S. M. Hussey Quotes

The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage.

A king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.

Whole families used to starve in their cabins without their plight being discovered until the stench of their decaying corpses attracted notice.

The misery of the people here is very great, the beggars innumerable and increasing everyday…One half of the people in Ireland eat neither bread nor flesh for one half of the year, nor wear Shoes or Stockings; your Hogs in England and Essex Calves lie and live better than they.

The whole British argument in the [Irish potato] famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect. It’s a dangerous, mean-spirited. Tired argument.

‘Give us food or we perish’, is now the loudest cry that is heard in this unfortunate country. It is heard in every corner of the Island …. It is a strange popular cry to be heard within the limits of the powerful and wealthy British Empire…. Russia wants liberty, Prussia wants a constitution, Switzerland wants religion, Spain wants a king. Ireland alone wants food.

The very great poverty of the Fishermen arises from the want of markets or other demand for fish. The Fishermen often see the creeks along the West Coast crammed with fine fish, when they could take tons of them at a haul, or shot, with a deep seine or drift net, but when caught they would be useless to them, as they could not either salt or sell them …. From the loss of the potatoes as a certain means of subsistence, the fishermen would give their undivided time to the Fisheries, instead of losing the best seasons by wasting their labor on a high-rented potato garden. They would thus throw an immense quantity of cured food such as Hake, Cod

Numbers of starving Catholics had gone to Protestant clergymen and offered to become converts in return for food, and when some of these sickened with the fever, the priests declared it was a judgment on them, and religious hostility became intensified.

Some superstition … prevented even the children from eating the myriads of blackberries which ripened on the bushes .

When the famine took place, the Irish fled as from a plague to America, and when they landed there both men and women were the prey of every blackguard without a single person to advise or protect them. Had the Government taken the movement in hand and employed agents at New York to provide for them until they obtained employment, and to direct them where to apply for it, England would to-day probably have had a grateful nation on the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, we have a hostile multitude which neglects no opportunity of voting for any politician hostile to Great Britain…

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

‘Money can't buy happiness.’ That's just a lie we tell poor people to keep them from rioting in the streets

That million and a half of men, women, and children were carefully, prudently, and peacefully slain by the English Government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created; and it is quite immaterial to distinguish those who perished in the agonies of famine itself from those who died by typhus fever, which in Ireland is always caused by famine. Further, this was strictly an artificial famine-that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that famine a dispensation of Providence, and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.

Ireland has never recovered from Britain's nineteenth century "free trade" rule.

…the ownership of slaves brought men great gain from the multitude of their progeny, who increased because they were exempt from military service. Thus certain powerful men became extremely rich and the race of slaves multiplied throughout the country, while the Italian people dwindled in numbers and strength, being oppressed by penury, taxes, and military service.

The famine has been sent by God to teach the Irish a lesson.... The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Development has to rise if population is going to increase, Otherwise people will starve and all kinds of other problems.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

The whole district seemed swept of food and a third of the population would be without food at Christmas, two thirds starving before February and by May 1848, there would be a total starvation.

Between 1845 and 1855, 2,100,000 chose to escape from Ireland; of those 1,500,000 went to the United States.

For ten years from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was wracked by poverty and social decay: the country suffered a demographic collapse on a scale never before witnessed in an industrial country outside of wartime as deaths outstripped births and the country’s population shrank by some 800,000 people each year.

… the struggling masses

The most disastrous revolutions are produced by the extreme of physical want; the most happy, by wants of a moral kind, physical want being absent.

Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution.