1170 days ago
The Welsh Government has found £170,000, in these times of austerity, to spunk on a report into statues, buildings, and street names that are linked to slavery or are racist in other ways. Naturally, folks like Sir Francis Drake, Nelson and Wellington are all in the firing line because their tangential or fairly minor connections to the slave trade must completely overshadow matters such as saving the nation from invasion and foreign domination. But it is my local town of Wrexham which shows up the monumental stupidity of this exercise, masterminded by the certifiably insane first minister Mark Drakeford and rubber stamped by the grossly overpaid pygmies of the Sennedd, in greatest detail.
2397 days ago
170 years ago my Church of Ireland forebears were sitting happily at Edenmoor, a country house in Donegal with bellies full while in the fields outside the poor catholics starved. Actually Donegal got off relatively lightly with its population falling by less than 20%. In Clare or Mayo the events of the Irish famine were truly terrible. A million Irish folks died and the same number emigrated. There is little doubt that British Corn Laws and the exploitative nature of the Landlord tenant relationship added to the woes of the potato blight. We Brits & the Cochranes of Ballybofey and their ilk have a good deal to answer for.
