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Originally Posted by medbh4805
Lets look at the example of Ireland, shall we?
During the Famine there existed a Laissez-faire economic system. When the potato crop failed a very clever man named Robert Peel got around this by importing animal feed (yellow meal) to give to the populace.
in 1846 he resigned and was succeeded by someone called John Russel who appointed Sir Charles Trevelyan, a staunch supporter of free trade, to look after Ireland. He stopped importing the cheap food, so people could only buy flour, the price of which rose five fold inside a year.
1000000 people died in the famine. The people, malnurished, impoverished and tied to their landlords, their lives were a daily struggle to survive. But because they didn't unify it was their OWN fault that they died? It was only through Christain Aid groups that the death toll was not higher.
This is the same thing that is happening with LEDCs and MEDCs at the moment.
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If you really want to talk about the famine, then first ye must straighten out a few facts mate...
1,000,000 Irishmen died as result of the famine. There were over 350,000 english troops in Ireland at the time - not one died of starvation. Why is that?
Robert Peel had the troops commandeer food from local villages to feed themselves, leaving women and children to starve while the brit troops ate heartily.
The brit troops routinely took food shipments from all over to feed themselves. The same troops under his command tortured and killed and Irish who stood up to his tactics.
To this day here in Ireland cops are called 'peelers' - a derogatory term which embodies what his troops were and his style of totalitarian leadership, a term that in Ireland is equal to calling someone a 'nazi'.
He is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, including vast amounts of women and children.
Before you use him as an example for anything, you might want to consider using someone else as his reputation is about the same as mussolinis or hitlers here in Europe, with the exception of the british military who consider what he did a gallant act.
My guess is wherever you copied and pasted that tidbit from came from a very pro-british, right-wing, conservative, anti-Irish site.