John Mitchel Quotes

During this glorious reign Ireland has seen 1,225,000 of her children die of famine, starved to death whilst the produce of her soil and their labor was eaten up by a vulture aristocracy, enforcing their rents by the bayonets of a hired assassin army in the pay of the –best of the English Queens’

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 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.

Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire 'great famine,' the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn't afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures.

… the annihilation of Ireland.

I want to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question is ... Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world ... That is the Irish question in its integrity.

England seizes our food whilst death seizes on our people.

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.

… half of the potatoes were ruined by the rot, and that no one could guarantee the remainder. Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark, in which states the potato disease had likewise deprived the poorer class of its usual food, have immediately taken energetic means, and have opened the harbours, bought corn, and provided[for the case of a rise of prices. Sir Robert proposed the same thing for England, and, by opening the ports, a preparation for the abolition of the Corn Laws. His colleagues refused …. The whole country cries out: the Corn Laws are doomed.

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.

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.

If we look at the day-to-day suffering of the Venezuelan people, that's not about numbers: it's about human beings.

Famines occur under a colonial administration, like the British Raj in India or for that matter in Ireland, or under military dictators in one country after another, like Somalia and Ethiopia, or in one-party states like the Soviet Union and China.

Ireland was almost constantly agitated by rebellions and insurrections, which, although not always taking their rise from the difference of religious opinions, between the English and Irish, were aggravated and rendered more bitter and irreconcilable from that cause.

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.

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

Ireland is a place where conditions are never normal—where class is distorted by race and an alien aristocracy.

Were men angels the devices of politics could be disdained, and earth would be a celestial abode; but while men were men, and the English were wicked, one must profit by their troubles.

… the time is come when a removal of the restrictions upon the importation of food cannot be successfully resisted. Should this be Sir Robert's own opinion, the Queen very much hopes that none of his colleagues will prevent him from doing what it is right to do.

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.

That dense population in extreme distress inhabited an island where there was an established church which was not their church; and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom lived in distant capitals. Thus they had a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and, in addition, the weakest executive in the world. That was the Irish question.

We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the Potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing…. Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?

I have seen the Indian in his forests and the negro in his chains, and thought as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland …. In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what never was seen till it was shown in Ireland. The misery of Ireland descends to degrees unknown elsewhere.