A prominent economist and former Unionist MLA has hit out at President Biden for blaming the British for the horrors of the Great Hunger.
In closing his first press conference last week, the President compared the flight of a million-and-a-half people from Ireland to the exodus of persecuted immigrants from Latin America.
President Joe Biden, as he so often does, invoked his Irish ancestry in the context of present days issues and priorities.
Biden was asked a number of questions regarding the current arrival of thousands of people, most of them minors, at the nation’s border with Mexico.
While outlining plans on how to deal with the crisis, the president sought to explain it in terms of parents desperate for the future of their children against a backdrop of natural disaster, hunger, violence and political corruption and malfeasance.
He said in part: “You know as well as I do; you cover it: You have serious — it’s not like somebody at a sitting hand-hewn table in Guatemala — I mean, in — in somewhere in Mexico or in Guadalupe, saying, ‘I got a great idea. Let’s sell everything we have. Give it to a coyote. Have him take our kids across the border and into a desert where they don’t speak the language. Won’t that be fun? Let’s go.’ That’s not how it happens. People don’t want to leave.
“When my great grandfather got on a coffin ship in the Irish Sea, expectation was: Was he going to live long enough on that ship to get to the United States of America?
“But they left because of what the Brits had been doing. They were in real, real trouble. They didn’t want to leave. But they had no choice. So you got — we can’t — I can’t guarantee we’re going to solve everything, but I can guarantee we can make everything better. We can make it better. We can change the lives of so many people.”
But now, economist Esmond Birnie, who served in the Assembly for the Ulster Unionists from 1998-2007, has hit back at the President, claiming that the British were not responsible for An Gorta Mór — though he conceded the government could have responded more generously to the famine that claimed one million lives.
"President Biden’s statement at the end of last week about those of his ancestors who had been victims of the 1840s Famine may display a limited interpretation of what was actually happening during the 1840s Irish Famine," said the University of Ulster professor. “In fact, the UK government did not introduce the potato disease to Ireland. At the same time as Famine struck the island of Ireland, it is worth remembering hundreds of thousands of people died - or emigrated - in the six counties which would become Northern Ireland.”
Dr Birnie said Ireland at the time had no welfare state and there was a limit to what the British could have done but added that is "not to deny that more should have been done”.
