IRISH HOLOCAUST AGAIN

irishmen and irishwomen

Lest we forget.

Read this site and weep.

Weep for the agonies and deaths of your people at the hands of genocidists. The authorities who imposed the curriculum, the teachers and professors who funneled it into you, have carefully kept you uninformed as to which British regiment, or that any regiment, murdered your people. Until now, that information was kept from you. You had no access to it.

You do now - you read it on your computer screen! Commit the regiment's name to memory.

Never, ever, forget it!  Learn its British HQ town. As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.

Is Britain's cover-up of its 1845-1850 holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?  

The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide.  Consider: why does Irish President Mary Robinson call it "Ireland's greatest natural disaster" while she conceals the British army's role?  Potato blight, "phytophthora infestans", did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn't cause famine anywhere.  Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.

Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment)  The attached map shows the never-before-published names and locations in Ireland of the food removal regiments (Disposition of the Army; Public Record Office, London; et al, of which we possess photocopies).  Thus, Britain seized from Ireland's producers tens of millions of head of livestock; tens of millions of tons of flour, grains, meat, poultry & dairy products; enough to sustain 18 million persons.

The Public Record Office recently informed us that their British regiments' Daily Activity Reports of 1845-1850 have "gone missing."  Those records include each regiment's cattle drives and grain-cart convoys it escorted at gun-point from the Irish districts assigned to it.  Also "missing" are the receipts issued by the British army commissariat officers in every Irish port tallying the cattle and tonnage of foodstuff removed; likewise the export lading manifests. Other records provide all-revealing glimpses of the "missing" data; such as: ...  

• Click HERE to visit Irish Holocaust Website.
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FASCIST HOLOCAUST EUGENICS

As a result of British sponsored revisionist history, many people are unaware, that while Irish farms were producing plenty of other foods, including corn, wheat, barley and beef, food was taken  away by the British Government, under the noses of the starving six million children, women and men. It was taken to wealthy England by the armed guard of the British Army, who were under orders to ethnically cleanse the native Irish from Ireland. 

The six and a quarter million disappeared Irish surpasses even the numbers in the Holocaust visited on the Jewish people later, by the Nazis. For confirmation see the the present Viceroyal in British Occupied Ireland Theresa Villiers family tree a direct descendant of the then Vice royal in Ireland,  George Fredrick Villiers (1800 - 1870). 

While you are at it, you might ask Ms Villiers, about the current political internment without trial in British Occupied Ireland of Marian Price and Martin Corey as happened in Hitler's concentration camps. The Irish Holocaust unlike the Jewish one has been airbrushed history by mentored, historical, revisionists. 

A good contribution to truth and reconciliation in Ireland, can be kicked started by the British Government, making amends on a relative scale, to what the German Government made in war reparations and amends, for their holocaust visited on the Jews.

Holocaust denial is a criminal offence in Europe. The criminal Tory Regime in Britain should be changed, imprisoning these criminals for another trial in Nuremburg or Strasburg in a very public way unlike the secret ones of the British Nazi regime, the inventors of the original Concentration Camp to exterminate children, women and men.

The Duty to Avoid a War in Korea

Fidel Castro

April 05, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -  A few days ago I mentioned the great challenges humanity is currently facing. Intelligent life emerged on our planet approximately 200,000 years ago, although new discoveries demonstrate something else.

This is not to confuse intelligent life with the existence of life which, from its elemental forms in our solar system, emerged millions of years ago.

A virtually infinite number of life forms exist. In the sophisticated work of the world’s most eminent scientists the idea has already been conceived of reproducing the sounds which followed the Big Bang, the great explosion which took place more than 13.7 billion years ago.

This introduction would be too extensive if it was not to explain the gravity of an event as unbelievable and absurd as the situation created in the Korean Peninsula, within a geographic area containing close to five billion of the seven billion persons currently inhabiting the planet.

This is about one of the most serious dangers of nuclear war since the October Crisis around Cuba in 1962, 50 years ago.

In 1950, a war was unleashed there [the Korean Peninsula] which cost millions of lives. It came barely five years after two atomic bombs were exploded over the defenseless cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which, in a matter of seconds, killed and irradiated hundreds of thousands of people.

General Douglas MacArthur wanted to utilize atomic weapons against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Not even Harry Truman allowed that.

It has been affirmed that the People’s Republic of China lost one million valiant soldiers in order to prevent the installation of an enemy army on that country’s border with its homeland. For its part, the Soviet army provided weapons, air support, technological and economic aid.

I had the honor of meeting Kim Il Sung, a historic figure, notably courageous and revolutionary.

If war breaks out there, the peoples of both parts of the Peninsula will be terribly sacrificed, without benefit to all or either of them. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was always friendly with Cuba, as Cuba has always been and will continue to be with her.

Now that the country has demonstrated its technical and scientific achievements, we remind her of her duties to the countries which have been her great friends, and it would be unjust to forget that such a war would particularly affect more than 70% of the population of the planet.

If a conflict of that nature should break out there, the government of Barack Obama in his second mandate would be buried in a deluge of images which would present him as the most sinister character in the history of the United States. The duty of avoiding war is also his and that of the people of the United States.

Fidel Castro Ruz - April 4, 2013 - 11:12 p.m.

Peter J DeLuca

5 hours ago

Right On.

Thank you for your efforts to prevent a calamity. I did not realize 5 out of 7 Billion lived in this area. It is unfortunate that I know that now. Seems that this information would offer that gang of 7 an opportunity to reduce the worlds population quickly as at the least expense.  We are all victims of their greed and arrogance.

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AlienneLaval

1 hour ago

@Peter J DeLuca this is no solution... it would traumatize the survivors for aeons...

HOLOCAUST, WHOSE HOLOCAUST ?

Ireland should not become a subsidiary of the international Zionist
holocaust franchise chain

It seems the Jewish holocaust is indeed much more important to
revisionists than the so-called Irish Famine or original European
holocaust, which in 1847 the Cork Examiner (now Irish Examiner)-
referring to the on-going crime in Ireland, called a "Holocaust" as
did many writers including Michael Davitt in his 1904 "The Fall of
Feudalism in Ireland". Being as it is that Jews were not victims in
the well documented food removal genocide perpetrated by the British
regime against the Irish people in the mid 19th century, could it be
that in today's politically corrected Ireland Jewish suffering and
crimes perpetrated by the NAZI regime in Germany trump the long
ignored and now much denied suffering caused by a deliberate policy of
state orchestrated genocide perpetrated against the Irish themselves a
century before by the racist, colonial power Britain?
Holocaust, whose holocaust?

By T Dillon Jan 2013

To whom it may be of concern,
It seems the Jewish holocaust is indeed much more important to
revisionists than the so-called Irish Famine or original European
holocaust, which in 1847 the Cork Examiner (now Irish Examiner)-
referring to the on-going crime in Ireland, called a "Holocaust" as
did many writers including Michael Davitt in his 1904 "The Fall of
Feudalism in Ireland". Being as it is that Jews were not victims in
the well documented food removal genocide perpetrated by the British
regime against the Irish people in the mid 19th century, could it be
that in today's politically corrected Ireland Jewish suffering and
crimes perpetrated by the NAZI regime in Germany trump the long
ignored and now much denied suffering caused by a deliberate policy of
state orchestrated genocide perpetrated against the Irish themselves a
century before by the racist, colonial power Britain? Must the Irish
in their still divided land not only desist in seeking justice and
recognition of the evil unleashed upon them by a brutal, usurping
neighbor but that they now too must participate in the franchised
international Jewish cult of holocaust that has become the religion of
global Zionism? Why do so many in Ireland insist on relinquishing
their own rights through the falsification of proven historical fact
while at the same time allowing themselves to be conned into donning
the "Emperor of Zion's" threadbare mantle of collective guilt being
foisted upon them as well as on to so many other nations?

Is this simply to be a case of an Irish based monument commemorating
the destruction of innocent Jewish victims (only) at the hands of
NAZIS, or is there to be a reciprocal memorial to the equally innocent
victims of the British engineered holocaust in Ireland perhaps set
somewhere among the ruins of Palestine's bulldozed villages and lands?
Or dare I ask will there be a world-wide network of well financed
monuments to the ongoing terror in Palestine (still being perpetrated
as I write) by the children of the victims of Auschwitz against the
real Semitic people of that cursed land? Where will the history chain
of guilt stop and what is so special in fact about Jewish
victimization that Irish minister Mr Alan Shatter feels the need to
insult the heroes of Irish independence while completely denying the
obvious genocide perpetrated against "his" people, the Irish who he
supposedly represents in the Irish government?

Needless to say this "debate" initiated by well known Zionist Fine
Gael politician Alan Shatter, who insults those who fought and died
for Ireland's independence -with his repugnant and extremist views
much promoted in British tabloids and the global network of Jewish
press- seeks to soften the "hasbara" of Israeli propaganda campaigns
as the ethnic cleansing and genocide against the people of Palestine
continue unabated. All this supposed Irish guile resurrected from
Ireland's bleak post independence past, (at least in Shatter's fertile
and alien imagination) is somehow responsible for the murder of
innocent Jews and is now being raised like some Hebrew Golem as bands
of extremist, supremacist colonizers from Eastern Europe and Russia
wielding their so-called "right of return" have made the Middle East a
raging inferno even as the despicable Netnyahoo government threatens
nuclear war against the sovereign and peaceful nation of Iran while
daily fomenting terror and anarchy against the people of Syria.

Perhaps Agent Shatter would also like to comment on the "morally
bankrupt regime" of fellow Jew and proto-Zionist Benjamin Disraeli,
who in the service of Britain's colonial interests during his tenure
as Britain's Prime minister for two complete terms in 1871 and 1877,
(all the while denying the rights and interests of those of John
Bull's less worthy citizens in his "colony" of Ireland), infamously
insulted that other great Irish statesman and freedom fighting hero
when the Zionist bellowed at Daniel O'Connell in the British House of
Commons with the supremacist taunt "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the
ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an
unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

Obviously Disraeli the "man of political and sexual intrigue" was
ignorant of the fact that he was addressing a member of a race that
was acknowledged centuries before by the English themselves as having
the oldest written language of northern Europe, much older in fact
than the first scribblings attributed to the English and of course
much much earlier than the migration of Khasarian Jews (Disraeli's and
possibly Shatter's ancestors among them) as these migrants spread
across Western Europe from lands that had nothing to do with Palestine
according to Tel Aviv university faculty of history Professor Shlomo
Sand in his best-selling seminal work on Jewish mythology, the must
read expose titled "The Invention of the Jewish People" (2009).

Not only is the propaganda stunt of imposing a Zionist Jewish
territorial marking monument in Ireland an outrageous insult to the
victims of German pogroms of the mid-twentieth century on mainland
Europe (a despicable horror in itself of which a broken and suffering
Ireland had no part whatsoever to play, Mr Shatter), it is an even
greater insult to the ignored and then rabidly denied genocide of
Irish people by a foreign government that has a history more brutal
than any other fascist entity on this planet. Shame on you for your
despicable insinuations that a land impoverished by almost a
millennium of savage, colonial rule by merciless Britain (whose own
jealous ambitions vis-à-vis the rising power of Germany and which
contradictorily played no small part itself in the financing and rise
of NAZI Germany along with well documented US Zionist and fascist
banking interests).... to somehow try to spin that historic fact into
a case of Irish "moral political bankruptcy" is indeed a new low in
the ceaseless attacks of Zionist hasbara spreaders and their network
of ill-informed, useful idiots which mankind today is constantly
subjected to by media in the hands of liars and bigots while trumpeted
by those propagandists they help to get s-elected.

However, I suspect that the real agenda of Zionism in Ireland and that
of its well connected Trojan horse riding cowboys is to teach the
unruly Irish once and for all that the cult of holocaust and the
cherished tales of "suffering Jews", despite all the evidence to the
contrary, will be forced upon the plain people of Ireland in order
that they too finally learn that their steadfast support for their
brothers in occupied, apartheid Palestine will no longer be tolerated
under the diktats of "New World Order" anymore than their attempt to
seek justice and retribution from the usurious tactics of so-called
"Irish" banks now bleeding the working-class people of Ireland dry in
the interests of thieving money changers and fraudsters in lands
distant and unfortunately not distant enough. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la même chose, indeed!

I would appeal to all voters in Ireland to rise above the inherited
Tweedledee and Tweedledum Civil War stupidity of Fine Gael and Fianna
Fail politics, where liars and traitors are continuously "elected" to
political office for flogging our ancient, dead horses, where said
politicians then proceed to betray the people of Ireland as they
unscrupulously represent the interests of foreign and dangerous
elements that are even more insidious than what our forefathers fought
against and were murdered by so that Irish men and women today can
still live and speak their minds in freedom.
Next time Zionist Agent Shatter and the rest of his ilk come pandering
for your vote, bearing despicable tales of imaginary misdeeds and
betrayal of the chosen race which he so obviously represents, remind
this impostor of his own political and moral bankruptcy (whatever
about financial) and ask him about those properties and legal disputes
down in Florida where many other well-heeled speculating Irish patriot
builder friends of his have equally sumptuous nests to escape to when
the climate in Ireland becomes too severe in the winter of collapse
ahead.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092138/Irish-m....html

http://irishholocaust.org/

http://www.federaljack.com/?p=174095

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/96853&user_frontpage=53

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Shatter

http://www.politics.ie/forum/history/204938-why-does-du....html

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ireland/disire.htm

Irish Holocaust of 6,257,456 "Disappeared," Censored by Britain

The Irish Holocaust

Posted by David Icke

'Is Britain’s cover-up of its 1845-1850 holocaust in Ireland the most successful Big Lie in all of history?

The cover-up is accomplished by the same British terrorism and bribery that perpetrated the genocide. Consider: why does Irish President Mary Robinson call it “Ireland’s greatest natural disaster” while she conceals the British army’s role? Potato blight, “phytophthora infestans”, did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn’t cause famine anywhere. Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.

Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers.'

Read more: The Irish Holocaust

Toll of Holocaust

(Click Map Above) Page List: Introduction Britain's Cover Up The Food Removal Voices in the Wilderness Official British Intent Toll of Holocaust Complicity What We Must Do Lisnabinnia Memorial Liverpool, Great Hunger Sister Jean Marie

Toll of Irish Holocaust. The 1841 census of Ireland revealed a population of 10,897,449. This figure includes the correction factor established by that year's official partial recount. When, between 1779 and 1841, the U.S. population increased by 640 percent, and England's is estimated to have increased, despite massive emigration to its colonies, by 100 percent, it is generally accepted that Ireland's population increase was 172% 10. The average annual component of this 172% increase is x in the formula (1+ x)62 = 1 + 172%; thus 0.0163, or 1.63%. Accepting that this 1.63% rate of annual population increase continued until mid-1846 (one human gestation after the late-1845 beginning of removal of Ireland's food), the 1846 population was 11,815,011. Assuming that rate continued, the population in 1851, absent the starvation, would have been approximately 12,809,841. However; the 1851 census recorded a population of 6,552,385; thus there was a "disappearance" of 6,257,456. This population-loss figure of 6,257,456 is scarcely susceptible to significant challenge, being derived directly from the British government's own censuses for Ireland. It is reasonable to assume that the rigor established in the recount of 1841 became the standard for the 1851 census; so that any residual undercount would be systemic, affecting 1841 and 1851 proportionately (and, if known, would increase the murder total). These 6,257,456 include roughly 1,000,000 who successfully fled into exile and another 100,000 unborn between 1846 and 1851 due to malnutrition-induced infertility. Of the 100,000 who fled to Canada in 1847, only 60,000 were still alive one month after landing.11 Among the 40,000 dead was Henry Ford's father's mother who died en route from Cork or in quarantine on Quebec's Grosse Ile. Thus; though from 1845 through 1850, 6,257,456 "disappeared," the number murdered is approximately 1.1 million fewer; i.e., 5.16 millions. Consequently; if Britain's census figures for Ireland are correct the British government murdered approximately 5.16 million Irish men, women and children; making it the Irish Holocaust. This number, 5.16 million, exceeds the high end of the range (4.2 to 5.1 million) of serious estimates of the number of Jews murdered by Nazis. The least reliable component of the foregoing arithmetic is the number assumed to have successfully fled. If the fleers who survived prove to number, say, 900,000 instead of 1,000,000, the murder count will have to be corrected from 5.16 to 5.26 millions. This amount of adjustment, up or down, of the 5.16 millions murdered is determinable by sensitive review of the immigration records of the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Australia; and of government records on the Irish who fled to Britain at the time. We invite bona fide documentation of the foregoing; whether in confirmation or rebuttal. Economists and historians are disqualified if their published work on the events of 1845-1850 covers up the British army's central role therein. Such individuals lack the standing to participate in this truth-quest. To our knowledge nobody else has ever published the above arithmetic or named the food removal regiments and battleships. Evidence that other truth-telling accounts exist would be greatly appreciated. Irish academia shuns and slurs Tom Gallagher's Paddy's Lament and Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger for mentioning the Food Removal. Woodham-Smith fudged, but not enough to satisfy the cover-up cabal. For example; she reported that the 1841 partial recount established a correction factor of one-third for the 1841 census figure; but she used the uncorrected figure to calculate! By this and other fudges she arrived at a population-loss of only 2.5 million. She allocated only half a page to the core facts of the Genocide; the food removal data, while using some two hundred pages to describe British government "relief measures" as if they were something other than cosmetic exercises; a cover-up. But just as Telefis Eireann out-Britished Yorkshire TV by refusing to co-premiere the latter's 1993 exposé of the 5/17/74 British bombings of Dublin/Monaghan streets that murdered 33 and maimed 253; and as the Irish police menace the survivors of that bombing instead of arresting the known British perpetrators; so do Irish historians out-British Woodham-Smith by ostracizing her for exposing the Food Removal. They out-do themselves in describing the "benefit" of the Irish Holocaust; how Britain reduced poverty in Ireland ( by murdering those it had impoverished! They promote the notion that only the blighted potato crop belonged to the Irish while Ireland's abundant livestock, grains, etc., all "belonged" to mostly absentee English landlords. By that insane standard all of the property and production of Europe and Asia, excepting starvation rations for workers, would belong to W.W.II GIs and their heirs (or to the Axis had it won). Irish are not guilty. Though many Holocaust Irish, like many, say, Auschwitz Jews, took deadly advantage of their own weakest, neither the Irish nor Jewish communities had hand or part in the conceiving and planning of the genocides from London and Berlin; respectively. But, the German government repented and paid $100 billion (dollars) reparations to Jews while the British government and its Dublin surrogates still use terror and slander against those who commemorate the Irish Holocaust. It is still dangerous - after 150 years - to reveal the truth of it. ... Continue Irishmen and Irishwomen! Read this site and weep.  Weep for the agonies and deaths of your people at the hands of genocidists.  The authorities who imposed the curriculum, the teachers and professors who funneled it into you, have carefully kept you uninformed as to which British regiment, or that any regiment, murdered your people.  Until now, that information was kept from you. You had no access to it.  You do now - you read it on your computer screen!  Commit the regiment's name to memory.    Never, ever, forget it!  Learn its British HQ town.  As no Jewish person would ever refer to the "Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945", so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine. http://www.irishholocaust.org/home

IRISH HOLOCAUST COFFIN SHIPS AIRBRUSHED

The writer of this song is thought to be Patrick Carpenter, who was credited for these verses in "The Irish Singer's Own Book", of 1880 [thanks to sdog1981]. It is a traditional, narrative song that takes place during the famine and rebellion of 1848. This song is recorded as originating from County Tyrone.)

Oh father dear, I oft-times hear you speak of Erin's isle
Her lofty hills, her valleys green, her mountains rude and wild
They say she is a lovely land wherein a saint might dwell
So why did you abandon her, the reason to me tell.

Oh son, I loved my native land with energy and pride
Till a blight came o'er the praties; my sheep, my cattle died
My rent and taxes went unpaid, I could not them redeem
And that's the cruel reason why I left old Skibbereen.

Oh well do I remember that bleak December day
The landlord and the sheriff came to take us all away
They set my roof on fire with their cursed English spleen
I heaved a sigh and bade goodbye to dear old Skibbereen.

Your mother too, God rest her soul, fell on the stony ground
She fainted in her anguish seeing desolation 'round
She never rose but passed away from life to immortal dream
She found a quiet grave, me boy, in dear old Skibbereen.

And you were only two years old and feeble was your frame
I could not leave you with my friends for you bore your father's name
I wrapped you in my cóta mór in the dead of night unseen
I heaved a sigh and bade goodbye to dear old Skibbereen.

Oh father dear, the day will come when in answer to the call
All Irish men of freedom stern will rally one and all
I'll be the man to lead the band beneath the flag of green
And loud and clear we'll raise the cheer, Revenge for Skibbereen!


Many Irish people still do not know, that at the same time Irish farms were producing plenty of other foods, including corn, wheat, barley and beef. This food was taken  away by the British Government, under the noses of the starving six million children, women and men. It was taken to wealthy England by the armed guard of the British Army, who were under orders to ethnically cleanse THE native Irish from Ireland. 

The numbers of Irish involved surpassed the numbers in the Holocaust visited on the Jews later, by the Nazis. For confirmation see the the present Viceroyal in British Occupied Ireland Theresa Villiers, direct descendant of the then Vice royal in Ireland,  George Fredrick Villiers (1800 - 1870). 

While you are at it, you may ask Ms Villiers, about the current political internment without trial of Marian Price. The Irish Holocaust unlike the Jewish one has been airbrushed history by mentored, historical, revisionists. Still there is always hope that the truth will eventually see the light of day with wonderful artists like Declan O'Rourke.

A good contribution to truth and reconciliation in Ireland, can be kicked started by the British Government, making amends on a relative scale, to what the German Government made in war reparations and amends, for their holocaust visited on the Jews.

Below is and article from today's Irish Times by Siobhan Long:

Heading into history for songs of substance

After Declan O'Rourke discovered his grandfather was born in a workhouse, he became preoccupied with the history of the Famine, and now he's performing songs that he has written on the subject over the past 10 years. photograph: carl timpone

In this section »

• A Bronx tale: unreported crime and the undocumented Irish

SIOBHáN LONG

Percolation: a process that requires time and patience, both of which are commodities that come in short supply when it comes to the delicate art of planning a music career.

Declan O’Rourke seems to be an exception. Over the past 10 years, he has let a raft of thematically related songs insinuate themselves into the atmosphere while he continued to sate the appetites of fans, radio playlists and a wealth of artists looking for permission to borrow from his songbook. Josh Groban, Eddi Reader and Paul Weller have all, literally, sung the praises of O’Rourke’s Galileo (Someone Like You).

Recently, he’s written full orchestral arrangements for many of his songs, and performed them live with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. It was an experience O’Rourke describes as akin to “having a huge palette of colours to play with”.

Aside from all that, he’s shared stages with Alison Krauss and Jerry Douglas, recently duetted with English folk’s Kate Rusby and shared more than a song or two with The Dubliners, but O’Rourke’s headline concert at this year’s Temple Bar Tradfest will see him occupy an altogether different space, where he’ll premiere a suite of songs he’s written over the past decade on the subject of the Irish Famine.

The germ that spawned this particular writing theme was O’Rourke’s discovery that his grandfather was born in a workhouse in Kinvara, Co Galway. Although he had only visited Kinvara once during his childhood, paintings by his grandfather of the local castle, which hung in the homes of many of his relatives, seeped so deeply beneath his skin that he felt what he describes as “a real spiritual connection” to the place. O’Rourke eventually moved to Kinvara, where he’s lived for the past six years. After picking up a book on the workhouses of Ireland, there was no turning away from a subject that’s preoccupied him ever since.

“That book had a big impact on me straight away,” he says. “And it was the personal stories that got me.” One story in particular, of a family from Macroom, struck O’Rourke with its stark and poignant juxtaposition of love and death.

“This man took his family into a workhouse, and all his children died very quickly,” he says. “So he brought his wife home, and, as she was dying, she was very cold, so he got down beside her and took her feet up on to his chest, under his shirt, and that’s where they both died, and that’s how they were both found.

“I was instantly taken by that image, and separate to my own emotional reaction, as a writer, that part of my brain was going ‘alert, alert, alert’. I was just instantly drawn to it, and had to write a song about it.”

The more he read, the more O’Rourke realised that one song could barely scratch the surface of a subject that he believes has been too often excised from our consciousness.

He also knew these songs were demanding a more traditional treatment, which would steer him away from the sound for which he’s best known, but towards something that he was drawn to from a very young age.

“My earliest memories of music are of Planxty and Paul Brady, and I can remember my legs not touching the ground, swinging them and listening to that music,” he says.

“I know there are flavours of that in my music, but I’ve also been afraid of it, because I know that sometimes, to be labelled as an Irish artist, or that you play Irish music, can really stunt your career – especially as a songwriter. The two don’t really go together.”

Serious subject matter 

O’Rourke’s dilemma about his relationship with Irish music is one that mirrors the complexity of many artists’ relationships with what they call home. It seems, though, that he’s found a satisfying way to navigate a path towards it, without diluting his primary instincts for the sounds that define him.

“Even though I’ve always been drawn to this very serious kind of music, and I’ve never stopped loving it or playing it, in a way I feel like I’ve been holding on to it with one hand, and pushing it away with the other.”

Somehow the more O’Rourke delved into this oddly elusive subject of the Famine, the easier it was to bridge the gap between the music he’d grown up with and loved, and the music he found himself writing.

“You know, I knew almost nothing about the Famine. I was never taught about it in school, any more than that it happened,” he says. “There was a gap there that needed to be filled: not only a cultural gap, but a musical gap.

“I hadn’t come across any songs about it really. I had come across Frank Harte’s album, The Hungry Voice but I’ve put that aside and I’ll only listen to it when I’m finished. When you have an idea for a certain subject you want to write about, and someone else has already done a good job, if you listen to it, you might feel that you can’t write your own material, because you can’t get the other work out of your head.

So I just set about writing these new songs fairly painstakingly– because I tend to labour over songs anyway – and they were never going to come until I had read lots about the Famine first. It’s such a serious subject and I knew I didn’t want to get it wrong.”

Temple Bar Tradfest closes with a performance of Declan O’Rourke’s suite of songs on the Famine in St Werburgh’s Church on Sunday, January 27th. templebartrad.com

The Famine:  Musical reference points 

The Hungry Voice by Frank Harte (album)

The Pursuit of Farmer Michael Hayes by Planxty

Famine by Sinéad O’Connor

The Fields of Athenry by Pete St John

Kilkelly by Mick Moloney, Jimmy Keane and Robbie O’Connell

THE IRISH & JEWISH PSYCHOSIS

We Irish and Jews share some experiences that make us rather unique, no, not chosen races, simply unique. Aside from the larger part of our respective populations being scattered to wander the earth, we have both suffered holocausts, where more than 6 million of each of our race, was exterminated by the British and German Nazis.

A well known Irish writer Brendan Behan, once said, that “other people have a nationality; the Irish and Jews have a psychosis”. Generally the  modern solution for psychosis is telling and listening to the truth to recover, as in the old maxim,"the truth will set us free." We are as sick as our secrets and while being truthful sounds simple, in the context of both Irish and Jewish hsitory it takes courage, considerable courage. Many people have lost and continue to loose their lives in both countries as a result of telling the truth.


A writer called Michael Lewis recently wrote of the Irish mentality as follows. “Two things strike every Irish person when he comes to America, Irish friends tell me: the vastness of the country, and the seemingly endless desire of its people to talk about their personal problems. Two things strike an American when he comes to Ireland: how small it is and how tight-lipped,” writes Lewis, “An Irish person with a personal problem takes it into a hole with him, like a squirrel with a nut before winter. He tortures himself and sometimes his loved ones too. What he doesn’t do, if he has suffered some reversal, is vent about it to the outside world. The famous Irish gift of gab is a cover for all the things they aren’t telling you”.

Secrecy practiced under occupation, slavery and the genocide of the British Holocaust, that cost 6,257,456 Irish lives, has left many self destructive elements in the Irish psyche. I once sat at a recovery meeting in Amsterdam, where  many international people, recovering from various addictions, shared that their dysfunctional family homes of origin, were for many of them, the source of their respective problems. Eventually my friend from the west of Ireland exploded and ranted, "If you people think you have a problem with your dysfunctional families, try coming from a dysfunctional fuckin country." I listened subsequently to many shared similar experiences of Jewish people. Below are two videos of what I consider truthful, one of them by a very brave Jewish man, who is the son of a General.

I have learned from experience, that no one person or group, have a monopoly on the truth but I continue to learn much from listening.

Debunking Jewish Myths

"If Anybody here, came hoping to hear a balanced presentation, then they are going to be sorely disappointed. I say this, because a lot of the things that you are about to hear to night are difficult to hear."

“Miko Peled is a peace activist who dares to say in public what others still choose to deny. He has credibility, so when he debunks myths that Jews around the world hold with blind loyalty, people listen. Miko was born in Jerusalem in 1961 into a well known Zionist family. His grandfather, Dr. Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and signer on the Israeli Declaration of Independence. His father, Matti Peled was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Sinai. http://mikopeled.com/

Miko Peled, author of The General’s Son, whose father was the renowned Israeli general Matti Peled, speaking in Seattle, October 1, 2012.

Video Posted October 13, 2012

The Generally Censored 20th History of the Unfree Irish State