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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOutrage at proposed 'Shameless' style sitcom about Ireland's Great Famine
Dublin writer Hugh Travers is in the stages of writing the programme called Hungry.
In an interview with the Irish Times he said it would be a 'Shameless' style sitcom based in famine stricken Ireland.
Shameless was a critically acclaimed, offbeat drama about the rollercoaster lives and loves of a dysfunctional family.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Shameless is about a dysfunctional family and while it is tasteless and somewhat bigoted it doesn't cut all the way to the core; making fun of the Irish famine is rather like setting a comedy in a concentration camp.
I can't imagine this taking off, though on CH 4 who knows? The far right nationalist parties might love it....
randome
(34,845 posts)[hr][font color="blue"][center]The truth doesnt always set you free.
Sometimes it builds a bigger cage around the one youre already in.[/center][/font][hr]
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)A completely different animal than the concentration camps. Officer POWs were actually treated relatively well by the Nazis (except for the Soviets, those POWs, officers and enlisted, were treated like the Jews, communists, LGBT etc)
MADem
(135,425 posts)to the Concentration Camps.
The POW camps had some Red Cross oversight, and while prisoners were not coddled, nor were they fed well, they were not outright starved and they weren't brutalized and sent to the ovens.
http://www.historyonthenet.com/ww2/german_pow_camps.htm
Daily routine varied from camp to camp but all prisoners would be expected to parade at least once daily for a roll-call. Some men would be put to work either around the camp or in the locality. A range of sports were played when the weather was fine and in the evenings there were sometimes concerts. However, for most, the overriding features of life in a prisoner of war camp were boredom, hunger and dreams of a better life once the war was over.
I think a bit of research into the history of the famine would do many well. Fair warning, this might be tough to watch:
jwirr
(39,215 posts)and Rs (ironically Paul Ryan) come from today just watch this video. Can't make it too easy for people because they will become dependent. Starving because they are lazy and shiftless. All this bunk came out of England during this time.
Turbineguy
(37,313 posts)I have a picture of him taken in May 1953. They actually had cigarettes. He did eat a lot of cabbage soup....
on point
(2,506 posts)hedgehog
(36,286 posts)The Holocaust was a result of actively putting Hitler's teachings on "race" into action.
The Hunger was a result of British officials committed to the gospel of Adam Smith passively allowing people to starve. The belief was that the land would be better off without the "excess" population. Exactly what you were supposed to do if you were part of that population was left for you to figure out.
Both governments were devoted to seeing the extermination of a group of people because of ethnicity
You have to give the British government credit though, the same concern was shown for people starving in Bengal in 1943.
treestar
(82,383 posts)So this would somehow poke fun at the British if it were going to work at all.
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)And did not take place in a death camp. It also made the Germans the bumbling comedic fools, not the prisoners. The four main German roles were in fact played by Jewish actors, three of whom were survivors of the concentration camps.
Somewhat different from a Beeb-produced comedy making light of the people suffering a British-imposed famine.
Warpy
(111,237 posts)Some things simply don't lend themselves to comedy. The Potato Famine is one of them, people eating stones and grass just to feel something in their stomachs, while rich landowners exported enough food to feed the whole island because money was more important than people.
Do gooders would feed the starving, but only if they did things like build roads, afraid to feed people lest it make them weak and dependent--and where have we heard that before?
Ireland had 8 million people before the Famine. When it was over, between the dead and the emigrated, there were only 2 million left.
Yeah, how funny can you get?
easychoice
(1,043 posts)The Gov't. let/helped those people starve to death.Pesky Gaelic's,get rid of them.
Warpy
(111,237 posts)but the potato Irish lived on the most undesirable, marginal land, each family lining their field with the type of low stone wall you see around New England delineating property lines. It's amazing how small those fields were, yet they'd support an Irish family dressed in rags and with little else to eat. The English considered them uncivilized, subhuman and good for nothing but, unlike in Scotland, their land was the same, not even good for sheep without the potato crop and reverted to inedible things like nettles.
The English who governed didn't see much difference between the thin, ragged potato Irish and the starving potato Irish and had no motive to care about either.
It's a real study in the callousness of a colonial culture toward indigenous people. I have a lot of INDN friends who say the 600 years of Irish oppression and genocide were a warmup for what they did when they got here. They could be right.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)had a population of over 8 million, shrunk to 3 million. Under the British Empire at the time, not much was done to try to stop the carnage.
I can't imagine anything funny about a tragedy of such historic proportions.
Maybe I just don't have a sense of humor anymore ....
easychoice
(1,043 posts)The English Aristocracy was pretty flip about removing those populations.They damned near killed some of my relatives.
think you misunderstood my disgust for their shoulder shrugging arrogance.Nobody here is laughing.
pnwmom
(108,973 posts)KT2000
(20,572 posts)when the English forced Irish Catholics to convert to Protestantism before they would give them a meal.
Sick.
Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)to worship in the basements of the Church's when they came here. Even the ones the great italian stone masons built. All condoned by the irish priests.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)To death.
Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)why don't you watch Pane Amaro and see what the irish immigrants did to the italians who came later than them.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)Simple question, requiring only a yes or no answer.
Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)Look it up.
Sheldon Cooper
(3,724 posts)your Italians are still way, way behind.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)Can you provide a link to that?
Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)HERE = America
There are plenty of links and descriptions of how deplorable irish immigrants were to the later arriving italian immigrants.
And on edit, the irish immigrants who came first were responsible for the lynching of 11 Sicilian immigrants in 1891 and were instrumental in the anti-italian prejudice in America. They stated "the italians were taking their jobs". They were strong proponents of the 1924 anti-immigration act against southern europeans (italians) and a pretty much responsible for a strong Anti-Japanese movement in this country as well. The film Pane Amaro (bitter bread) tells of the story of Italian immigrants in this country.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)msanthrope
(37,549 posts)MFM008
(19,804 posts)Our family had to leave Cavan and settled in PA.This is a bad idea.
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)Setting a sitcom in Nazi-occupied France?
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I think the issue is (even with the Irish writer) that it's the Beebs doing this.
PeaceNikki
(27,985 posts)LittleBlue
(10,362 posts)What would be funny about people starving?
It just wouldn't work as a sitcom. A drama would be interesting, though.
treestar
(82,383 posts)Maybe I lack imagination? Just no.
Zorra
(27,670 posts)What England did to the Irish people in Ireland during the "famine" was unspeakably wicked. But, of course, England didn't get to be the nasty, presumptious, elitist, morally depraved evil imperialist empire they were by being kind, peaceful, decent people.
"A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse .... He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense." ~ Historian Arthur Young
Not Potatoes, But Slavery
Any historian who has studied the subject further than former Vice-President Dan Quayle, knows that potatoes (or the lack thereof) did not cause the Irish famine and genocide 150 years ago. The potato blight which struck the harvest in autumn 1845, had begun in North Carolina, and spread to destroy potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years; it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere except in Ireland. Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish--75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of British landlords, fanatical preachers of ``free trade"--were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock. The historian Arthur Young had written, like many others, that the Irish tenant farmers were slaves in effect:
snip--
Free trade exported or sold all the corn, wheat, barley, and oats Irish farmers grew, in order that they should pay their rents. All crops became cash crops--and there was nothing left for the farmer and his family to eat. British free trade tolerated no change in this situation while a million Irish starved to death, heavily deploying troops to protect the export ships. Free trade evicted instantly all farmers who stopped paying their rents, and the large landlords, led by British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston, evicted their tenants more rapidly than before as they were starving in the 1840s, even evicting many who were still paying rent. Free trade decreed that no money would be spent on infrastructure projects such as drainage, harbors, fisheries, etc., though a committee of prominent Irish subjects led by Thomas Drummond had quickly surveyed what was most needed. Ireland at that time had 164 miles of railways; England had 6,621 miles.
Free trade decreed that no government surplus food--"no welfare"-- be given to the starving, in order to leave the market for food undisturbed. "We do not propose," Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, "to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain may be brought into Ireland." Free trade insisted that the destitute work on the Public Works or in the workhouses, and that these hundreds of thousands should receive wages below the miserable levels prevailing, in order not to distort the labor market. Thus laborers died in large numbers "on the works" and in the Poor Law houses. Free trade gave the Irish farm families three choices when the potato crops failed: starve on their farms, while selling their grain crops and paying their rent; report to the Public Works or the Poor Law workhouses to be worked/starved to death as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz; or emigrate and take a 50 percent chance of surviving the passage across the Atlantic.
The Irish population was officially 8.1 million in 1845. Some 1.5 million human beings died of starvation and disease in Ireland in four years, while more than one million attempted to emigrate; of these, about 500,000 died--usually of typhus--in passage or in quarantine camps in Canada and New England. The Montreal Board of Health stated of those in the camps in 1847, ``It may well be supposed that few of the survivors could reach any other than an early grave." In that period, among the Irish emigrant population of Massachusetts, average life expectancy was estimated by Lemuel Shattuck at 13.4 years, with 60 percent dying by the age of 5: a level characteristic of Stone Age human societies.
In many instances a stone would be taken from a church ruin, and relocated to a rural area, with a simple cross carved on its top. Because the activity was illegal, the services were not scheduled and their occurrence was communicated verbally between parishioners. The practice had waned by the late 17th century, when worship moved to thatched Mass houses. Some of the Mass rock places may have been used for patterns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_rock
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)Pfeiffer stands and, with all the dignity he can muster in his British colonial accent, replies, "Sir, you may be chief of staff and my immediate superior, but I must remind you that we are both men, both human beings, both equals."
At which Kilbourne breaks out in a great horse laugh and bellows, "Both equals? Hello! You're in Americaaaaa!"
There is more, including a minstrel blackface sequence and jokes about cotton-picking and black dialect.
http://splitsider.com/2013/02/the-secret-diary-of-desmond-pfeiffer-historically-awful/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Diary_of_Desmond_Pfeiffer