Now we’ll move to Ireland. Everyone’s heard of the potato famine, and everyone knows that the Irish still hold a bit of a grudge about it when pushed. Now I know a bit more about it, that seems fair enough. The English “owned” Ireland as a colony. Thanks to English penal laws, Irish people weren’t allowed to buy any land, all of the land was kept by rich Englishmen. These land owners rarely, or never visited their plots, so they would hire middlemen to rent it out to poor landless Irish labourers. To make as much cash as possible, these middlemen would carve the land up into tiny tracts and squeeze the peasants for all they were worth.
The only way to feed a family from the land they rented was to grow potatoes and own a cow. This could feed a family, just. The penal laws also forbade Irish people from having an education or entering into a profession. No wonder they hated us.
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