Britain forced a famine on Ireland, now it's taking part in the Gaza
The Paupers’ Graveyard in the Irish town of Wexford. (David Cronin) The people buried in the Paupers’ Graveyard do not feature in histories of the British Empire.
A visitor will not learn their names, just that they belonged to “Wexford’s poor, deprived, handicapped and destitute,” as an inscription beneath a Celtic cross reads.
Many had lived and died in the workhouse of this town on Ireland’s southerneast coast.
The workhouse was set up in 1845, the year when Ireland’s Great Famine began.
The workhouse was, in effect, a prison for the impoverished.
Inmates were separated from their families and forced to toil for 11 hours per day. The rationale behind having extremely harsh conditions was that only the most desperate would seek help – if that is the right word – from such an institution.
As I walked around the Paupers’ Graveyard in Wexford earlier this week, I thought about Refaat Alareer, the eloquent and brave Palestinian scholar assassinated by Israel in December 2023.
Refaat drew parallels between Palestine and Ireland. In October 2023, he posted on social media that he used to inform students about how “Britain helped exacerbate the Irish famine that happened 170 years ago,” before observing that “the US/UK are helping Israel starve Palestinians in Gaza.”
The following month, he wrote that “famine is a pure European weapon in modern times,” citing the example of Ireland, as well as Bengal.
I have also been thinking about Donald Trump – admittedly, it is hard not to. In between his games of golf last weekend, the US president complained that nobody has expressed appreciation for American aid to Gaza.
Trump – intentionally or not – has given negative connotations to the word “humanitarian.” While the term used to be associated with altruism and compassion, it is now inextricably linked with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which promises aid to Palestinians who then get massacred when they come searching for it.
That, it would appear, is the US-financed “humanitarian” aid for which Trump expects to be thanked.
Grateful for crumbs?
The idea that a starving people should be grateful when their oppressors throw a few crumbs in their direction is not new.
In 1848, The Yorkshireman newspaper described Britain’s supposed relief measures for the Irish famine as “golden gifts” that were poured into “the lap of the disaffected and miserable people.” Britain had come “magnanimously forward,” in the paper’s view, only to be met with the “deepest ingratitude” from the Irish.
Refaat Alareer rightly underscored that Britain exacerbated Ireland’s famine.
When the potato crop failed in 1845, the British initially arranged for corn to be imported into Ireland from America. The imports were halted after John Russell from the Liberal Party replaced Robert Peel of the Conservatives as prime minister in 1846.
The Liberals decided that the amount of food brought into Ireland should be determined by market forces.
Filling the coffers of merchants and grain producers was a political imperative. The bellies of the Irish became emptier.
The famine stalking Gaza is the result of deliberate policy.
International agencies have a large supply of food stationed beside and near the crossings which Israel controls. For several months, Israel has blocked the delivery of that aid.
Israel’s new announcement that it is pausing “military activity” for 10 hours per day in some parts of Gaza – nominally to facilitate aid deliveries – does not lessen its culpability. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is still officially wanted by the International Criminal Court for using starvation as a weapon of war.
The Irish were deliberately robbed of food in the 1840s, too.
Rather than being used to meet the country’s needs, grain, butter, fish and livestock were exported in vast quantities from Ireland during that period. Many of the shipments took place under armed guard.
Channeling Irish anger
The United Nations’ Genocide Convention did not come into effect until almost a century after Ireland’s Great Famine.
The evidence is nonetheless compelling that the hunger crisis forced on Ireland involved genocide, as the term is understood today: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.
The suffering of the Irish was “brought on by their own wickedness and folly,” The Economist insisted in 1846.
Starving millions of Palestinians to death “may be right and moral,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, declared in August 2024, lamenting that the “world won’t let us.”
Smotrich’s protest was unnecessary. The world’s most powerful states have let Israel get away with causing mass hunger, just as they let Israel get away with committing massacre after massacre and destroying nearly all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
The world’s most powerful states include Britain.
The Great Famine of the 1840s and early 1850s was not the last starvation crisis in Ireland. High levels of hunger were experienced again in the 1870s and the 1890s, a decade which began with Arthur James Balfour heading Britain’s colonial administration in Ireland.
He would later – in his then capacity as foreign secretary – issue the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Through it, Britain became the imperial sponsor of Zionist colonization in Palestine.
Britain is a direct participant in genocide today.
Royal Air Force flights over Gaza – which take off from a British “sovereign” base in Cyprus – are being used to provide Israel “intelligence” as it butchers hungry Palestinians.
The Irish still feel anger towards the British state – not, I hasten to add, ordinary British people.
We are right to be angry. Forgetting Britain’s crimes would be an affront to our ancestors.
Like Ireland, Palestine is a victim of Britain’s perfidy. The most productive way to channel our anger today is by demanding Palestine’s freedom.
