Irish Potato Famine Part Four- High Tide For Death

This week we continue our series on the Irish Potato Famine. And it's getting rough here folks. We're coping with the subject matter with a Irish whiskey tasting along with some rough information!

We're into a second year of crop failure, and the British government is finally realizing it might be helpful to just feed people? They replace their commissioner and decide to close the public worksites and open a network of soup kitchens but  its much too little much too late. 

Sources: The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

But don't be ashamed if you get confused when you talk to your friends or you watch the news. They try to tell you where it all went wrong. Now you don't need to or you just sing this song. Rich people stacking the dick. Rich people with big back chicks. Rich people to have in a bar.

SPEAKER_09 0:28

Rich people with hey everybody and welcome to Eat the Rich. I am Emily Walsh, and I'm here with my co-host and husband, Danny Moss.

SPEAKER_06 0:45

Oh hoy hoy.

SPEAKER_09 0:47

I could tell you were gonna do something I was gonna hate by your you were like you get this little face where you're like this is gonna infuriate her.

SPEAKER_05 0:55

It just popped into my head seconds before, uh seconds before we did it. I don't believe you. No, it really did.

SPEAKER_09 1:00

It was well then I caught the look in a mere matter of seconds.

SPEAKER_05 1:03

That's right. Um I do.

SPEAKER_09 1:07

All right, we're back. We're still sad.

SPEAKER_05 1:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:10

It's still uh the Irish Potato famine. And and just to be um just a note, we've gotten several comments that are like, it wasn't a famine, it was a genocide. I agree. Um, it's just that calling it like the Irish potato genocide series is is a lot. Um it's a lot, it's what people know it as a famine. It was also a famine, it just was a famine that was used um for murder, essentially. But that I get it. I get what you guys are saying, is what I'm trying to say. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_05 1:41

So we're getting some feedback. A little, not a ton.

SPEAKER_09 1:44

And nobody's like, you basically are just like, it's not a famine. And I'm like, I listen to the episode. Yeah, listen to the episode.

SPEAKER_05 1:52

Um square rectangle could be both.

SPEAKER_09 1:54

Same, same, same. But also we're not done. We're not done. This isn't the end. Well, there's gonna be two more. Oh, this and one more. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:02

So yeah, I'll just I'll just try to try to uh you know keep the dams around my eyes uh fortified.

SPEAKER_09 2:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 2:11

To keep from weeping.

SPEAKER_09 2:12

Yeah, it's sad. It's sad, it's sad. Yeah, um, but we did we added a chaotic element to this uh evening's episode. Yeah, because uh friend of the show, listener Greg Ryan, um he he wanted to send us some Irish whiskey for the uh pod recording. Also we were messaging and he was like, I I know I also have a kid, but you guys are more tired than I am. And I was like, we might be, and he's like, No, but I think and I was like, no, I think we are, but um yeah, but yeah, he uh he sent us this uh bottle of whiskey that we got really excited about, and then Danny went out and um decided to get a few more. It's a red rest because uh sometimes he forgets that we're no longer uh double income no kids. Yeah and uh dinos.

SPEAKER_05 3:02

You get a double income one dino income one kid.

SPEAKER_09 3:05

Dino income one is dynock. Dinock. I'd rather be dinos.

SPEAKER_05 3:11

Yeah, fair.

SPEAKER_09 3:12

Um but yeah, we're so we're gonna add the whiskey in when we get sad. I don't know what our plan is, really.

SPEAKER_05 3:19

My uh plan was uh those moments that went in the last episode when it's like haunting when we took a break for fun facts since we ran out of fun facts. Yeah, I thought it'd be a good time to do a little classic whiskey.

SPEAKER_09 3:30

Because the problem with the internet is when you look up fun fact, they're like interesting is the same as fun, and it's not the same as fun. And it uh likes to be like We got a lot of famine facts, a lot of famine facts, aka genocide facts, aka yeah, sad, sad business.

SPEAKER_05 3:45

So yeah, we're gonna really trying to find the the thing that that Greg sent us. It said something similar to like, if you're gonna talk about my people, you should at least do it with their whiskey. So Okay, yeah, which is feels appropriate. So fair enough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 4:04

It's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_05 4:05

Yeah, I think I'm excited.

SPEAKER_09 4:07

I'm not. I mean, yeah. Yeah. But uh before we before we get into it, just really quick uh baby and beverage check-in.

SPEAKER_05 4:15

Where are you at? The baby is a baby. She's actually transformed in the last time. She's a teenager. She's she's uh drinking her own bottle. She's like It's crazy, you know, basically using words, uh demanding things with her.

SPEAKER_09 4:26

Essentially, walking. A lot of uh I hear that sound six thousand times today.

SPEAKER_05 4:33

So much. And if you do not respond to the uh scream.

SPEAKER_09 4:36

Also the fake phone calls. We're getting a lot of phone. Because if a toddler hands you an invisible phone, you must answer.

SPEAKER_05 4:43

Just like if a dog winks at you, you wink back. You have to wink back. Otherwise you're crazy.

SPEAKER_09 4:48

Um, but she's asleep. I'm she's been, you know.

SPEAKER_05 4:51

I'm not gonna say anything, actually, but she's we're just gonna we're just gonna say she is currently asleep.

SPEAKER_09 4:54

She's asleep. Danny got a nap. I got a little nap.

SPEAKER_05 4:57

I have had two coffees.

SPEAKER_09 5:00

I had a big coffee and then a carbonated caffeinated seltzer thingy. Okay, and then a little hit of afternoon coffee.

SPEAKER_05 5:10

I had a uh a strawberry refresher from Dunkin' Donuts. I hate everything that you're saying. And it was I didn't drink the whole thing. Uh it was diabetes. Yes, I'd have diabetes. No, I think the kids are uh the kids are gonna be alright, but the sugar content in those.

SPEAKER_08 5:26

It's for the kids, but we drink Mountain Dew. Yeah, fair. We drank surge.

SPEAKER_05 5:30

And coffee culottes were not. And we're not okay either. But uh yeah, there was a some sort of promotional thing that one of my coworkers bought one of these strawberry things and was like, I can't drink this. And I was like, I'll try it.

SPEAKER_09 5:42

And I was like, oh dear gosh. And you're a guy who's had beverages with nerds clusters in them by choice.

SPEAKER_05 5:46

True, true.

SPEAKER_09 5:47

So refreshers gotta be sweet.

SPEAKER_05 5:49

Yeah, yeah. And I I also just to be clear, don't drink that nerd's drink from Sonic.

SPEAKER_09 5:54

It's it turned purple in a bad way.

SPEAKER_05 5:57

Yeah, it was it was somehow it made uh it made the nerds inside taste kind of savory, which is it was sweet. So there you go. All right, well let's talk about genocide slash famine.

SPEAKER_09 6:12

That's babies and beverages. I guess we'll get into it. Uh as always, the main source for this series of episodes is The Graves Are Walking, The Great Famine and Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly. And yeah, it is real bad. Second uh second harvest of nothing edible, yeah, essentially. And it is wintertime, and now they have just suffered a week of snow.

SPEAKER_05 6:42

And uh, oh right. The snow was was a real real twist. And people are still like, hey, if we helped you, you would need help for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_09 6:52

Yeah, we still can't. If you teach a man to fish, he might know how to fish. So we simply can't.

SPEAKER_05 6:57

You just can't do it.

SPEAKER_09 6:58

We can't. Um yeah, they're yeah, they're not gonna get any better on that front. They're gonna get different. We're gonna change up the ways we're not helpful, but still. Yeah. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. Yeah. All right. Cool.

SPEAKER_05 7:16

We're getting real close to one of those classes. Cool.

SPEAKER_09 7:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So they got a shipment of of American corn in finally in December, but already the need was much higher than what they had, of course. And a lot of it was delayed from a shipping storage shortage.

SPEAKER_05 7:35

And they're still bad at processing it, yes, probably.

SPEAKER_09 7:38

They don't, yes. And Trevalian, our good old friend who likes to talk about scarcity, turned down the idea of using warships to go get the grain.

SPEAKER_05 7:45

Oh. Because he was worried about all of the the war approaches.

SPEAKER_09 7:49

He's worried about helping too much.

SPEAKER_05 7:50

Oh, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_09 7:51

But he did suspend the duty, the tax on foreign grain and the law saying that the grain had to be carried by British ships, but that did not do much.

SPEAKER_03 8:00

Cool.

SPEAKER_09 8:01

He said, acknowledged the people are starving. I have oh, actually, he didn't say this. A board officer in uh a town called Claire did. He said, The people are starving. I have stated this frequently, but I consider it my duty to state it again and again. Like nobody is listening, they're hungry.

SPEAKER_05 8:18

A board officer is in someone on the board, not uh somebody that's gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_09 8:22

Now it's like, oh, do something else. Live surprise me. Um so food depots now start charging less money than the market rate because they people just can't people need to eat. People need to eat, but they're still charging for food. Again, we're not giving it away.

SPEAKER_05 8:41

Money is still nonsense in this place.

SPEAKER_09 8:43

Yes. Uh and workhouses started bending their rules as well. They started feeling feeding a few thousand people breakfast every morning, um, which is outside of the world.

SPEAKER_05 8:52

Because they were like, we don't feed people.

SPEAKER_09 8:54

We well, they only feed them if you're like inmates. Because the workhouses are essentially you and your whole family have to go live in a shame prison and work and they'll feed you, but you must be because if they're gonna help you, you need to feel bad about it. You need to feel bad about it. We're actually that's a big theme this week. Okay. But uh, and the workhouses also started admitting individual people before you had to go with your family. Now they're letting people in individually. Um, the poor law, so the poor law is like the tax that um has existed for a long time, but they they're gonna keep trying to maneuver, and we've talked a little bit about, but it's the um the tax on the wealthier people in the county that they're in to help pay for the poor people.

SPEAKER_05 9:36

The thing that they didn't want to do, and now they're kind of forced to do it, but they're probably still trying to dodge it.

SPEAKER_09 9:40

And every time I read it or hear it, uh the poor law, I'm always like, what is that? But that's what that is. I'll I'll remind you again in like 20 minutes. But um, the commissioners of the poor law um tried to get these workhouses in trouble, but they just ignored the court orders and kept feeding people.

SPEAKER_05 9:55

So wait, they try to get them in trouble for feeding people?

SPEAKER_09 9:59

They're not supposed to.

SPEAKER_05 10:00

Ah, come on. That's the whole thing. They're so hungry and they're not so many people left. So just feed them. There's still a lot of people. Yeah, true, but a lot of people do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 10:11

So they just decided to wait for the poor houses to go bankrupt because they were like, we're not gonna give them extra money for what they're doing, so they're gonna have to stop doing it eventually, which did not take long. And by early December, they had to cut off some services, rooms were unheated, meals were cut back, and sanitation was ignored.

SPEAKER_05 10:27

Oh, that'll be that'll help with it. It's only gonna get grosser. Yeah, it gets pretty gross. Malnutrition and uh and then you add disease into the whole thing.

SPEAKER_09 10:35

It's just like bodily fluids everywhere in mud.

SPEAKER_05 10:38

Yeah, kind of like Woodstock 99. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 10:42

Yeah. Honestly, yeah, yeah. Similar. Yeah, less fire, more limp biscuit. I don't know what I mean by that. Uh but yeah, by still corn though, in both.

SPEAKER_05 10:55

Hey, this guy. That one didn't bother me.

SPEAKER_09 10:58

Yeah. Um, so the weekly death rate. Jesus Christ. The weekly death rate uh by December 15th was 2,700 people a week. Uh bodies are piling up at a skipperine workhouse in two months, the mortality rote rate rose over 50%. So the amount of people dying, hundreds were dying.

SPEAKER_05 11:23

It feels like it's about to go exponential because like all of the stores, all of the things keeping the like bastions against death.

SPEAKER_09 11:29

All the dams are opening, to use your previous metaphor. Um and the emergency like triage spaces that they're adding are literally like horse stables open to cold and water. People are laying on beds of straw, and there weren't enough able bodies to bury the people dying. And the new issue was that the peasantry was going to the public works program for wages. So the peasantry was ignoring their land. Because the thing is, is the people who are going public works are not just non-landowners. There are people who own five acres, ten acres that are doing public works.

SPEAKER_05 12:01

And the the whole uh the whole farming system is set up on like everything's so parceled out to each individual people that it ends up having to like be work as a collective to make bigger money. And so those people are just like that. You can't use it for anything right now.

SPEAKER_09 12:16

For better or for worse, it won't be that way in a couple years.

SPEAKER_05 12:19

But okay.

SPEAKER_09 12:20

Uh but the land needs to be prepped if they're gonna have a s a harvest next season. So um Robert Griffith, a public works commissioner, created a thing called Circular 38. It was a proposition and it was supposed to pay. Um then did I have another pamphlet? Probably. How would they know about it without reading it?

SPEAKER_05 12:39

They need the pamphlet.

SPEAKER_09 12:40

There's no radio. So it is a pamphlet.

SPEAKER_02 12:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 12:46

So the whole idea was that they were gonna pay men for a fortnight, which is two weeks, to drain a certain amount of their land for uh prep, for for harvesting or for planting. And if that person completed that work in seven or eight days instead of two weeks, he could do whatever he wanted for the rest of the time and be paid the same amount of money. Okay. Not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_04 13:07

Not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_09 13:08

Prime Minister Russell thinks it's a bad idea.

SPEAKER_04 13:10

Somebody shut it down, somebody shut it down.

SPEAKER_09 13:11

Well, he was like, What would British people think? What do the British farmers think if they're not getting paid for doing nothing? Like, we can't make that.

SPEAKER_05 13:17

They're not dying of of famine.

SPEAKER_09 13:20

Correct. Uh, correct. And I just want to remind everybody that, like, the Irish in this story are colonists, like to the British, essentially. Like, it's they're part of the EK. They're not like they're yeah.

SPEAKER_05 13:37

Yeah, it's not uh they're not at this point their own autonomous thing, which pay it probably never should be because they're being overseen by just a bunch of idiots.

SPEAKER_09 13:47

It's it's a very uh Puerto Rico hurricane situation. Russell's out here throwing paper towels.

SPEAKER_05 13:54

Wearing uh shirts that are like Irish are fine.

SPEAKER_09 13:56

Yeah, everything's great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 13:58

What was that thing that Melanie was wearing?

SPEAKER_09 14:00

Something I hate everybody. Like I don't care about people. Something ridiculous. Um, so in December, the public works rolls, so the list the amount of people working went from 185,000 to 441,000 people.

SPEAKER_05 14:14

Okay, that's a bit of an up sweep.

SPEAKER_09 14:16

Landowners were now supposedly supporting a group larger than the army. Like the amount of people that they're paying is very high. But apparently most of the landowners thought they wouldn't actually ever get to a point where they were gonna have to pay this money. Okay. Like the the government is sending out the money being like, but we're gonna tax you for it. And they're like, Yeah, send the bill. Send that bill. I might not be home, but you come back around again, you ask for somebody else.

SPEAKER_05 14:40

Yeah, I'll pay you potatoes, rotten potatoes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 14:44

And for some reason, there were still inquests into some deaths. Uh, like there's the the book that's my editorializing for some reason. There's in the book, they're like, at a at an inquest about why uh public workers James Bryan died, uh, they decided it was for the want of food. And they did an autopsy, and this there was nothing in his stomach or most of his canal. There was like a tiny, tiny bit of poop at the end of his colon, and that was it. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, they're fucking hungry. Like, did we need not to maybe, maybe you gotta look to make sure there's nothing else going on, but I'm like, they're fucking hungry.

SPEAKER_04 15:20

They're hungry, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 15:21

Like, how hard is it to be like, oh, they look they weigh 16 pounds? Do you think maybe they're hungry? Like, I don't know. This man's been shot by hunger. By the lack of taters, yeah. So on the public works rolls, every every day, 400,000 people more or less are going to work, many of them not having eaten in the past 12 to 24 hours, wearing thin clothing in an Irish winter, and you know so they I love the fact that they're like, hey, you don't have a lot of food, you don't have a lot of money to buy food.

SPEAKER_05 15:54

We need you in order for us to give you even a little bit, we need you to do backbreaking manual labor.

SPEAKER_09 16:00

Manual labor that will make you more hungry. And the healthy young men who could have made up to a shilling a day under this piecemeal system, because remember, we're just paying people for what they do, don't really exist anymore. Many of those men were dead or sick or leaving the country. Like there's not this able-bodied workforce that's, you know, getting this food and this money. And the cold and the fact that these men mostly didn't have gloves is really horrible. Uh, they would wake up in unheated cabins, march three or four miles on an empty stomach, work through they stopped heating the workhouses too. Yeah. And they couldn't afford to heat their own space, working through weather and exhaustion and hunger. And then they would get home and send their wives to the doctors to describe what was wrong with them.

SPEAKER_05 16:44

Oh God. I can't make it to the doctor, huh?

SPEAKER_09 16:47

Can you tell him how sad I am?

SPEAKER_05 16:50

Yeah. Oh, gee, I think it might be the hunger. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 16:55

So many men, um, as is as happens in many desperate times, began to arm themselves. We began to get guns. Um, there was a firearms mania, and many officers on the public works crew would rather resign than give an unpopular order because they were honestly a little scared.

SPEAKER_06 17:11

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_09 17:12

Like the coast of to the west of Ennis had a vast army of unemployed squatters. Many people had given up hope for survival and were literally waiting to die. They did not think they would see the next harvest. And under the guidelines, they realized that upwards of 10,000 people weren't technically poor enough to be on the work rolls, but they were. They were men that had 10 to 15,000 acres of land, maybe a cow or two. And this guy named Captain Edmund Wynne, who arrived as an inspecting officer, was like, Who is who are these people? They're not poor enough to be poor. And so he decided he gets all fired up and indignant, and he makes this speech. He's like, I'm gonna replace them with people who actually need the food, you know? And uh, it's very much like how can poor people have phones kind of thing. You're like, they have one cow, they have 17 children. Like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 18:02

Um, and and this is he's literally saying this, and within the past few weeks, a board member had been killed and another attacked. And so tensions are very high. And the people that he's calling undeserving are also people who were deserving, everyone's deserving of food, yeah, and needed it. They had a few acres of snow-covered ground that was growing nothing and like multiple children and no other income. They need the help as well. Yeah, but Captain Wing came in, he's like very high and mighty. He's he's shouting, and he brings his work rolls into public meetings, and he's like, This guy, we've now this guy, like McDonald, he's got two cows, and his cousin gave him a sandwich. Gone! Like he was like literally like crossing them out.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

Like, just feed them.

SPEAKER_05 18:45

Like, what are we talking about? Literally, I love that when when stuff like this happens, this big bureaucratic thing where they're just like, Oh man, we're gonna solve it by getting rid of all of this fraud. And you're like, it's not fraud, they're hungry. Just yeah, like this is this is the you're you're looking at such a minute little piece of this huge, massive thing.

SPEAKER_09 19:05

Well, it's easier to assume that people are lying. Like it's easier to to not acknowledge the fact that like people need food stamps, and it's not people welfare queens was like the thing in the 80s and 90s.

SPEAKER_05 19:16

It's like people And there's also such still prejudice between you know the British and the Irish, and yeah, and you know, they're they're those big potato fed, you know, I would say it's stronger than prejudice.

SPEAKER_09 19:26

They're like, Yeah, I mean if you live or die, it's kind of your fault. But we don't want to clean up your bodies like So uh at one point a priest was talking about Wynne and said that he was going to attack, he would attack him if there was not a collar around his neck. Like people are getting mad at this. They're like, What's happening? And the next day, one of the overseers that worked for Wynne was uh was shot by a man who jumped out of a ditch and shot him point blank, and he staggered home and could hear people around him laughing because they were like, Yeah, we hate you.

SPEAKER_06 19:58

We hate you.

SPEAKER_09 19:59

And then Wynne ordered the public works project in Clare Abbey closed until the person who shot him was apprehended. So 900 people because of that were without food two weeks before Christmas. Wine was now racked with guilt after seeing the hungry out in the cold. He felt a tiny bit of remorse. So he reopened the worksite and increased the labor force by 150 more people. Yeah, okay. So even he is like feeling bad.

SPEAKER_05 20:24

Yeah. But and now bullet wounded.

SPEAKER_09 20:26

And now, well, not him. Oh, yeah, okay. Uh, and things are even worse somehow, and weather is getting even worse somehow. So they're like, we probably need a new plan.

SPEAKER_06 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 20:38

And so Prime Minister Russell is like, we gotta come up with something else, but we're we had some interim ideas, some quick little ideas to help for a little bit. And for a bit of time, the anti-Irish sentiment was was decreasing. The idea that they were benign, they were um being being, I was like, what am I trying to say benign? Uh, that they were slothful and ignorant. They're kind of cooling it on that because it's it's punching down to an extreme degree. And uh, and people also, there's a couple of mentions where it's like, honestly, people were getting uncomfortable with how many dead kids there were. Right. Like there's just a lot of dead children. You can't, that's a really hard one not to yeah. Maybe we yeah. Yeah, and even Trevelyan, the guy who wrote the book about scarcity, acknowledged that Ireland was in the middle of a quote, stark, staring, downright actual famine.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah, that sounds about right.

SPEAKER_09 21:32

So when the guy who thinks nobody should have anything thinks maybe some people should have something.

SPEAKER_05 21:38

He just had like 10 more of those his books lined up and he was like, I'm gonna give these out, and then he was like, maybe not right now.

SPEAKER_09 21:44

Maybe to zoom, maybe too zoom. Next year, next year, next year. Christmas next year. Okay, so we're starting.

SPEAKER_05 21:56

We're starting with the uh the red breast twelve. Twelve single pot still. Twelve year. Twelve year, yeah. Irish whiskey. Uh it's a rich mix of dried fruit and spice with a toasted oak and cherry undertones.

SPEAKER_09 22:10

Okay. I'm excited. I'm ready. We're gonna we're gonna have a little sippy and then I think I'm gonna add some ice because I'm an ice scale. Even my whiskey, everything's cold. Yeah, that's funny.

SPEAKER_05 22:25

We got There's a lot of bleakness to go around.

SPEAKER_07 22:29

Monday Monday Monday.

SPEAKER_05 22:37

Thank you, Greg.

SPEAKER_09 22:38

Thank you, Greg. I don't think it's a tanning. I'm so used to only drinking uh whiskeys that taste like a campfire. Like you know, I'm like a Petey Pete gal. Uh that this is pleasant. Like a really good thing.

SPEAKER_05 23:07

It's um it's bracing. It's warm. It's it does have fruity undertones.

SPEAKER_09 23:13

It's true. It is a little odd to be drinking this in August, but we have the IC on. It's fine.

SPEAKER_05 23:18

That's right. And the sadness in my heart is chilling. It's so cold.

SPEAKER_09 23:24

It's so cold. Ireland is full of snow in the winter of 1847.

SPEAKER_05 23:28

Yeah, so that's uh it's quite good.

SPEAKER_09 23:31

It's quite good. Yeah. I'm enjoying I yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_05 23:35

Different vibe, but I'm all about it. The one that uh specifically that Greg wanted us to try was Tealing because it came from the town that his family is from.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Oh, that's fun.

SPEAKER_05 23:43

Yeah, so I definitely want to get some at some point, but uh our local uh, you know, on a Monday night. Yeah, the local run with a baby.

SPEAKER_09 23:52

Did you have her on the stroller?

SPEAKER_05 23:53

Oh yeah. We rolled we rolled her right in there, baby. I love it. I love it. She's been there a few times. I had to put her in the middle of the aisle to make sure she didn't grab any of the bottles.

SPEAKER_09 24:01

I was wearing her when I went shopping before going to Girls' Weekend, and I was getting stuff for several people, and so I had like two cases of high noons and everything for like many Aperol spritz, just wearing a baby that was like and I was like, I'm a great parent. There you go.

SPEAKER_05 24:16

Did you give her the orange to hold at least, you know? She can't be trusted. No, she can't. She's just drive right. She would have done a drive-by fruiting for sure. For sure. Um so earlier I thought of the phrase, you're gonna hate that. You're gonna hate it. You're gonna hate it. Yeah, be prepared. Uh I thought of the phrase, see you later, allotator.

SPEAKER_07 24:43

I picked him.

SPEAKER_05 24:46

I picked, I picked him. Well, that's I figured it wasn't uh this was this was this is a little a palate cleanser. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 24:52

After all those dead children here just could have been more.

SPEAKER_05 24:57

Oh, it's super, super. Yeah, this is really good. Yeah, I'm very excited.

SPEAKER_09 25:02

I'm scared I'm gonna fall asleep before the little are we becoming an Irish famine podcast just so we can have whiskey every week. Maybe, yeah. Okay. Um well now it's it's because I I've been thinking about it, not to continue to digress. People who really hate we don't get feedback like this, but I'm sure somebody hates it.

SPEAKER_05 25:22

Uh the internet is full of all kinds of people.

SPEAKER_09 25:26

Um I feel like before, when we didn't have a child, when we had more time, yeah, yeah. This was less of a big thing that we had to fit in our schedule. But now this is like essentially our date night. It's like talking about dead children from 200 years ago. So we might as well have some whiskey.

SPEAKER_05 25:43

Yeah, I think that's right. This is our date night. Uh, welcome to our date night. Welcome. Yeah. YouTube. Yeah.

unknown 25:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 25:50

Get ready with me for while we talk about the most depressing thing I can think of.

SPEAKER_05 25:56

Unbox the sadness.

SPEAKER_09 25:57

Yeah. Oh my god. Okay. Next time you gotta give me less. That's so much. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 26:05

Go ahead and take some of that. Okay.

SPEAKER_09 26:07

Got a little ice.

SPEAKER_05 26:08

Yeah, sure.

unknown 26:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 26:13

So it is bad enough that uh private charity has started. People are starting to give money of their own accord. And weirdly, Trevelyan, I can't. Again, I guess it's the government reliance and the the the um the worthiness of it all, but they're very supportive of private charity.

SPEAKER_05 26:30

Oh.

SPEAKER_09 26:31

They just don't think the government should do it.

SPEAKER_05 26:33

Got it. I to be honest, at this point, I was expecting them to try to prosecute people that did private charity. Wow, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_09 26:39

They're okay with that. They just don't it's the government.

SPEAKER_05 26:42

I mean, I think it's the the like trying to get the landed, you know, aristocracy to pay for the people below. Like that was kind of a sentiment that the British were okay with. So maybe that's the concept of charity of it all.

SPEAKER_09 26:56

I think that the entire thing, because I think that some of the the stuff that I've seen and read other than this book, um, and obviously I don't want to just like take the point of view of this one person, but I I agree with him on some of it where it's not um it is genocide in the sense that it could have very easily been avoided and they have they didn't do things that seem very straightforward.

SPEAKER_06 27:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 27:17

But I don't think that it was out of uh hatred. I think it's out of indifference. Yeah. I think it's out of like literally could not don't care, would rather hold their principles than right.

SPEAKER_05 27:28

And there it is, like the the thing that's tough about all of it is that there is a certain amount of racism and there's a certain amount of course like it's that's the this the whatever is deeper than prejudice is part of the reason that they were justified in being like, Well, you can't help them because then they won't help themselves is because they thought so much less.

SPEAKER_09 27:47

Yeah, because they're talking about them like they're five-year-old children who they're like, you can't spoil. And it's like it's the same way you can't spoil a baby because they're not trying to be tricky. Yeah, people who are dying are not trying to trick you, they're just trying to eat potatoes.

SPEAKER_06 28:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 28:02

So private charity is happening, people are contributing. There are officers from the East India Company contributing, which is crazy. Because you have to, I keep forgetting Britain is like every taking over at one point. We're gonna talk about Canada, and they were like, don't let them impression those impressionable young Canadians. Like you can't let them infect them, and it's like everybody's freaking British right now.

SPEAKER_05 28:22

Yeah, and again, the British, the colonizing system, bad, evil, bad. Bad because they went, you know, they went into all of these people places, said they owned them, and then turned them into money-making machines to prop up this empire that did not care about them.

SPEAKER_03 28:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:40

And this is just the closest to home is a version of that.

SPEAKER_09 28:44

The inconvenience of this for them is that people have a little more sympathy for the Irish because they are white people who live in a country attached to theirs instead of people who look different far away. Yeah. The news comes to them quicker, and we're gonna talk about it later. Um, but there's also some more pro-Irish sentiment once America starts getting a little more aware and involved because so many Irish live in America, in Boston, on the country. Yeah, so they're like, we're they're people. We can like have compassion.

SPEAKER_05 29:15

But then later we'll get into how American was there was uh you know, racist and prejudice against the Irish people.

SPEAKER_09 29:21

Yeah, we're gonna take a break, but yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 29:24

Uh so yeah, the Irish soldiers are contributing, the Queen, the Prime Minister, their ladies' associations in the UK collecting weekly little bits of money, like the quilters, and everybody's kind of raising money for the Irish at this point. Um and the Society of Friends got involved, the Quakers. And there was a 3,000-person um Society of Friends in Ireland that met in Dublin, and their co-chair, a guy named Jonathan Pym, said the people must be kept alive, whoever pays for it, which not that radical.

SPEAKER_05 29:53

Yeah. I also so I feel like, you know, some of this, the private charity of it all, smacks of like, you know, I don't know who who it was, like Shania Twain or whoever it was the person you know the thing of throwing Shania under the bus? I don't know if it's Shania Twain. The you remember those videos about like you can like give it to Helder a day. Yeah, the arms of an angel.

SPEAKER_09 30:13

She didn't do that herself to be manipulative. She left the owners they're song.

SPEAKER_05 30:18

I know, but what I what I'm saying is I don't know why I'm defending her so hard. I'm just fired up. What I'm saying is that uh having these very public and outward private donations means that the the more you know behind closed doors uh policy making meant that like you they could continue being draconian while they were like on the outside of the money. And that check is not enough to solve the big problem. But they were like, look at all of the work and look at all the good works we're doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 30:48

Maybe they invented ridiculously sized checks. Yeah, maybe. So we're like, yeah. Uh an English Quaker, a guy named William Forster.

SPEAKER_05 30:57

I just feel bad for dragging Shania Twain. I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_09 30:59

Yeah, no, you should. She didn't do anything to you. She didn't do anything to you. What's the guy on the bike? He did her wrong.

SPEAKER_05 31:08

I don't have any idea. Lance. Oh, Lance Armstrong?

SPEAKER_09 31:11

Is that an astronaut or a bike guy?

SPEAKER_05 31:13

Uh bike guy.

SPEAKER_09 31:14

Bike guy. He did, yeah, they they they dated and he like cheated on her or something rude.

SPEAKER_05 31:17

Yeah. Boo. Boo Lance. Yay Shanaya. Yay Shanaya.

SPEAKER_09 31:22

Someday we will rest again. It makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 31:27

One day we'll be at least as re arrested as Greg.

SPEAKER_09 31:31

That's the goal. Yeah. Uh so an English Quaker named William Forster went to assist uh from the UK. And at a workhouse in Tipperary, he said the only way he could tell the difference between adults and children was their height. Because the starvation had aged kids of like eight years old looked like adults. That's how sunk it in. Yeah.

unknown 31:57

Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_09 32:02

So they wanted to create a network of soup kitchens, and he had actually helped run some in the UK. So that's part of the reason he was over there.

SPEAKER_08 32:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 32:10

And his son, his son, W. E. Forster, came over as well and started visiting the villages. And there were villages where they went to where people weren't strong enough to not crawl to get food. Like this is this is where we're at. And they went through these towns and they would wonder if people were alive, and they'd see these little cabins, and they would just hear people moaning inside the doors, like slowly dying. This is our first very upsetting fact. Like everything's upsetting. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 32:42

But quick check. We still have a number of years of ongoing famine to go.

SPEAKER_06 32:53

Cool cool cool.

SPEAKER_05 32:54

God mean lay it on me. What's your very upsetting fact?

SPEAKER_09 33:03

One woman had sought shelter in an outhouse from the weather and wind and was attacked and eaten by a pack of dogs.

SPEAKER_05 33:14

Cool. Yeah. It sounds like that's uh gonna become less uncommon as the days go on.

SPEAKER_09 33:25

Yeah, but like imagine being so desperate that you're like the outhouse and then you get murdered by your best friends.

SPEAKER_05 33:35

Man, not so best friend. Yeah. Yeah. In a porta body.

SPEAKER_09 33:39

Yeah. Yeah. At this point, people are applying for assistance money to pay for their family's coffins. Okay. That's what we're doing. And like chit-chat with each other and be like, let's go murder that lady.

SPEAKER_05 33:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 33:54

Like dog looks.

unknown 33:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 33:58

It smells like shit in there, but I think there's food.

SPEAKER_09 34:00

I think there's a lady we can eat. God damn it.

SPEAKER_05 34:03

So I gotta.

unknown 34:05

Whew.

SPEAKER_09 34:09

In Skiberine, people were dying at such a quick rate in the workhouses that were dead in the alley, beaten, being eaten by rats and dogs. Women were knocking on the doors begging for money for the dead children they held in their arms for their coffins, like holding their babies, being like, please can you help me? I just want to bury my dead baby. We can't drink every time. It's so depressing. We'll die.

SPEAKER_05 34:33

We'll die, yeah. This is this is one of those uh you know drinking challenges that will is not safe.

SPEAKER_09 34:41

Every time you say the word like, like you'll you'll die. You'll die. Uh but at this point, the death rate in Skibberen was around 10,000, and they predicted that they would lose about a third of their population at this point. So at the next meeting of the Board of Guardians at the local workhouse, a member of the board, a guy named Mr. Somerville, suggested opening a soup kitchen. But James Perry said they could not establish outside relief. So then they were like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, we can't give them outside food. What if is it legal if we lend them food? You know, a very common practice.

SPEAKER_05 35:19

Well, go ahead and lend them food because I feel like all of the people in Ireland would be like, yeah, we're totally gonna pay you back.

SPEAKER_08 35:24

Pay you back shit in your hand and give it back. There you go.

SPEAKER_05 35:28

I got these very aggressive dogs for sale.

SPEAKER_07 35:31

Would you be interested in a trade?

SPEAKER_09 35:33

I know that that's not our system anymore, but would you like a pack of dog markers that have the taste for flesh?

SPEAKER_06 35:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 35:40

Uh and a board member was like, maybe, but if we do that, it will have to be repaid in accordance to the poor law. Like, but maybe. Another workhouse had been stopped because they tried to serve outside breakfast.

SPEAKER_05 35:54

Come on. Everybody needs a bacon, egg, and cheese. What are we doing?

SPEAKER_09 35:57

We've got to start the day with a little protein. When was the last time these people ate protein? Weeks?

SPEAKER_05 36:02

Years because they were eating just potatoes and like potatoes with like flavored potatoes.

SPEAKER_09 36:08

Like, if I don't have protein for one day, I'm like, shh, and my my bone density is going down. And they're just like, we haven't had protein in six years. One, okay, this is gonna make you mad. Uh, in one area, they were like, hey Trevelyan, we really need some food. People are dying in Skibarine where it's really, really bad. And Trevelyan's like, yeah, no, that's that's really bad. Um, but they don't have a relief uh committee, and the relief committee is who we can can give the provisions to to give them out. So get a relief committee and we'll send some provisions.

SPEAKER_05 36:46

Unfortunately, that lady that died in the outhouse was the head of the relief committee.

SPEAKER_09 36:51

Well, no, this is this is honestly even more upsetting. The community of Skipperine did have money. Yeah. So it literally made no sense that these people are dying this way because there were several million people there who would be millionaires today. In fact, the 12 wealthiest people in the region had an annual income collectively of what would be $25 million today.

SPEAKER_06 37:09

Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_09 37:10

So there are there is money.

SPEAKER_06 37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 37:12

And they're they're Anglo-Irish gentry and they're some of them are absentee British landlorders. Like it's not these, it's not necessarily Irish people staring down at other Irish people in the same sense, because that's the other thing that we I haven't talked about a ton, but it is um a big part of this that like a lot of these, especially the remote towns, are the only places where people are still speaking Gaelic, where they have this like strong Irish tradition, this storytelling, this national pride. And they have been just pushed for place to place to place to place to place. And the people that are um supposed to pay for them are often, you know, UK educated. They they're English speakers, some of them are Protestant, they're they're some of them are British and they just own the land. They just inherited the land, they don't live there. So it is, there's a lot of layers to it. I don't think they were necessarily standing out staring at the debt. I mean, some of them were, but like you get what I'm trying to say. It's it's complicated, but um Trevelyan was like, we can't do it because they don't have a committee. And Ralph was like, There's not even food. Like, what are you talking about? There's no money and there's no food. So what are you what are you saying? And even men that had work tickets, like had been approved to do public works, couldn't find work. There was food in the town, in the inns and at the diner, but they just were not eating, and literally, people they individually describe a lot of stuff, but all you really need to know is there are families where they're huddling together in cabins, and like several of the people are dead and several aren't, and they're all still huddled together. Like it is as dark as it gets right now.

SPEAKER_05 38:44

That is a bleak Grandpa George situation.

SPEAKER_09 38:48

It's a thousand percent starving to death Grandpa George. Yeah. It's just like four to six people in a bed being sad. No chocolate for nobody.

SPEAKER_05 38:59

Just no chocolate for nobody.

SPEAKER_09 39:01

Not even in a manipulative way where you try to trick them into being moral.

SPEAKER_06 39:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 39:07

Although some morality tricks drawn from Charlie and the Trocker. Interesting. All they walk is like if you don't act right, yeah. I don't care.

SPEAKER_05 39:22

Like a blueberry. Yeah. They want to squeeze you the the the blueberry juice out of you.

SPEAKER_09 39:27

Yeah, they do.

SPEAKER_05 39:28

Yeah, they squeeze. Probably is leaves to death. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 39:32

I think they all died, those kids. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:34

Well dolls bleak. Not in the you know, first one, but the second one for sure. Like not in the the uh Gene Wilder one.

SPEAKER_09 39:42

No, I think they're dead in January.

SPEAKER_05 39:44

We never see them again. It's true. It's true.

SPEAKER_09 39:47

They're definitely dead. Um, so fights are bad. Uh on January 19th, uh, in 1847, so we're into a new year, Queen Victoria went to speak to Parliament, and everybody's dressed up. She takes a royal carriage, there are bee feeder, like guys, ladies in waiting.

SPEAKER_05 40:07

Bulldog is there.

SPEAKER_09 40:08

Somebody's like, the hats were so big, they should have been in the Navy. Like it's and basically she just gives a speech acknowledging that things are bad.

SPEAKER_06 40:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 40:18

And then she leaves. And then six days later, Russell, prime minister, addresses the House of Commons and is like, we've failed.

SPEAKER_06 40:24

We have failed. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_09 40:26

And for basically the past 18 months, the government was like, we can't feed the people. We can't feed all the people. We can only do these little relief measures. Um, but now they've tried everything.

SPEAKER_06 40:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 40:35

Tens of tens of thousands of people are dead, hundreds of thousands of people are likely to die.

SPEAKER_05 40:40

So now they're like, what if we what if we fed them? What if we fed them?

SPEAKER_09 40:47

What if we fed them? Uh so they decided under the Temporary Relief Act in March of that year that the 700,000-person workforce at this point, public workforce.

SPEAKER_05 40:58

Uh-huh. Up from four, up from 400,000, up from 100,000.

SPEAKER_09 41:02

700. Now it's going to get close to eight by the end, but 700,000 was going to be closed.

SPEAKER_05 41:09

Yeah. Just closed.

SPEAKER_09 41:11

That'll help. Well, they don't need money because we're going to feed them.

SPEAKER_05 41:14

Oh, I see. So they well, to be honest, they probably shouldn't be working. They should just be fed.

SPEAKER_09 41:18

But also, you got to do one or the other. Yeah. You can't just say you're going to do one and stop doing the other.

SPEAKER_05 41:24

Yeah, and also, like, you can't just do both until you get the other thing rolling. Because that's what they keep doing, where they keep being like, new plan. Stop everything.

SPEAKER_09 41:33

Halt. Yeah, halt everything.

SPEAKER_05 41:35

We've got a new plan.

SPEAKER_09 41:35

They literally hitting the button dramatically on a printing press of all the pamphlets. And they're like, but we're hungry.

SPEAKER_07 41:41

And they're like, no, not yet.

SPEAKER_09 41:43

Um, so they're gonna close it in stages, is the concept. And as work sites disappeared, soup kitchens would show up in their place. And then the dismissed workers could go home and plant their fields. So that's the concept.

SPEAKER_03 41:56

Sure.

SPEAKER_09 41:56

The idea also would include a $50,000 loan that the government or pound loan that the government would use to get potato and grain seed to these tenants, to these small acre farmers, because they had already eaten their seeds as food at this point.

SPEAKER_05 42:09

Oh, sure. That makes sense. Maybe different type of potatoes.

SPEAKER_09 42:16

So he Russell just didn't really mention with this brand new plan that a big part of it was that in August of that year, they were going to transfer the rest of the costs to Ireland when they closed the soup kitchen. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_05 42:28

So the soup kitchen's closing in August, according to this Ireland that is super flush right now, has lots of cash.

SPEAKER_09 42:34

And also the fields that aren't being planted, we're banking on them being full of healthy potatoes in September.

SPEAKER_05 42:39

Right. Even though we've done nothing to change the fact that potatoes do be dying in them streets.

SPEAKER_09 42:44

They do be dying in them streets and in them fields. Um, but it would create outdoor relief for the old, incapable, orphans, poor widows, and sometimes even the able-bodied poor. The one thing that they did that I guess is nice, but also literally doesn't matter because money is fake at this point and whatever, they would forgive half of the nine million dollars, nine million pounds in debt that the public works program had accumulated.

SPEAKER_04 43:08

Sure.

SPEAKER_09 43:09

So, um, but because of the adding these new things, these new plans, basically the Irish were gonna be having the poor rate forever. Like there's no end in sight. Um, and so the first thing that this new plan achieved was having 500 leading Irishmen from all over come together and put aside their political, emotional, historical differences because they were like, this is a bad idea. We would like a new plan. Yeah. So they were like, okay, this is the Irish gentry and and everything. And I I I gotta say, I don't disagree with they're they're all bad, but I don't disagree with this as a concept because they're like, they're like, okay, you're saying that we're a union, you're saying that Britain and Ireland are under the same thing.

SPEAKER_05 43:53

We're team.

SPEAKER_09 43:53

So how can Ireland be a drain on England if we're the same thing?

SPEAKER_05 43:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 43:57

It's not the English treasury, it's the treasury. Yeah, it's our treasury. Treasury.

SPEAKER_04 44:00

Right.

SPEAKER_09 44:00

So we can't drain the treasury. And the Brits were like, okay, so you just want our money. Like there's they're like, we're not, we're the same except for when we want to be different.

SPEAKER_05 44:08

You're right. Right. We we uh we we own we own you, so I don't know what to tell you. And who said that? We said it.

SPEAKER_09 44:17

We said it, sorry. Um gross. Yeah, so they decided to create this one guy named Lord Lord George Bentnick. He decided to employ himself, the spokesperson of the Irish peasantry, even though he was not an Irish peasant.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

True.

SPEAKER_09 44:35

And went to the commons saying that they should create a large-scale railroad project, that that could create some work. That the plan that he had in mind would create 110,000 new Irish jobs and feed 550,000 people, and that the means to create this basically already existed because they had approved a plan to build about 1,500 miles of railway, and only a hundred or so had been built by now.

SPEAKER_07 44:57

So they just needed 16 million pounds and they would wrap it up.

SPEAKER_05 45:00

Just go on and make a little railway so we could move our uh boxes of empty potato you know, cars from one part of the country to another.

SPEAKER_09 45:08

Didn't really nobody got really excited about that idea.

SPEAKER_05 45:11

No, I mean, you know, I think it's better than roads to nowhere, but uh like it's still it's just like I don't know, can we plant something else?

SPEAKER_09 45:20

Can we do something food related with the this two years ago? Maybe this would have been a good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you just gotta feed him. Stop, stop talking and go to the fields yourself and pick some food.

SPEAKER_05 45:31

Right, and figure out why the potatoes are dying.

SPEAKER_09 45:33

Yeah, put it on a boat. Um, this also would uh be this wasn't Daniel O'Connell's idea, but the the liberator, the guy who's really intense and political. This would be his last appearance before the Commons in February of 1847, and he didn't even have a plan. He just was like, we need help. Yeah, please help us.

SPEAKER_04 45:52

Please help us.

SPEAKER_09 45:53

So by early 1847, people in other places were starting to feel a lot of sympathy all over the world. They're the the Choctaw in Oklahoma, who had just gone on the literal trail of tears, raised $170 between them to send to Ireland, which is roughly $7,000 now. Yeah. Like they were like, We have nothing. Nothing, but we know what it's like. But you have less nothing, we're sending you money. Like and now there's a monument uh to the Choctaw, which I think is cool.

SPEAKER_06 46:25

Yeah, that is cool.

SPEAKER_09 46:26

Um also there is a museum of the Irish famine in Connecticut, but it is temporarily closed.

SPEAKER_05 46:35

Oh.

SPEAKER_09 46:36

So that's weird.

SPEAKER_05 46:38

Um, but let's go there and figure it out due to some investigative journalism as to why it's not open. And also check out that museum.

SPEAKER_09 46:45

People donated, sent the money uh from the US, from Europe, from Canada, from South America, and Europe was sympathetic, but not a ton because they were not gonna get super sympathetic while the Irish were stealing ladies' hats and shooting at officers. And the Irish grand juries, like grand juries in Ireland were trying to indict Russell and Ralph for the will for m willful murder of people at this point.

SPEAKER_05 47:07

Stealing ladies' hats? Just like in just general uh They just think they're being silly.

SPEAKER_09 47:13

And doing crime because they're hungry, like the Well, they're doing the crime because they're hungry and furious and uh disenfranchised, but the Brits are like, stop taking our hats.

SPEAKER_06 47:22

Got it. Okay.

SPEAKER_09 47:24

Uh Trevelyan had a new idea and thought that maybe a letter from the Queen would help raise some more money, and they would stop needing the treasury's money. So the newly created on New Year's Day, the newly created British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and Scotland gathered. What's that acronym look like? Bairdis. Bairdis. Okay. And a few weeks later, they issued the Queen's Letter, and it was the first celebrity-oriented international charity event. Like it was the first, like we are the world.

SPEAKER_06 47:57

You stop talking about China.

SPEAKER_09 48:00

So, in addition to the English donations, which included 2,000 from Queen Victoria and 1,000 from the worshipful company of grocers, the Sultan of Turkey donated 1,000 pounds, Florence 1,000, St. Petersburg, uh almost three, Constantinople, a few hundred, Denmark over a thousand. All in all, the British Association would raise 470,000 pounds.

SPEAKER_05 48:24

Which today is uh huge money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Millions. So maybe not enough to feed an entire hungry, but it was at least worked.

SPEAKER_09 48:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. They also got access, the association got access to the Navy's boats, and the treasury would pay for the insurance freight and shipping charges for the money and food. So the food crisis at this point, we're now at its its worst thus far, which obviously is just gonna keep getting worse, but we've hit a new low. One town reporting only having seven pounds of cornmeal left. And an association agent certified the existence of the shortages, and then provisions would be released.

SPEAKER_05 49:01

So they're still they're like, wait a minute, we gotta make sure that you're still you're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_09 49:05

I need to see at least four people eat by dogs before I'll send you a meal. Oh god. It's it waiting literally, what are you what are we doing here?

SPEAKER_05 49:13

And they're like, Oh, I'm so sorry, you actually have 7.2 pounds of food, so we can't help you at all.

SPEAKER_09 49:18

And the British still believed that high prices were going to be the effective way to ration the food supply.

SPEAKER_05 49:23

Okay, cool. There is not enough food. There's not enough food. And money is meaningless. What are we talking about?

SPEAKER_09 49:33

There's not enough food.

SPEAKER_05 49:34

Yeah, and they're like, oh yeah, we're paying them less at the workhouse. Let's charge them more. Let's charge them more. Oh, I watched a really intense video about uh AI surveillance wage-like theft, which is gonna get you real mad later. I got a book I gotta read.

SPEAKER_09 49:48

Boy, flock cameras, am I right? We're we're getting close to needing our next whiskey. We are getting close. Oh no, I'm saying I'm gonna tell you something upsetting soon.

SPEAKER_05 50:00

Okay, I'm gonna start unwrapping one. What do you think we should go for next?

SPEAKER_09 50:07

This one's from Merchant's Quay. Okay. Virgin Oak to reach our bourbon.

SPEAKER_05 50:16

The guy at the front ate uh descent that that's some good juice.

SPEAKER_09 50:22

Let's do this one. Uh meanwhile, the weather's getting bad again. There are sea squalls on the coasts, and boats were getting pinned against the harbors. They couldn't go out. Some boats were literally like getting smashed into the rocks. And there were regions, a place called Skull, appropriately.

SPEAKER_05 50:42

They were just into skulling?

SPEAKER_09 50:44

Uh I guess. They were a little place on the west coast, um, 84,000 acres roughly of uneven rocky ground and only one real village of substance, but there were ruins of medieval castles everywhere. And roughly 18,000 people lived in Skull. They really only had fishing as an industry. They couldn't really farm. Most of them still spoke Irish, and they barely knew the UK themselves, but people knew of Skull because it was known to have some of the absolute worst suffering.

SPEAKER_05 51:12

Oh, that's not an award you want. No. That's not what you want.

SPEAKER_09 51:17

People were starving to death together. One cabin, a man knocked on the door and asked if he could come in and lay down for a moment and just died. Uh, children's bodies were everywhere being eaten by rats. A woman was carrying her. This guy was visiting, and a woman was carrying her dead child on her back in a burlap sack, and he said that these were everyday occurrences. The weather got even worse, and they had three foot snow drifts everywhere, and people were eating the diseased bodies of cows. The elderly were foraging through three feet of snow for grass on the ground. Some were walking 10 to 15 miles to the next town. So at this point, people are doing whatever they can. A thousand people from Skull went to a nearby town and attacked a local food depot. Another group in Mayo raided a provisions boat. And in port towns, at this point, people are just lining up on the cliffs hoping someone will come rescue them. Like they're like, I'm gonna jump in any boat that comes close enough. The swelling tide of people emigrating actually was starting to alarm people in the rich in the UK. One of them, Lord Borgram, who was a Lord Chancellor of England, gave this whole speech and accused that the Irish poor were defying the will of God by not dying.

SPEAKER_05 52:34

What?

SPEAKER_09 52:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 52:35

What? So there's this whole thing. Who cares if they're gone or not gone if they're dead?

SPEAKER_09 52:39

Like Well, that's what I'm just let them leave.

SPEAKER_05 52:43

Like, what are we talking about?

SPEAKER_09 52:44

No, he's mad they're coming to his country.

SPEAKER_05 52:46

Oh. Yeah, so they're emigrating to I I see. They're they're mad about them coming to the UK.

SPEAKER_09 52:51

Yeah. Which is that we are in the with London. Yeah, yeah. It's all it's the same treasury. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so there's this whole idea of providence. Providence is like when God does stuff. And uh he said providence, who sent the potato disease, meant that many should die. So there are there's a lot of people that are like, this is punishing you for your ways and your lovers. So this is potatoes.

SPEAKER_05 53:12

This is the thing about religion uh being misused to uh have massive groups of people die. It's not it's not the way, everyone.

SPEAKER_09 53:20

Yes. Uh in one recent 48-hour period, 3,000 Irish poorer had shown up in Liverpool. Like it was happening very quickly, and they were worried that the Irish would go to Canada and turn a Catholic and they would set a bad example for those impressionable Canadians, which I think is funny. Yeah. Uh all right, so this is the Copeland.

SPEAKER_05 53:43

Yeah, so let's um let's get in there. Boy. So we have a good little pallet cleanser. This is a Copeland Merchant's Quay blended Irish whiskey, non-chill filtered. Um product of Ireland. Let's see what else we got here. Double distilled malt, Virgin Oak Recharge bourbon barrel.

SPEAKER_09 54:02

I'm just gonna get a little pallet cleanser of my orange vanilla sensor the way everyone. Yeah, that's a good I'm just trying to rage bait the one person who tuned in because they were like whiskey twisting.

SPEAKER_05 54:16

Uh I did use uh fresh glass, so Oh, okay, great. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 54:37

I'm wondering if the reason I like really smoky things is to keep myself from drinking it really fast. Maybe. Because this I'm like, oh thank you. Mother's milk like it's not what you want.

SPEAKER_05 54:52

No, the the the red breast uh went down very smoothly. I could probably drink a large glass of it and then be too drunk to function.

SPEAKER_09 55:00

Yeah, no. I mean this is also juice.

SPEAKER_05 55:05

It has like a there's like a caramely after it. There's like something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 55:11

Well it has the I was wondering if we should save it, but I wanted to have it. Uh oak spice and orange peel is often a toffee.

SPEAKER_05 55:19

Toffee! Here we go.

SPEAKER_09 55:21

Toffee, vanilla, and club spice.

SPEAKER_05 55:23

Yeah, that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_09 55:25

The finishing notes.

SPEAKER_05 55:33

Different.

SPEAKER_09 55:34

I like it.

SPEAKER_05 55:35

Yeah. We're learning all kinds of new stuff today.

SPEAKER_09 55:38

Oh yeah. So the works program had now grown to 708,000 workers and a monthly cost of $944,414, which is close to $500 million a month. Got it. But it needed to be reduced. And that was difficult. And a lot of people in charge were very scared to cut the work rolls. Um, some people even started adding people to the rolls because they were like, I can't, I'm not. Yeah. And they challenged one guy. Basically, I'm not going down for this, but they challenged one guy. They were like, you have to cut these. And he's like, if you make me cut the rolls, I'm gonna send their dead bodies to your house in a cart.

SPEAKER_06 56:13

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_09 56:14

Which I'm like, hold your ground. Yes, yeah. It's like, yes, because they're not, it's just not literal. That's the problem with all of this. Is like, I feel like to the UK, to the people who are incredibly out of touch, it's just not literal to them. They're not seeing it, they're not feeling it, they're not, or they're the most callous people in the world because I can't imagine how you could witness these people that you're like, how old are they? I can't tell, their face is sunken in and be like, they deserve it.

SPEAKER_05 56:38

Like, yeah. In a again, under a financial system where you you have the means to help them. Yeah, and they're right there.

SPEAKER_09 56:46

And I'm not I we listed it at one point, I'm not gonna do it every year. They're exporting so much food, they're exporting can't they're they're exporting cattle, they're exporting butter, they're exporting food that could keep the country alive. Yeah, but they're exporting, it's gone.

SPEAKER_05 56:59

Yeah, because they need to pay for all of this this you know, corn that they're getting and they can't eat. That they can't eat it, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 57:07

Yeah. Uh so people couldn't find work, so many more people were throwing themselves at the workhouses, and the workhouses total were supposed to have an occupancy of a hundred thousand, and already we're at 116,000. So they are all full. There's five or six people to a bed, there's no sanitation, and there's fever everywhere.

SPEAKER_03 57:27

Of course.

SPEAKER_09 57:27

Uh, and so the way I don't know why I think this is funny. I think just to try to find anything that's joyful. Uh, they call the quarantine buildings fever sheds. Oh. And I just think it's funny. I'm like, yeah, go back in the shed. You feel better. Yeah, it's uh but a lot of people didn't have fever sheds, so then they couldn't even quarantine the sick, so everybody's getting sick.

SPEAKER_03 57:48

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_09 57:49

Uh, one workhouse of 930 people that was meant to have 800 had 25 deaths a day. Just 25 people a day. People were poor and naked. And at one point, Trevelyan even looked at samples in his office in the UK of of winter clothing that was intended for black women in the West Indies. They could have bought petticoats for three shillings, three pence, or shifts and stockings, but no records show that he ever actually bought any clothing.

SPEAKER_05 58:16

I think all these people making these choices need to go sit in the middle of one of these towns.

SPEAKER_09 58:19

For a full 24 hours. Oh, there's gonna be something that's gonna make you so mad later. It's gonna make you so mad. Uh one workhouse in County Carey that was built for a thousand and already had 1200, had a squatter camp formed outside. And when they went to send the squatters away, the women were literally just trying, holding up their infants, being like, please, please help us. And when all these people were finally left, the yard was covered with chewed-up bones, human excrement, and burn marks from the fires, just like a war zone, essentially. Bodies in the poor houses are everywhere, they're getting so numerous that they're putting bodies in corners, they're putting them under the stairwells, they're leaving them in sleeping areas. Normally, the carts like for the dead would sweep through every 24 hours, but they literally could not keep up. So they're like, where do we put the next one? Like, it is so rough. After inspecting a South Dublin workhouse, uh, Mr. Barden, a relief official, said that the place was a haunt of desperate suffering, and then he went home and shot himself.

SPEAKER_02 59:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 59:28

So he that's the thing is I'm like, if you look at it with your eyes, yeah, you have to have more compassion.

SPEAKER_05 59:34

Right. And then it's also like looking at it with your eyes and realizing that you've been part of like um like keeping these people down, and then knowing that it's impossible to talk the people back in Britain into doing more has got to be roof.

SPEAKER_09 59:51

Roof souf. So these houses were not built to be 30% over occupancy. Poor houses were falling into debt, and some of the workhouse guardians had to personally guarantee that the bills would be paid if local merchants would bring to bring them food. Like they'd have to be like, I promise you. Yeah, like me, Tom, I am telling you, I will pay you. In 1838, which was years before, the law said that they could collect a new poor law. So if things got really bad, you could send out a second collection. Um, and they got to the point where they sent out a third, but it was difficult because they didn't have the people to go ask for them. Everybody's bleeding money. Like it doesn't really matter. It's not a matter of just, oh, ask again, and they'll you know. One of some of the workhouses had to stop providing coffins. Another started using reusable coffins where they would let you have a service, carry them to the burial ground, and then shoot them into a large hole.

SPEAKER_08 1:00:45

Nope, nope, nope, no, no, no, no, no. Pass.

SPEAKER_09 1:00:48

Pass. Pass. One workhouse had to try tried to purchase unground corn, and the inmates threw nails into the handmills as protest, which is like Oh right.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:00

The handmills that they were like, hey, you can grind your own corn.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:03

You know that energy you have?

SPEAKER_05 1:01:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:05

Uh in October of 1846, so at the kind of the beginning-ish of this whole saga, four out of a thousand would die every week. And by mid-April of 47, it was 25 per thousand.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:17

So by So like six times, uh a little more than six times the amount.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:22

By March 1847, poor health's deaths alone would be 77,630. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:35

Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:41

I can really taste the the vanilla.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:44

Yeah. The toffee is really hidden.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:46

It's nice. It's like a dessert.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:47

Yeah, it kinda is a dessert. Maybe in retrospect, it could have been a dessert.

SPEAKER_09 1:01:52

Are we doing all four? I don't know, maybe.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:54

Maybe. It depends. How much more bleakness do you have? Oh, we're doing, we gotta go back to the store.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:02

Um so on January 16th, the Times headline was widespread mass extermination. If that helps.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:18

Oh, that'll help.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:19

Yeah. Because the thing is, is 20 to 30 acremen paid up to half of the poor rate for them.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:25

What is the point of rent when all of these people are dying?

SPEAKER_09 1:02:29

Rent, rent, rent, rent, rent. Yeah. Paper money is nothing. Sorry, sorry.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:37

It's okay. You know, it's I'm I'm chill. I'm cool. I'm fun. I'm cool. I'm fun. We're having a good time. Date night. It's still fun. It's a date night.

SPEAKER_09 1:02:46

Date night. Uh but yeah, so the men who own 20 to 30 acres would pay at least like half of their own poor rate. But if you had less than that, the cost would often just fall to the landowner. So if they evicted a few hundred people, it would really cut down their costs. So a guy named Lord Lucan, who would later be immortalized in the poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, sent 600 people himself to their deaths. Um he was a bully and very cost conscious. In 1846, he had had a local poor house closed, and somebody else, one of his peers, was like, That's great, because then the poor either starved to death or they left. You know? So problem solved.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:23

What the fuck?

SPEAKER_09 1:03:24

Yeah. And when the poor law amendment was definitely going to go through, once he knew it was going to happen, he drove another 2,000 people off their properties.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:34

I'm angry, only walsh.

SPEAKER_09 1:03:36

Some people felt that they should use something that the Scottish had called the Encumbered States Act, because they had restructured their class system, basically.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:47

And they had allowed newcomers with money to come in and buy out a lot of the poor aristocrats that own the land and couldn't uh Oh, so you mean this problem that we're having right now where uh you know a third of the landowners are out of the country and absentee landowners, and so they can't really see the suffering that they're overseeing and they don't really want to pay for it, and so they're just not you they want to do more of that?

SPEAKER_09 1:04:10

No, they want to do less of that.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:11

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:12

Like the Scottish, but they're not going to.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:14

I see.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:15

The Scottish are doing better than them.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:16

I thought you were saying the Scottish were gonna come in and buy Ireland.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:19

No, they're suggesting that the the Irish do what the Scots did, which allow people to come in who live there and buy up the land. And uh sorry, I got confused.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:29

I thought I thought they were trying to like outsource even more of the ownership of the country.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:34

Basically, the Scots are paying for their own relief a lot much almost entirely, and the Irish aren't. And so they're like, what if we did what they had done?

SPEAKER_05 1:04:41

Yeah, but they've got all that haggis to eat.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:43

So the London insurance companies held a lot of Irish mortgage debt, and they didn't want hundreds of estates flooding the market and depressing property values.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:52

Because that is important.

SPEAKER_09 1:04:53

That's what we're worried about right now. Okay, so the last big topic uh of the night. Okay, and then next week we'll talk about something even more fun called coffin chips. I was gonna say that for the end, but I spoiled it. Yeah. Spoiler. Yeah, then I'll lie on the books. So many people. So many people. I know. I'm sorry, I didn't I didn't think this topic is hard. Next, I gotta. I'm looking, I have some ideas, but anybody who has a silly, maybe a scam, maybe. I think I got a silly.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:29

It's not silly, it's not silly. There's third degree burns, but it's it's hilarious! Yeah, no, we gotta go lighter than this. Uh for sure.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:37

Walk into the sea. Okay. Yeah. I'm gonna go with this one next when we get to it. That's coming. Don't worry. So uh the next phase. What do you got? What's it coming? Uh just a little little something called pestilence.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:57

Oh.

SPEAKER_09 1:05:58

Everybody getting sick.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:59

Uh huh. Sure. Why though? It seems so robust.

SPEAKER_09 1:06:04

We haven't had as many haunting phrases that'll fill you right up, but we're gonna have them right now.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:09

Is this coming?

SPEAKER_09 1:06:09

Yeah. In 1849, uh reflecting back on 1847, when they asked Dr. John Callahan um when the pestilence reached him, he said that in the winter of 1847, Fate opened her book in good earnest, and the full tide of death flowed on everywhere around us. Oh. Wow. Yeah. Cool. Tide tide for death, huh? High tide for death. High tide for death. There's a the wave is coming in. Uh people knew from history that blight would often lead to pestilence. Like the blight of a crop would often lead to sickness. Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:44

And because everyone's weaker and more susceptible to even the the smallest of diseases. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:06:51

And in 1816 to 1819, when there had been a lot of crop failure, about 65,000 people had died from it. So they they were not unfamiliar. That was roughly 30 years ago, but they were not unfamiliar. And fever was already very prominent in Ireland because of the fever sheds. The fever sheds. Because people were poor because hygiene wasn't always great. Like fever was already prevalent. So they did have about a hundred fever hospitals already. Workhouses were obligated to provide fever care. But only two poor houses in 45 had it. And at the time, the treatment for fever was hot whiskey, the fairy doctor, which I don't honestly know what that is. Yeah. Prayer, I guess. And literally praying hair hail marys, being like 10 Hilmaries. And maybe you won't have to.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:38

I assume they were just gonna like dump dunk them in a I guess they don't have ice, probably. Where would they get ice? I don't know. Literally, they'd have to ship it from an iceberg. Uh in the winter, pretty easy because they had all that snow.

SPEAKER_09 1:07:54

So in 1846, they did create a temporary fever act because they were like, fever's coming, but weirdly, there was no fever the first year of the famine.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:06

So in 1847, they let the act expire. And Parliament was like, ordinary law will deal with the famine. So basically, no extra relief for fever if it comes, but it didn't come this year, so it'll never come.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:18

We bought a really nice umbrella and they were like, I'm gonna need this umbrella, and we got rid of it.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:23

Leave it in the closet.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:25

And then tsunami, that's the wrong one. Monsoon. Monsoon, yes.

SPEAKER_09 1:08:29

So in February of 1847, an American visitor visitor, a guy named Elu Barit, uh, went to investigate the fever, and in Skiberine he saw such extreme circumstances. Um, there was limited space in the ground for graves, so people were digging up each other's dead to bury their own. God. People were guarding their family members' graves. And again, the crawling, some in line, some were in line for food on all fours, like quote, famished beasts. He went to a water house near the workhouse to find the people with the fever, and there were only about a dozen in there. They appeared to all be dead, they had swollen heads, oozing sores, they were bleeding, parched, and jaundiced. And he was about to close the door thinking they had all passed, and one of them called for water. Yeah. So there was no fever, weirdly, the first year, and now it they're saying it feels like it fell from the sky. It's everywhere. Everyone. It's everywhere. Everyone.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:29

Yeah. Okay, so this is uh Clonic Clonicilty.

SPEAKER_09 1:09:36

Clonicilty.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:37

Yeah, an Atlantic distillery. Uh it's uh you know, a cork cork distillery. Okay, we love it. Irish whiskey, a single badge. I love the whale tail. Yeah, uh the gentle cut, non-chilled filtered. Uh the whale tail is quite nice. Um it won uh a San Francisco World Spirits competition, so double gold. Let's see how much. We'll see. I do like the whale tail. It does it reminds me of like cut.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:17

Traditional very traditional. Like if you told me to describe a nice Irish whiskey, I would say this.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:26

Yeah. No toffee in that one.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:29

Are there notes? The gentle cut. It goes out pretty smooth, though. It is smooth.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:37

Soft spices and vanilla lead to flavors of ginger, hazelnut, and a long finish with toffee, caramel, sweetness, and spicers lingering on the palate.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:46

Yeah. Long finish.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:48

Matured, finished, and bottled in Ireland.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:10:52

Clonic LT Distillery. What's the appropriate age to take your child to Ireland?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:56

They can have uh one year, three months. Yeah. Give or take.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:02

Yeah, roughly. She'll love it.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:04

She'll love it. She'll love it. She'll love it. It's also now her heritage. That's true. You know, a little farther back, but not that much farther.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:11

Wear some big sweaters. As far as I know, I'm like 80%. I'm not gonna pay the the DNA people.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:18

You think we can get the dog DNA people to do DNA for us?

SPEAKER_09 1:11:22

What happens if we I just don't, I mean, I guess, I guess catch my family who's committed crimes. I don't know. It feels weird to get myself into that.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:30

Yeah, well, the all of that DNA stuff. Oh, we should do a series on all of those DNA things being basically data mining.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:37

Yeah, no, it's all just because you're literally like, here's everything about me, and now you have my DNA.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:42

Using uh surveillance, it's basically getting over hippolas. They're doing this.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:46

As far as I know, shenanigans. I'm like 1516 Irish, but I don't actually Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:55

What's the what's the the last 15? There's a little bit of German.

SPEAKER_09 1:11:58

Okay, and then Walsh uh is the name for people from Wales that moved to Ireland.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:04

Okay, so a little farther back, probably some Welsh.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:07

But also, like honestly, like my grandpa, my mom's parents, the Donnegans, were a little more Irish pride. I feel like the Walshes are like, we're Irish, but we don't like do things about it, like other than like St. Patrick's. There's no like I don't know anything about much about it. And my my grandparents were like very intensely Boston Irish, and their their pride was like Boston Irish and like the Kennedy's.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:33

Well, and you talked about uh the idea that like St. Patty's Day as well. It's Americanized, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:12:38

They don't I Ireland doesn't celebrate it, like they don't care at all. But like my my grandparents were like they had some Irish pride, but they also had like American pride because they were first generation, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were like, We we did it, we're right.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:52

Um but and they were some of them were fleeing the potato family?

SPEAKER_09 1:12:57

No, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:58

Oh, okay. I don't know when the when your relatives came over.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:01

I don't think so, because my so my mom's parents I actually don't know when my dad's parents were born, but roughly around the same time, I would imagine. But my mom's parents were born in uh 1917 and 1919 in Boston. Okay. So it'd be too late to be fleeing, but probably leaving the sadness of the aftermath.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:22

The aftermath was probably not great. Yeah. I did uh you were talking about your uh possibly probable Welsh heritage. I met a Welshman once on an airplane, it was a long flight too, and he was very chatty, and apparently he helped re-roof Canterbury Cathedral. So we talked about slate roofs for quite a long time. Okay, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:44

I do think I'm from Cork, but only because my mom used to say it with my grandmark, like, no, I don't, I don't know, look, I'm gonna do a little Google.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:52

Yeah, I honestly don't know.

SPEAKER_09 1:13:53

But yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:54

You know what? This would be so chaotic. But do you want to get Patrick to Patrick Hasty to come back for the I was like, my dad? No, your dad. No, uh Patrick Hasty to come back for the fourth episode, the last episode of this series. This is the fourth. You mean the fifth? This is my first fiver. The fifth and final. Uh but uh we had him on, you all may remember, maybe you weren't listening at the Firefest in the Firefest Live while we were at at the Edinburgh Friends Festival. Uh I love Patrick. He's so chaotic and fun, but he'd be bring a very interesting vibe to the bring him in. Yeah. Maybe he's our fun fact. Just Patrick.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:32

We'll see. You listening? Uh okay. We gotta talk about typhus. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Oh boy. They got typhus.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:42

Do they have typhoid Mary out there? Do you know anything about typhoid Mary?

SPEAKER_09 1:14:45

I know a little bit about typhoid Mary.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:47

I want to know about typhoid Mary.

SPEAKER_09 1:14:48

The incredibly short version about Typhoid Mary is that she uh was a cook. Okay. She was in America. Sure. Very few people carried typhus without, or typhoid, or whatever like asymptomatic type. Yeah, so she didn't get sick, but she was a cook, and it kind of seems like she was just stirring soup with her arm. Like she had like no hygiene, and she uh made a lot of people sick, and they kept being like they kept putting her in like jail and being like, stop being a cook, and she'd be like, I don't know. And then she'd leave and murder somebody else with her germs. And then eventually they put her on an island with like a little dog.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:24

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:24

I think in New York. Huh. I'll have to look it up.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:27

That's a wild story.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:28

It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's not really like our story because she wasn't doing it for money. Yeah. I think honestly, she was just like, What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_05 1:15:37

But yeah, like please stop giving people typoid. Yeah. Is that a thing you just have forever?

SPEAKER_09 1:15:42

Like, is it uh so I'm gonna get into it. Okay, but uh basically everybody relapses a few times, but then by like the third or fourth relapse, you're either done or you're dead.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:53

Oh whoa, cool, cool. And it seems like a not pleasant ailment.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:59

I'm gonna describe it for you right now. Let's um oh we did try we did try to do it.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:04

Yeah, but let's let's uh let's do a little to Mary.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:11

Actually, the um Yeah, this is just like this is a really good straight down the barrel whiskey. Yeah, um the my favorite murder episode about Ty Ford Mary is very funny because Karen Kilgarov can do a very funny Irish woman accent, and she that is worth listening to, and that's where I got honestly that little bit of anecdotal information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so shout out to them.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:33

I wonder what kind of little dog she had.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:36

It was a terrier.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:38

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:38

Yeah. Um, I think she was on the like North Brother Island or whatever. Like, I think it was like one of the New York Islands. Oh, really? I think. I don't I that is a Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:50

Who knows? We we didn't research that. I was just uh I've had some whiskey.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:54

So I had more than I meant to, but we're gonna have some liquid IV when this is.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:59

Yeah, that seems smart. Uh the bleakness, Emily. It's so bleak. I know it's just Monday night.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:05

Oh God, we're doing great.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:07

We're doing great.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:08

How are y'all doing?

SPEAKER_09 1:17:12

Okay, so uh fevers everywhere. The most common was typhus. Um, and the symptoms included red blotches on the skin, the arms, chest, and um uh torso. A fever so intense, so warm and uncomfortable that some people jumped out of windows to find relief.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:30

Because of the wind while they were falling, they just felt hot and insane.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:34

They literally feel insane. Um they're twitching, there's muscle pain, very intense muscle pain, mental impairment, and walking like with a drunken gait. Like it is bad. It's bad. It is not just like I don't feel it's like yeah, what's wrong with you? Um, but if people could make it through the worst of it, usually they recover with just typhus. We're gonna keep stay with me.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:58

Sure, because there's more to come.

SPEAKER_09 1:17:59

There's more to come. But if it's just typhus, up leading up into now, most people, if they made it through the fever period, would recovery would be uninterrupted. However, now people were relapsing three or four times. Got it. And so way more likely to die.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:14

Got it. So normally, like uh up to before everyone was starved and immunocompromised because of uh malnutrition, they would they would relapse maybe once, but then it would be an on-way, like a like a see, it's a little confusing, but um they're yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_09 1:18:34

Okay. They basically uh people just died way less before because it was one issue they were dealing with and not uh this amount. So a guy named Dominic John Corrigan, who was the five-time president of the Irish Royal College of Physicians, was like, hey everybody, the reason more people are dying is malnutrition. Like every time we've had this fever, rich people never die more than poor people. Like fever is indiscriminate, but the rich survive, and it's because they had food in their bodies to sustain them through. And people at the time were honestly a little skeptical of that explanation, but eventually over time, people would realize that that is what happened and that it was aggravated by the overcrowding, by the concept of germs. They don't know about germs yet. No, they don't know about germs yet.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:24

Yeah, because they're just like, I don't know, put them in the fever shed.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:27

Yeah, I but in a sense, they're like, We know you have to be over there, yeah. But they don't, and like, and so lice, lice is a problem.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:19:36

Lice is a huge problem. This is a little gross. If spoiler, we're on like little buggies. Skip, skip a minute if you don't want to hear me describe exactly how you get typhus from these bugs. Um, unfortunately, you've made me listen to the most messed up stuff on the planet. You made me think about a woman who's had 20,000 paps smears, and I wake up every morning and I think about her.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:01

You're gonna listen to the lice.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:20:07

So lice is a very hearty little critter. Okay, but they're also very susceptible to typhus. Oh. And ricketzia is the genus of many types of typhus. The uh they would multiply in cells of the intestinal wall of the louse. The cells would burst and then it would spill into the intestines and end up in the feces. So usually that would happen, and as the lice were dying from this bursting, they would go to a new host and bite it, and the host would scratch that bite, break the skin, and the richestia would make it into the bloodstream. The problem with this because of lice poop. The problem too is that because lice is so prevalent, their feces turns into this like light powder that gets on a person's skin, and then it can also enter through the eyes and nose, not just the bloodstream. Um the Gaelic would call it the black fever because its mortality rate can be up to 60%. It's it's really, really rough. It can be as low as 10. Like there are people that survive. Um, and before the so the CDC has their own uh numbers that were actually very close to these numbers that the Irish came up with at the time, but the the operating uh days they were working under at the time was that the initial fever was five days. There were seven to ten days between or seven to fourteen days intervals between each relapse and three to four relapses to a full recovery.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:32

So, like we're talking three months worth of illness.

SPEAKER_09 1:21:35

And the relapsing fever was stronger and would pass more easily throughout.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:41

Got it. So the fever was stronger, but would pass would pass sooner later.

SPEAKER_09 1:21:46

Okay, so yes and no, there's a second fever that is happening. Yeah that is separate from typhus. Oh that is uh just making everything worse, basically. So some people have both complicating it diagnostics of it all. Okay, get ready for an upsetting.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:08

I don't think it's gonna be oh god, we have so many more upsetting things to say. Okay, um, so it's just very, very passable. So this is straight out of the book. In Galway, there was a a macabre incident. Three strangers were infected by the same fever victim, a local gentleman who had died of the disease. The village barber fell ill while shaving the gentleman's corpse, went home, and died. The physician who administered an ema to the same gentleman on the eve of his death also fell ill and sank on the 14th day after passing through a most malignant form of typhus. The gentleman's coachman was the last of the three victims to be stricken. He fell ill while acting as a pallbearer at the gentleman's funeral.

unknown 1:22:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_09 1:22:51

So it's everywhere.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:52

Because so was uh was the lice the most common like transmitter? It seems that way, but I think a lot of it there's still because like pall bearer would would lead me to believe that like still lice. It's still lice.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:09

Oh, though he's getting it lice from the cot from the corpse.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:11

That's how the and and the way that you described it earlier, so the lice would basically find a person that had typhus, be like, oh no, I have typhus, feel kind of ill, jump to another person, bite them, die.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:23

Give them typhus. Give them typhus. But also you can get typhus from the powder feces of the lice.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:29

So even if you just have lice and no open source, like, oh, something in my eye, and you're like, now typhus typhus.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:34

Typhus.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:35

Cool. And if there's no shed, yeah, just watch out for typhus bumps. Sorry. You should be sorry for that one. It's very bad.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:45

Okay, so the peasant code in Ireland was still that you take in anyone who knocks, even if you can only shelter them from the cold. But that is getting oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:56

Really complicated.

SPEAKER_09 1:23:59

Yeah. People would take in strangers and then within weeks be sick or dead themselves. And disease was everywhere, but it was winter, and most people had already pawned their clothes months ago, and no one could pass up clothes on a dead corpse. So they were just getting lice.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:16

Yeah, or feces powder.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:19

For feces power, yeah. You get it. Uh people were trying to leave, but then they would go to lodging houses in the port cities and sleep five or six to a bed. Liverpool would end up with a ton of fever outbreaks because they were a huge emigrant destination.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:34

Oh, and then the the whole thing where they're like, oh, we don't want these immigrants coming in. They're bringing now they're bringing this disease. Bringing typhus.

SPEAKER_09 1:24:41

Yeah. Um Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, also of because disease is indiscriminate and they don't know about germs, it's killing doctors and it's killing priests. And those two groups were the people helping people. Right. So now there's even less caregivers. And then dysentery became incredibly prevalent. The weird thing about dysentery that I didn't know, and maybe it's only true when you're also starving to death, because in my mind I always think about the Oregon Trail. It's yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:08

I think about Andersonville from the Civil War, and I'll tell you about that later.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:12

Okay. Um, but basically, if you've lived under a rock for 40 years and you don't know what it is, it's it's bloody diarrhea that kills you.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:19

Um, it's real bad.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:21

It's pooping and puking your all of your fluids out of your body until you die. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:25

Um, and but weirdly, um, mentally, apparently for the people suffering it from it in Ireland at this time, it was a peaceful death. And then most people who had it just continued to get weaker, knew they were dying, were resigned to their fate, but were grateful for the help. Like grateful for people like feeding them and giving them water. Like they were weirdly like, okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:48

Um we've been going for a long time, and this is at least uh uh a nicer way to go. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:25:55

Fever and dysentery together were also almost always fate fatal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, also because everything is bad, now people are having to deal with scurvy.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:09

Of course.

SPEAKER_09 1:26:10

Because potatoes, if nothing else, scurvy before. They were only potatoes have vitamin C. How did potatoes have vitamin C? Didn't know it.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:17

I didn't know what I mean.

SPEAKER_09 1:26:18

They had enough to keep away the scurvy. Um, so the fever was very, very bad, and obviously we don't have accurate information, but it's estimated that there could be roughly 10 people who died from fever for everyone who died from starvation. Wow. So everything we've talked about, every bleak thing we've said till now was all starvation. Escalating, it's getting very fast. Times it by 10.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:39

I'll I'll do this really quick, but uh because I mentioned Andersonville. Andersonville was a uh prison in the South during the Civil War that they put a bunch of Union soldiers in, and a lot of those people died of dysentery. Like the the sanitation was not very good, so a lot of people got dysentery. And uh apparently there's a mineral that you can take that is part of the medicine for dysentery these days, that literally that ground was uh fertile with. Like if you dug down and there's a little white uh uh light white mineral called kaolin that if you ate, it probably would have saved their lives. But they didn't know.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:15

Oh, I thought you were gonna tell me that's how we know that.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:18

No, no, no, no. Uh later we learned that kaopectate, which is the medicine, uh, can help dysentery, and then but no, a lot of people uh died at Andersonville. Sick. Because they were sick.

SPEAKER_09 1:27:33

Okay, um, I'm just gonna look ahead to see how many bummers we have left in the episode.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:39

I think I might be gonna be that's kind of a silly Okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:27:50

Uh so this if we want to do the last one, this is the uh This is the impetus for the last sad.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:00

We're on our way into the last thing.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:01

We're on our way into I mean there's a silly I mean it's silly everything's relative, but yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:11

Okay, well this will be our last whiskey and we'll see for the evening. This is uh landolo double barrel Irish whiskey. Apparently, uh I don't fully understand.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:43

Double cast, double barrel. So the first barrel is an American bourbon barrel.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:47

Yeah, and the second barrel is a Spanish or Lasco Is it a wine? I think it's a sherry, but I'm not a hundred percent sure.

SPEAKER_09 1:28:57

Let's read the top thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:58

There you go.

SPEAKER_09 1:29:00

St. Kevin discovered Glendalow in the sixth century, inspiring our ancient city, which for hundreds of years beckoned thousands of pilgrims and monks from far and wide, keepers of Irish knowledge and pioneers of distilled spirits.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:23

What was St. Kevin about?

SPEAKER_09 1:29:24

I don't know. And then the bottle says stand apart. Dark fruit, lemongrass, citrus, and nutmeg. A taste of smooth butterscop, cherries, and peppercorn. And the finish of ginger spice is a touch of almond and earthiness. Okay. It is liquid proof that when you go the extra mile, you reap richer rewards. There we go.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:00

Kevin is uh I have a few people in my family named after him, so I should probably is.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:15

Very we've had a very varied This is a very wide palette of I like that that.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:20

Yeah, we might have reordered them a little bit, but Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:24

This is interesting. This is different than I've had, obviously from the bear multiple. I want to know more about the Spanish element.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:32

Yeah. This one has a much richer front than the rest of them.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:36

This one is like if you're making a night of what you're drinking, yeah. Like I think some of them are like if you want the night to be about the thing and you happen to be drinking, this is like, do you want your night to be about the drink?

SPEAKER_06 1:30:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:48

This is like an interesting yeah, it's different.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:51

Yeah. I think so far. I do enjoy this one, but I do think my favorite was the first one we had so far.

SPEAKER_09 1:30:58

I think my favorite was the red breast. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:01

Even though I'm we're generally into a smokier, smokier whiskey, that one was it just went down to the stuff. It went down really fast. It just had a really rich flavor. Yeah. I'm not mad about any of it.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:12

I didn't mean to get a little tipsy on a Monday night, but you did apparently. Okay. Um we did it wrong. We had the whiskey before the sad. Are you ready?

SPEAKER_05 1:31:24

Oh, well, I'm gonna need it. Yeah, that's fair. Bracing whiskey. It's sadder than typhus.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:30

No, I mean it's all it's just a really graphic description of what starvation does to your body. Sure. So this is a um a quote from the book because they brought up an interesting point that I um also had never really thought about. But basically, the there's a very famous um famine memorial in Ireland of people kind of wasting away. And the pictures that I posted, and then if you look it up, the drawings, because it's 1846, um, it's very gaunt. It's very like the fat. We all kind of think we know what a starving person looks like. Um, but he makes a point to describe the fact that most of the drawings and political core cartoons and everything are at the midpoint of the starvation cycle. So when people look like that, it hasn't gotten to its worst yet.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:13

Um, and I think that the the look that we see is upsetting, but it's like somehow more palatable because they're just smaller. You're like, oh god, if I got them a sweater and a meal, they'd be okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:24

But this is um there comes a point of no return that all the the the only respite is death.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:30

And I'm about to tell you about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:32

Exciting.

SPEAKER_09 1:32:33

So that American guy was witnessing all this and the visitor uh Barrett, but yeah, once um so quote from the book the body has begun to cannibalize itself, bones protrude, the face is hollowed out, muscle and skin hang from the frame, but the most hideous changes have not yet occurred. In the later stages of starvation, the eyelids inflame, the angular lines around the mouth deepen into cavities, the swollen thyroid gland becomes tumor sized, fields of white fungus cover the tongue, blistering mouth sores develop, the skin acquires the texture of parchment, teeth decay and fall out, their gums ooze pus, and a silky growth of hair covers the face. When the victim lies on his back, the articulations of the spine protrude through the skin of the stomach. Hunger edema, grotesque swelling, is also common. Ihu Burrett had already been familiar with edema when he visits Skiberine. Passing public work sites in Ireland, he had seen men with limbs swollen to almost twice their natural size, digging ditches and pushing wheelbarrows. In a cabin in Skibereen, Burrett encountered edema in its most florid form. A boy of about 12 with a cold, watery face and a body swollen to nearly three times its natural size. Nothing could be more hideous, Barrett thought, than from a darkened corner of the cabin, a toddler appeared with a body swollen to the size of a full grown person. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:42

Yeah. Like I've I know I know about the like the fact that like a distended belly is a thing that happens sometimes. I didn't know your whole body could swell. I mean bodies are fucking weird. The the gauntness in the cheeks and uh all of that is something I would I would expect at the I wonder I wonder how far gone somebody with that level of starvation we've like to bring back from the brink.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:22

I think they're gone.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:23

I mean maybe now, maybe if you could give them an IV of like highly concentrated medication and yeah, well, and it probably is a thing that you have to like very carefully control to get the feel like any rescue story you hear, they're like, go slow, you're gonna get sick.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:39

Like you can't just gorge yourself.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:41

Yeah. But teeth falling out and oozing pus.

SPEAKER_09 1:35:48

Spine bones. Oh, that was okay. Well, I have to get through this next part of just facts, but then there is kind of a silly thing. So we're just gonna keep moving. We're getting close. The episode's kind of long, so we gotta just we gotta we gotta push it.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:03

We gotta carry on.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:06

So by 1847, America was fully in tune on what was going on, and many, especially in Boston, could remember being in Ireland and felt these feelings viscerally when they heard about it. But because of how nature trap, because of how news traveled, they were getting their news three to eight weeks late because it's on paper and by boat. Like they're not, there's no internet. Um, so typhus, dysentery, scurvy, and starvation, by the time it hit, uh, kind of just globbed into one horrific thing. Um, and unfortunately, people in Ireland were resistant to helping each other because once someone is sick, they could get other people sick.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:46

Right.

SPEAKER_09 1:36:47

So, even in Cork, there were Dublin police stationed outside city entrances because people were showing up in search of food. Fever continued to spread throughout the workhouses, and the workhouses weren't refusing people, so there was overcrowding, some almost twice as full as they should be. So by February of 1847, the Temporary Fever Act was passed, and 373 new fever facilities would be built. But so many people were sick and dying.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:12

It's way too late. It's way too late.

SPEAKER_09 1:37:14

And they're just building fever sheds, and these fever sheds are gonna increase the poor rate, so the pack taxpayers are also upset. And a month later in March, O'Connell uh would would pass away, our our fearful, fearless liberator man. Yeah, but it's not really super in the story, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:32

Well he kind of he kind of lost all his power when he backed the the guy that was gonna be whatever the governor mayor or whatever it is, and then uh every prime minister. Yeah, split up the right prime.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:44

Sure.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:45

But then basically split up the opposition coalition. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:37:49

So okay, so we're gonna we're gonna get a new officer, we're gonna get some soup kitchens, and then we'll end it for the so no more. I don't think everything's haunting, but no more incredibly haunting.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:02

Yeah, we're gonna have to, we get we gotta bring them back up. We gotta bring it back up before we end this thing.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:07

Yeah, yeah. Uh so at the House of Commons, Mr. Smith O'Brien, who's one of the young Ireland people, said that he thought there had been at least 240,000 starvation deaths. And there was pushback on that number, but partially because they were like 220,000. Well, no, it's not that. It's that they couldn't get the number because so many people hadn't buried their dead, were hiding their dead in their cabin walls until they could afford coffins. Fields were littered with body parts. I'm sorry I lied. It's very upsetting. I just You're doing great.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:43

I hope everyone else is doing great. How's everybody doing? Yeah, they can't respond. It's a podcast. Yeah. Um remember that time we talked about people's faces melting? Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:54

Radium Girls? Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:38:57

I was like, what upsetting things? Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:59

Uh so that's our theme. Our our secret back, you know. Secret bonus theme is being sad. Very sad. Sticky. Yeah. Puss is the second. We could have all done better, is you know, yeah, part of it.

SPEAKER_09 1:39:11

That's correct. Um, so now it's March. The American corn is coming in, but the average public works wage is only seven and a half pence a day, so nobody could really afford it. And by the spring, the public works program would be closed, and a network of 2,000 soup kitchens would be established slowly. Um, and a guy named General John Burgone was the new chairman of the relief commission. He had previously been the director of the Irish Board of Works. He fought in the French Wars. He was a tall, handsome officer in his 60s. People are excited about him. They've they got faith in him. So he he went to Dublin Castle to start his job. Ralph was feeling a little bit demoted because he was a little bit demoted. And uh Captain John was supposed to have 2,000 soup kitchens soon, the first running within six weeks, the first group running within six weeks. And he, because he's British, wanted the operation to be fraud proof. So again, stop everything. Stop everything.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:08

My uh I'm so I'm so angry. I'm just all that I can think of right now is the idea that like, what is the point of money when people are dying of starvation? Well, don't worry. What is the point?

SPEAKER_09 1:40:19

Don't worry, don't worry. The public works program had not worked, and they recognized that. So they shut everything down, and what they did is produce 14 tons of documentation. 14 tons of paper, baby. Paper.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:39

I just you can eat paper.

SPEAKER_09 1:40:40

Frankie does it all the time.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:42

I I was okay, okay. This this podcast, I I've been really enjoying this. But the more I learn, you know, the going into this, I was like, okay, you know, capitalism, socialism, communism, all of these things. There, there are ways to, you know, uh uh break all systems. So, you know, it's it's just about picking one of them and then having uh uh like being diligent about making sure that there's compassion built into the system. But what is money when people are dying like this? What's the point? It's like making them try to play Monopoly while they're starving to death. Literally. You're like, oh, I'm so sorry you can't pass going. Like, I am dying.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:22

You're gonna get more upset. Breathe it out. Okay, so they produce record books, food cards to hope help stop the chaos. They come up with a color-coding index card system, where to stand.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:36

They make the Dewey Decimal system in this moment, essentially. Which I do need to do Dewey Decimal because that's also racist and problematic.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:42

Yeah, we'll we'll get there. But uh, officers even had opinions about the type of soup. They were gonna decide how what happened if they if you missed your name, you had to get back in the back of the line. Like they were coming up with explanations for every single thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:55

They're crawling to the food banks, Emily.

SPEAKER_09 1:41:57

Well, so okay, this is the the type of soup is the silly. So are you ready for a soup talk? Oh, I love soup.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:03

Emily hates soup.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:05

Somebody uh on Fred's, I meant to send it to you, was like, uh, wouldn't it be nice if it was fall? It was like a little cold, and you went to a place and instead of beers to taste, it had soups, and it was just like you tried soups to hung out. Maybe it was called a stewery, and I was like, oof, Danny Moss, did you join Threads?

SPEAKER_05 1:42:21

I'm there, I'm ready to go. I would uh uh just have so many different types of bits. Mess up a soup.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:27

You would have such weird poops after that. Soups and poops.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:32

That's the secret name, underground name for it.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:36

The stewer.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:37

So the soup.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:38

The soup.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:39

It had to be it had to hit three marks. It had to be cheap, flavorful, nutritious. It's a little bit of like a cheap, done fast quality, whatever it is, that's fine or tech cannibal free.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:52

Done fast, done quick. You're right. Done fast, done quick, or done speedily. Done speedily.

SPEAKER_09 1:42:58

Yeah. Done fast, done well, or done cheaply? Yeah. Yeah. Um, so a Frenchman named Alexis Sawyer created what they would call soup for the poor. Poor soup. Poor soup. No, they don't like that. It's called soup for the poor. Okay. They don't like the whole it's a homeless versus houselessness conversation. Soup for the poor. Um, he was a famous French chef. He invented the gas oven. Oh. And he was really into scientific food prep, which they don't really explain, but he's kind of like a gastroadapter.

SPEAKER_05 1:43:29

There's a like a gastronomical movement of food that everybody's super stoked about. So he's that. Like test tube kitchens.

SPEAKER_09 1:43:36

And basically he comes up with his recipe for soup number one, uh-huh. Uh, which is literally what they call it.

SPEAKER_05 1:43:41

This is soup number one, number number one.

SPEAKER_09 1:43:42

This is soup number one, number one, number one. Um, and they show the recipe, and everyone's kind of skeptical because it's like a very bit of small bit of beef, and then it's like um uh fat droppings and brown sugar and things that are like they're not in their minds soup things. Yeah. Um, but the cost projections were almost half of what they had been paying in previous soup kitchens. Okay. About three quarters of a penny to a quart of soup. So they were like, let's go. Yeah, let's go.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:09

Like, give us our sweet meat soup.

SPEAKER_09 1:44:11

Yeah. And so six weeks later, a hundred Dublin notables went to the first soup kitchen experience. So this is the weird thing. They have this place where he's like, a hundred people can eat at a time. Beat it. Beat it. Get out of here. Beat it. You're gonna be really, yeah. It's kind of silly. It's this was what I thought was silly, but it's kind of just enraging.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:31

Yeah, sorry. I'm already, I'm just primed for being so furious.

SPEAKER_09 1:44:33

But it's literally he, so he has this giant soup boiler. Yeah. And he's making this soup, and then there's, he's like, we're gonna seat a hundred people at a time. He's like talking about it like it's some real restaurant.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:43

What's the what's the there's a like all of the podcasts give money to this kitchen guy. What's it you know what I'm talking about? Yes.

SPEAKER_09 1:44:53

Alv Alv. Kitch. Oh my god, this is gonna drive me crazy. But yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:59

It'll pop in your head, but but just he's like presenting it like it's like a a bespoke uh like Brooklyn helping. He's like, this is what I've created.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:06

Um, so it's gonna serve a hundred people um at a time. It's bowls with soups chained to them. They all walk in at once, and a hundred rich, notable people from Dublin did this first. But there's three bells. They walk in, there's a bell to sit. Sorry, excuse me. They walk in, they sit. There's a bell to pray, a bell to eat, and a bell to finish.

SPEAKER_05 1:45:26

If you don't do it right, the soup not to pops out. It comes out.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:28

There's no freaking literally. And then when you leave, uh, you get some bread or a biscuit on your way out. Oh.

SPEAKER_05 1:45:35

So you don't even get to dip. Yeah. Well, come on, that's what the bread's for. That's the speed thing. Well, it's it's a reward for being moral about the way you eat your soup. You get bread. And you get a little linder chocolate. You get it bread. It's delicious.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:46

I mean, that would be a reward. This is dirt bread.

SPEAKER_05 1:45:48

I know. Dirt bread.

SPEAKER_09 1:45:50

Uh so literally, the wealthy people went through the first feeding, poor people came for the second feeding, and people were like, the vibe was like they were zoo animals. Like, because it's just these wealthy Dubliners being like, oh, they're very hungry.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:03

Like does taste okay. Yeah. Look at all these pores.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:09

But Ralph thought that Sawyer was a artist, and soup number one should be everywhere.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:13

Yeah. Is that like motif number five? Soup number one. Soup number one. Do you know you know the like uh I don't know if fairy tales are like do you know stone soup? Yeah. You know the idea.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:24

I wonder what ASOP's fables.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:26

Oh, is that where it's from? I was wondering where that came from because the the idea of like, you know, the the thing is the this whole community would just bring more stones. They would just be like, I brought this other stone.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:37

I'm helping.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:37

Yeah. I'm helping. Which is not their fault because all they got is stones.

SPEAKER_09 1:46:42

Add in murder dogs. Murder dogs. Okay. So then the people who um Team No Help got some good news.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:51

Who's Team No Help?

SPEAKER_09 1:46:52

Everybody. The people who think they're trying to justify that they don't need help. Oh, I see. They decide that money is uh is being created somehow because there was more money being put into banks by the Irish this year than the last. So put into savings accounts. So they were like, look at all this money. That's not why. They're like, look, we're recovering, but the money that was being put aside was by middle and upper classes because they were either going to emigrate. So they were either putting the money into the bank to be like, I'm gonna take this money away out of here, or uh they were doing it to just wait. Yeah, they were basically just putting it aside to emigrate.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:47:45

Right. There's no other I thought for some reason I thought there was another reason.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:48

It's just to leave.

SPEAKER_09 1:47:50

Uh and with the spring planting coming very soon, large farmers and landowners are still delaying these aggregational agricultural operations because none of them really have faith that anything good is gonna happen. So they're scared to plant, they're scared to give money, there's good instinct, honestly. So the public works programs were told to close, and they were still very scared, too close because fear and anger. Um, so on March 20th, they cut 20% and they were gonna keep cutting the programs at two to three week intervals. So the first people that were cut were men that had 10 acres or more. The second group were people with physical infirmities, and the soup was going to start being served on the 15th, but they were in no way ready to feed as many people as they laid off, especially their families. Because for every person you're laying off, there's a family behind them.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:36

Well, and you're only feeding a hundred at a time because that is the format.

SPEAKER_09 1:48:39

Well, that's one place, but yeah, they're not doing it right. Um, but at different work sites, they're deciding in different ways who's getting laid off. At one, men drew sticks to see who would be let go. One committee just crossed off every fifth person. In some towns, people uh rioted and destroyed the large soup boilers, which made no sense, but nothing made sense. Yeah, like they're just mad, they're they're dying.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:04

Well, um the yeah, the all of this feels like such an afterthought and so so it's such a small response to such a big problem. Yeah. That also fuck them. Like they're dying.

SPEAKER_09 1:49:15

They're just yeah, it's it's everything, you know. And it in April, there's still 400 people on the work rolls. But now there's this, there's there is sympathetic sentiment. And again, it's because there's so many dead kids that they're like, oh god. So they start the British start having this conversation about a day of observance. Um, and they're like, maybe a day of observance will raise um awareness and and get people to give more money. Sure. Not a terrible idea in theory, no, but they wanted a theme to the awareness. Oh god. And the theme is atonement.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:50

Atonement?

SPEAKER_09 1:49:51

Well, because the crop failure was Providence, so that was their fault, right? Because of the potato culture and the large.

SPEAKER_05 1:50:00

The British control Ireland. Why couldn't it have been the British's fault?

SPEAKER_09 1:50:05

Well, so interesting that you say that. Okay. So they were like, we're going to atone too. But what have we done wrong? What is it? So they decided they were going to atone for their pride and for their wealth and for allowing the Irish to slip beyond human civilization, essentially. Um, so what they were gonna do is have a day of fasting and humiliation.

SPEAKER_05 1:50:30

Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_09 1:50:31

And it was a few days after the public works shut down.

SPEAKER_05 1:50:34

Did they take all the food that they didn't eat while they were fasting and give it to the Irish?

SPEAKER_09 1:50:38

They certainly did not. Also, like the first thing the book is like, so they were gonna fast, right? But this one lord, he made it halfway through the day, and then he just had a crust of bread and then a little bit of meat, and then that like so people aren't even taking that seriously. And they said that central London, parts of central London did have a somber feel. People were going to church in central London, yeah, but a ton of people in more regional areas used it as a day to go to a picnic or go to the park. Like they're not, they're not, they don't care. They're like, it's a day off, sick. Like, yeah. Meanwhile, in Ireland, uh, more bodies are being eaten by dogs, and a a shopkeeper described giving a woman some milk for her baby, and then seeing that woman dead on the road the same day with the baby still alive in her arms. I forgot about that one. I'm sorry.

unknown 1:51:28

Yeah, like I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:30

I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_05 1:51:31

The soup is kind of silly. The soup is silly.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:34

I'm sorry. It's not a fun story.

SPEAKER_05 1:51:37

It's not a fun story. Uh it is it is uh listing way more genocide than it was. Yes, it was before it was just like uh, you know, uh dumdums famine and dum-dums, and now it's feeling very much like uh willful ignorance genocide.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:53

Meanwhile, during all of this, the English are really getting ready to transfer the cost, the entire cost of Irish relief to the Irish taxpayer with the Poor Extension Act, and it was going to raise their property taxes from roughly 400,000 pounds to 1,800,000 pounds.

SPEAKER_05 1:52:09

Because they got a lot of money. Yeah, they're running with it. So much money.

SPEAKER_09 1:52:12

And they were cons the Irish were concerned about a class war because if the rates got too high, there was just going to be such an even larger um difference in wealth from the poor to the wealth. Like they're like, this is we can't do this. Um but the Brits also hoped that transferring the debt would keep people from emigrating. I'm not a thousand percent sure why, but that's what they thought. Um, Trevelyan also thought that the law would make it cheaper to pay for labor than to pay the poor rate. So his hope was that people wouldn't want to pay the poor rate, so they would pay people to work. Because then the poor rate would go down because the poor rate was supporting the people who couldn't support themselves. Um, again, just willful ignorance and idiocy. But the House of Commons would fight viciously about all of this, and the poor believed that if the poor rate was raised, then or the Irish believed rather that if the poor rate was raised, the they would all be in the workhouse anyway. They're like, this is not a solution. We can't support this. Um but uh Mr. William Gregory created an amendment to the Poor Law Extension Act, which passed very easily, 117 to 7, which would deny relief to small farmers unless they agreed to surrender all but a quarter acre of their land.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:26

So that are you taking from these people that have nothing?

SPEAKER_09 1:53:28

Well, what it would make the Poor Law Extension Act an instrument of social engineering, like they were able to reformate how the whole society was.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:40

I so all depressions, the rich uh find a way to take more, to take way more. Like it's it's the the redistribution of wealth that happens during depressions, during famines, during all of this stuff is absolutely disgusting. And this is yeah, this is a huge example of it.

SPEAKER_09 1:53:58

It's all bad. Um, and this amendment would completely crush the small farmer class. Within six years, the number of small farms in Ireland, those between one and five acres, would fall 52%.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:13

And society definitely is better when there's no small farmers, when it's all macro farming.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:18

Yeah, no, it's good. It's good. We don't like field diversity, we don't like business diversity, we don't like small business.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:25

Plant diversity. So we like if if things uh I meant by field diversity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:30

So in April, Sawyer the soup man said goodbye, reminding people that they could visit the Sawyer model kitchen and watch the poor eat for five shillings. And that that would be donated to charity. Then he went back to London.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:44

Oh, this is the so it so the whole time it was it was a like you could pay five shillings to watch the poor eat food.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:52

Not the whole time, just on this one day.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:54

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_09 1:54:54

But still maybe they should have done the whole time because farm animals eat.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:58

But also, like, Jesus Christ. No, it's all bad.

SPEAKER_09 1:55:01

It's so bad. It's all bad. And by April 24th, 209,000 of the public works labors had been cut. And Colonel Jones, the new guy, decided that by May 1st, all public work projects needed to be closed unless told otherwise, which even Trevelyan thought was too much.

SPEAKER_05 1:55:18

These new people just showing up and like everyone else has failed before them. And they're like, I'm I'm gonna day one, I'm gonna figure this out. You're just a bunch of idiots. You're like, no, it's just bad. It's really bad.

SPEAKER_09 1:55:30

You're not that smart. Yeah. Uh even Trevelyan knew this was insane because two million people would be affected, and only half the soup kitchens were operational. Because by two million, I mean the families like shut everyone down. One workhouse had 104 inmates and 24 beds. In Galway, there were more bodies than graviggers. And in in Galway, the dead actually were buried next to a fever shed, which was near the well, and fever killed the master, his wife, and two doctors.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:56

Near the well feels like a bad idea.

SPEAKER_09 1:55:57

It's a bad idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 1:55:59

O'Brien, the young Ireland guy, reminded the colonel that in the commons the works weren't supposed to close until the kitchens opened, but he was like, We never said that. Who said that? What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 1:56:11

I am so sad and angry.

SPEAKER_09 1:56:14

The shutdowns did get slowed down a bit, and by June 1st, 2,729,824 people were being fed by soup kitchens, which is an achievement. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:56:26

Emily, isn't it so fun to learn about history? I love it. Isn't it just so cool just to learn about things?

SPEAKER_09 1:56:32

What if we were just what if I was just watching below deck right now?

SPEAKER_05 1:56:34

I'd be happy and rested. Yeah. What are y'all doing listening to this?

SPEAKER_09 1:56:42

Don't tell them to stop.

SPEAKER_05 1:56:43

No, no, no. I'm so sorry. It's good that good to learn about these things so that we can stop them from happening in the future.

SPEAKER_09 1:56:50

So the second half of the plan that they originally had, that 50,000 to get people to go home and plant seed, also didn't work. Right. Because wealthy people were leaving the country. The middle of the road people didn't want to lend money to the poor because they didn't think they were actually going to plant.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:05

Right.

SPEAKER_09 1:57:06

And those who could plant were worried that if they did, the landlord would take the crops the second they were grown.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:11

Yeah. Yeah. And the rest of them were crawling to the soup kitchens.

SPEAKER_09 1:57:15

So next episode will be our last episode of this series, and we will discuss the fact that in April of 1847, about half a million people were going to uh Irish Goodbye, as they say.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:28

Yeah. They were gonna get out of there. Get out. Well, the getting was way past wood. Way past good. Yeah. The getting was bad.

SPEAKER_07 1:57:36

Yeah. So next week we're gonna talk about coffin chips. It's gonna be so fun. And maybe we'll do an ice cream social.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:45

Yeah. We could try uh various Irish creams. Hey, we could just drink Bailey's the whole night. Hey, there you go. We might need the coffee because I'm just to pep us up.

SPEAKER_09 1:57:55

Oof, this was almost two hours of sadness.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:59

Yeah, yeah. Bleak city. The thing is, you know, the the whiskey of it all did slow it down and add to this. But I needed it.

SPEAKER_09 1:58:07

I needed it.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:08

I needed it.

SPEAKER_09 1:58:09

This might come out later in the day on Tuesday, you guys. We'll see. We're gonna see.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:13

We'll see. Sorry. I'm gonna edit at 2.5 speed. So if there's some extra ums, I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_09 1:58:20

All right. Well, um, there is one more episode. Thank you. I'm sorry. Um yeah, if you have a good zany topic for me next time, let me know. Because Danny's idea of zany is third degree burns on an elderly person. Um, but yeah, we appreciate all the the new listeners. We appreciate everybody who is listening. If you want to hit us with a follow, hit us with a comment, all those lovely things. Um, any feedback is good feedback at this moment. We're trying to figure out what you guys like and what you don't. So if you want to leave a comment on any place about or including to our faces, whatever you want.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:57

Yeah. Um also, Greg, thanks for the whiskey. Thanks for the whiskey.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:00

Greg, I'm gonna give you an angry hangover text in the morning, is what I'm gonna do. Because ooh boy. Uh everybody say a little prayer in their heart that Frankie sleeps till at least 6 a.m.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:11

Yeah. And also remember, famine's no joke. That was too bleak. It's not. Anyways, uh remember.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:23

No, really, remember, famine's not the problem. The fever is avoid the void, the typhoid. See, uh maybe our fun facts next week will be places we're we're gonna visit in Ireland that aren't sad.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:40

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one, thank you, Ireland, for these whiskeys.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:45

Thank you, Ireland.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:45

Thank you, Ireland. The the whiskies of the night were delicious and delightful. Uh, thank you for making it through this horrible atrocity that was uh foisted upon you by an uncaring overlord.

SPEAKER_09 1:59:58

Umks for listening, and a big thanks to Carsi Bland for the theme music. You can follow the podcast everywhere at Eathe Rich Pod. You can email us your suggestions for future episodes at eatherich pod at gmail. You can follow me at thefunnywalsh, and you can follow Danny at DMoss315. See you next week.