might gave them right to extort and collect.
We were then subject to their whim and decree
Till we learned to fight back and we made ourselves free.
Victorian Britain took the occasion of the Irish potato famine to crush a subject people. Poor Irish tenant farmers were forced off the land and their hovels were destroyed while their absentee British landlords continued to export food from the island to the Empire.