Should the Queen Have apologised to the Irish?

[thir]

The main thing is very simple: The English took over Ireland, which it had no business doing, in order to 'civilize' it, though Ireland at the time was one of the most civilized countries in the world. (A topic for the civilization disucussion, btw.) They crushed their culuture and changed their self-sufficient ways, made them a colony and a suppressed people, in the end dependent on potatoes - in the long course of their reign there.

Lest you think I am riding the moral horse there, Denmark did much the same thing with Greenland, broke up and crushed a well functioning society perfectly adapted to its hostile surroundings, in order to 'civilize' and Christianise it. And we are still there! No apologies will come forth in the foreseable future, though they are entitled if any are, and, more importantly, they are not allowed the right to the natural resources of their own land.

And Norse vikings sat on Ireland for about 400 years, as an Irish person rather drily pointed out when I complainted about the English!

So, my point is that once you try to subdue another country, violence will follow as sure as night follows day and you cannot very well complain about it. People do not take kindly to being invaded.

[QUOTE=MMI;928160]Thank-you Ian.
They blame the English for callous murders of their people in the 20th century - Bloody Sunday is often cited, and David Cameron has issued an apology to the British people who were affected by this, but the soldiers involved, wrongly or rightly believed they were dealing with armed terrorists;
[quote]

Leo9 has promised to comment here in a seperate post which concerns the complex situation in Northern Ireland. Enough to say here that that situation, too, did not come from nothing.

Croke Park is often cited,

Let's see:
"Bloody Sunday (Irish: Domhnach na Fola) was a day of violence in Dublin on 21 November 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. In total, 31 people were killed – fourteen British, fourteen Irish civilians and three republican prisoners.

The day began with an Irish Republican Army (IRA) operation to assassinate the ‘Cairo Gang’, a team of undercover British agents working and living in Dublin. Twelve were British Army officers, one a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary and lastly a single civilian informant.

Later that afternoon, the Royal Irish Constabulary opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing fourteen civilians. That evening, three IRA suspects in Dublin Castle were beaten and killed by their British captors, allegedly while trying to escape.[1]" (Wikepedia.)

So, a terrorist action performed by British soliders upon fotballers and spectators.

but Croke Park was a misguided act of revenge for the greater act of murder committed by Michael Collins and his gang just hours earlier;

Ireland was at war with Britain. The targeted persons were at least part of that war.

The Great Famine is often cited, too. <> While plentiful crops of corn were growing on Ireland's richer soils, England was importing that harvest for its own consumption, leaving the peasants to live off the poorer lands where only potatoes could grow. That England knew of the plight of the peasants in Ireland stands to its eternal shame, but it can plead in mitigation that, because of the very strong lobby of Irish landowners in the British Parliament at the time, the political will or the strength to do anything about it did not exist. Britain could have imported all the corn it needed from anywhere in the Empire - or the world, for that matter - but the Irish earls and lesser landowners of that country were making very nice profits by exporting corn to England and it was they, the Irish ruling classes, that ensured that this would continue to happen, rather than to be used to relieve their starving countrymen.

1) If the Brits had not taken over Ireland and changed the self-suficient economy, there would have been no potatoes and no famine.

2) The landowners constisted of some Irish who had sided with the English, and anglo-english landowners. I think you are right that neither felt compelled to do anything about the situation - other than make sure it did not cause them loss!

3) Ireland argued that if they are part of Britain as stated, they should recieve help as did other parts of Britain in a like situation. But they did not, which confirms their actual status as a colony no-one was responsible for.

I offer no excuse for Cromwell other than that he - a traitor himself - was intent of suppressing any Royalist threat from Catholic Ireland. His decimation of the population cannot be justified, and Irish hatred for him - still alive - can be well understood. However, Cromwell's activities cannot be used to justify Irish terrorism today (nor are they, I hasten to add).

Two (or gods know how many) wrongs do not make a right.

But the word 'terrorist' is too freely used in many situations to mean 'the people we do not like'. Who are freedom fighters and who not? What methods can justify the end when a country is oppressed?

So I contend that England has only to apologise for failing to ensure that Ireland's great landowners put the well being of their tenants before profit. All of the rest, the Irish brought on themselves. That apology would never be accepted, for the Irish state is built on the myth of English oppression (like other nations I could mention) and an acceptance would be admission of the lies they base their legitimacy upon.

Before the Normans Ireland had one the world's best educational and legal systems, with lawyers studying for years at the university. We are talking 800 something here, or earlier. Many countries sent people to their univeresities. When Ireland got Christianised, the new faith and the old ones existed peacefully for many years. They had poems and music famous still. They also had squabbles between the various lesser kings, but, I think, no more than in other places and of necessity on a smaller scale.

The Normans came to Ireland after their conquest and brutal reorganisations of England, but the situation here was different, while they initially took over Ireland as well, made it more feudal, introduced more brutal laws and money, their areas shrank to around Dublin and apparently they did not have a real hard impact on the country.

As far as I know, things went rather peacfully for centuries right up to the Reformation. In the 16th century the protestants came and the trouble between protestants and catholics started.

King Henry the 8th saw Ireland (now self governed) as a threat, and started to retake it rather brutally, which continued under Elisabeth the 1. In spite of uprisings which were put down by among other things induced famine, Ireland became a real colony under James the 1, complete with plantations and loss of any rights. I think it is from this time it went really bad, roughly the last 400 years

wikipedia:
"From the mid-16th and into the early 17th century, crown governments carried out a policy of colonisation known as Plantations. Scottish and English Protestants were sent as colonists ..."

"These settlers, who had a British and Protestant identity, would form the ruling class of future British administrations in Ireland."
However, Ireland wasn't a popular place to live for these people and they were "absentee landlords" leaving the administrations of the plantations to the bailifss, who were accountable to noone. Obviously the result of such a system was a lot of poverty and sufffering.

A series of Penal Laws discriminated against all Christian faiths other than the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland."

The penal laws:
After the surrender of Limerick in 1691, the treaty which promised religious freedom to the Catholics was grossly violated, and they were made subject to the action of severe "penal laws", passed in the Irish parliament, an assembly composed of Protestant lords, and of members returned for boroughs controlled by the crown or by patrons or by close corporations, and for counties dominated in election affairs by great proprietors of land. Catholics were not permitted to keep school; to go beyond seas, or to send others thither, for education in the Romish religion. Intermarriage with Protestants was disallowed, in case of the possession of an estate in Ireland. Children of mixed marriages were always to be brought up in the Protestant faith.

A "Papist" could not be guardian to any child, nor hold land, nor possess arms. He could not hold a commission in the army or navy, or be a private soldier. No Catholic could hold any office of honour or emolument in the state, or be a member of any corporation, or vote for members of the Commons, or, if he were a peer, sit or vote in the Lords. Almost all these personal disabilities were equally enforced by law against any Protestant who married a Catholic wife. It was a felony, with transportation, to teach the Catholic religion, and treason, as a capital offence, to convert a Protestant to the Catholic faith. The legislation devised for the Irish Catholics in that evil time was described by Burke as "a machine as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man".

http://www.libraryireland.com/articl...Penal-Laws.php

We have seen the result of that system up til today.

I do not see the Irish as angels or saints, nor the British as devils incarnate. But the result of such systems is inescapeable, and you reap what you sow.