The Real Irish Story Not Taught In Schools

I use to think history was boring, and it was taught that way…you know, memorizing dates. But real history is so much more, and the elderly are the greatest resources. The Indians valued the wisdom of the elders, but in today’s split families, that history is being lost.
The other day a 90 year old friend began telling me that her family had come from Ireland, and they told her stores that I had never heard. She began telling me that her Grandfather escaped to England during Great Potato Famine that began in 1845. He found the British people most compassionate, and became very pro-British.
On his grandmother’s advice, her grandfather moved to America, and brought his starving family from Ireland. They were very anti-British. Her relatives said there was plenty of food (cattle, and other crops besides potatoes) in Ireland during the famine that killed 750,000 people. But only the British colonialists were allowed such food,
Her Grandfather told her that there was a volcanic eruption that darkened the skies creating an unusually wet and cold climate. He said it caused the potato blight that destroyed the poor people’s food supply.

This was not the story I had heard. But I have learned not to dismiss such stories too lightly. I had learned a great deal from the stories passed down from Indians, Mexicans and blacks. So I began some research, and too my amazement I found the following. I have not yet researched the entirety of the documents, but there was much truth in what this ladies family passed down to her.
Despite the famine, corn, barley, and dairy products were exported from Ireland to Britain in compliance with British control that called colonialism free trade. The Great Famine Of 1845
Livestock was also exported from Ireland Quick History: The Irish Potato Famine.
I continued to search for the volcanic eruption that her grandfather talked about, and so far have only found this little known history: The Year Without A Summer (Mini Ice Age) volcano apparently a rumor http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/how-did-the-potato-get-to-ire…/
As I researched more about colonialism, I discovered this. “Eventually Venice, Amsterdam, and England all adopted central banks. These banks helped pay for unnecessary wars, unprofitable colonies, and to expand the state at home. Eventually all of these central banks resulted in economic crises and devaluation. Meanwhile, the United States remained free of such central banking in the nineteenth century, and became the world’s economic superpower. We only began to experience the growth of government, continental wars, and expanding colonial empire, and skyrocketing national debt when the Federal Reserve was found in 1913. The pace of change accelerated when the final break from the gold standard occurred in 1971.” The Fed’s War On The Middle Class
Now this is why real history is so important, and why what we are taught in modern textbooks is so worthless.
__________sources:
The whole issue was not helped by the majority of landlords in Ireland who showed no sympathy for those who worked their land. Those who could not pay their rent were evicted despite the government’s effort to establish some form of employment in rural Ireland. Also during the time of the famine, £1million of corn and barley were exported from Ireland to mainland Britain, along with quantities of dairy produce. This fitted in with the free trade approach of the time. Those who produced these vital products simply got a better price for them than in Ireland. Driven on by free trade, foodstuffs left Ireland – despite the fact that it was desperately needed in Ireland itself. Any initiatives in London were also hindered or simply blocked by the chief civil servant to the Treasury – Trevelyan. He was symptomatic of those who worked for the government in Westminster. A supporter of free trade, Trevelyan was also less than sympathetic to the Irish or their problems.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/ireland_great_famine_o…
they noted that during the famine’s worst years, many Anglo-Irish estates continued to export grain and livestock to England.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/hi…/irish_potato_famine.cfm
http://idiotsguides.com/…/quick-history-the-irish-potato-fa…
This article is about the year 1816. For the Byron poem, see Darkness (poem).
The Year Without a Summer (also known as the Poverty Year, The Summer that Never Was, Year There Was No Summer, and Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death[1]) was 1816, in which severe summer climate abnormalities caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F),[2] resulting in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.[3][4] Evidence suggests that the anomaly was caused by a combination of a historic low in solar activity with a volcanic winter event, the latter caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years. The Little Ice Age, then in its concluding decades, may also have been a factor.[attribution needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer