The Domicide Of Ireland In The 1800's

The French sociologist, Gustave de Beaumont, might have been thinking of this yet un-invented word 'Domicide' when he visited Ireland in 1835 and wrote: "I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland...In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland."

“Domocide” is a very recently coined term to describe the famines (There was more than one in the country of Ireland in the1800’s) It puts the famine in the context of a deliberate policy of negligence, starvation  and mass murder by just one word. Modern historians love it. One way or the other, ‘domocide’ had murdered a million people in Ireland legally by starvation with several million more leaving in coffin ships. The literal translation of the word 'domocide' means: "The murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." 

The reality is that there never was a famine in Ireland in any real sense for there was no shortage of food; it was mass starvation because there was plenty of food and just too much want; want from those who were the wretched poor and the beaten down under the heel of the British Penal Laws of tyranny that protected the landlords, and because of it, made slavery seem like a holiday camp.  

Another observer, James Mahony, wrote about the famine in 1847 this: We next reached Skibbereen…. And there I saw the dying, the living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them in the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as they were in all the same state; and, not a single house out of any 500 could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of three or four, even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last resting place.”

Barry Clifford