Paul Murphy TD speaking in the Dáil on June 21 on forced migration driven by war and climate change. According to the UN there are 65.3 million people worldwide forcibly displaced by war, climate change and human rights. What is the response of the EU?
The Real Irish-American Story Not Taught in Schools
by Bill Bigelow in CommonDreams. published on Thursday, March 17, 2016 by Zinn Education Project
To support the famine relief effort, British tax policy required landlords to pay the local taxes of their poorest tenant farmers, leading many landlords to forcibly evict struggling farmers and destroy their cottages in order to save money. (Sketch: The Irish Famine: Interior of a Peasants Hut)
“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:
… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th century Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.
© 2015 Zinn Education Project
Right2Water/Right2Change policy and fiscal frameworks
NoelFliuch
I’ve just read both the policies document and the fiscal document for the fourth or fifth time.
Fiscal Policies
The fiscal document is totally aspirational. They continually go on about rejecting EU fiscal policies yet constantly go back to saying they’ll go to the EU and other EU and eurozone countries asking for their support – which I don’t see them getting – so effectively they’ve given themselves a ‘get out of jail free’ card for every single fiscal policy when it falls on its face.
That in turn means many of their other policies will fail because they hinge on the fiscal policies being enacted.
One huge flaw in their fiscal policy is the fact that it’s based on current government figures which we all know are politically skewed, deliberately misleading, and fundamentally undermined by other financial authorities – so that’s another ‘get out of jail free’ card for them (there was nothing left in the bank went we went to get the money etc).
Other Policies
I have to say the policy document is also full of aspirations many of which hinge totally on the fiscal document.
Democratic changes would be welcome but the changes put forward are quite superficial (tackling corruption, media ownership etc.) I would predict they’ll make a big fanfare out of those superficial changes when what we really need is wholesale change like full participatory democracy (which is not mentioned in their policy document).
We also need a right of recall by the people of any Dáil deputy, senator and judge, and that also isn’t mentioned in their policy document.
There also isn’t anything solid about how they might encourage more people to engage and participate in our current form of democracy.
As for media ownership, well there are strict EU regulations surrounding this and any proposals or changes in this arena will also have to pass mustard with Brussels and since we’ll be kicking them in the nads financially they won’t be too keen giving us any slack.
Bank Bailout
One huge flaw in all these policies is that there is no commitment to go back in any way on what most of us consider to be Not Our Debt.
There is nothing in either document that declares the bank bailout to be unjust and unacceptable. There is nothing said about the ongoing debt that this country has been saddled with, no statement saying they will declare this debt to be odious.
…….
Overall both documents are purely aspirational (almost utopian) and one hinges (and falls) on the other while the other hinges (and falls) on serious changes within the eurozone which aren’t going to happen either for a long time (or never) or else not without serious concessions and compromises from us (like surrendering more sovereignty and/or losing our neutrality etc).
I would say these frameworks are more skeletons that are seriously in need of having some meat on them.
Irish Water Ltd
What Right2Change actually say about IWL is that they’ll abolish it within 100 days but then they say they’ll set up another version of IWL like a Bord Uisce Eireann kinda thing but that begs several questions:
What about all the current employees of IWL? Redundancy packages, pensions etc.
What about the contracts IWL has already entered into?
Have they costed dismantling IWL?
Where will they get the money to fund the dismantling of IWL?
Do they have a costing for setting up an alternative?
How will they fund that?
None of these questions are asked so none are answered instead there are more aspirations but what will actually happen is that we will have hand-wringing and We Are Where We Are / There Is No Alternative / the previous government…etc.
While Right2Change are not formally fielding any candidates for the next general election they are acting as an umbrella organization looking for independents and parties to sign up to their policy frameworks – this neatly bypasses the formality of actually setting up a political party of their own.
It must also be pointed out that most of our unions were silent after the last financial meltdown and were mute during the bank bailout and subsequent surrender of sovereignty to the Troika while unions in Greece, Italy, France and Spain were mobilising mass rallies to protest the bailouts.
Now we see a time of discontent among many state and semi-state workers over the losses they incurred due to ‘reforms’ forced upon us by the Troika and those same unions are being called upon to stand up for their members (the same unions that told the same workers that they had to accept the Troika reforms) so we’re looking at multiple disputes escalating into strike action.
Sinn Fein
Fliuch has never supported or endorsed any political party and this remains our policy. With the recent news of a voting pact being set up within Right2Change groups anyone subscribing to Right2Water are by default supporting Sinn Fein – that’s your choice – we will continue to promote non-aligned independents as the best choice for now.
Conclusion
All of this combined seems completely self-serving and dishonest on many levels and any local anti-water tax group that has signed up to Right2Water (and by default Right2Change) really needs to think about where they were, where they are now, and where they want to be, as opposed to where Right2Water wants you to be..
Noel for Fliuch.
Source: http://www.fliuch.org/right2waterright2change-policy-and-fiscal-frameworks/