Mistletoe used to be hung up in Irish homes & stables at Christmas to protect from the mischief of fairies and evil. Later on it became associated with the love, friendship, & goodwill we know today.

The Vigil of the Nativity of Our Lord

[Book of Kells, f7v, the oldest extant image of Mary in a Western manunoscript]

Christmas Eve 1601: Irish forces led by Hugh O'Neill and Ruadh O'Donnell are heavily defeated at the Battle of Kinsale - it marked the end of the native Gaelic order.

A mince pie and a bottle of Guinness is the traditional Santa snack in Ireland - Also a carrot must be left out on the doorstep for Rudolph! 🎅🍺🥕

This concludes my forgotten Christmas posts.

The Eucharistic Congress 1932, Irish flag flown from every building. Catholic gathering of clergy, religious, and laity to bear witness to the Real Presence of Jesus
http://bit.ly/2mtLcMj

A 12th century panel depicting the Judgement of Solomon at Ardmore Cathedral, Waterford.

"We did not strive to get out of that British domination of our affairs by outside force, nor we did not get out of that position to get into a worse one"-

De Valera objecting to the potential of an European Parliament 1955

Britain, Rothschild and the Great Irish Starvation: A Thread

Weary men, what reap ye? "Golden corn for the Stranger.
"What sow ye? "Human corpses that await for the Avenger.
"Fainting forms, all hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?
"Stately ships to bear our food away amid the stranger's scoffing."

There's a proud array of soldiers what do they round your door?
"They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
"Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? "Would to God that we were dead
"Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread!"

"We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride,
But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died.
Now is your hour of pleasure, bask ye in the world's caress;
But our whitening bones against ye will arise as witnesses,

From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffined masses,
For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.
A ghastly, spectral army before God we'll stand
And arraign ye as our murderers, O spoilers of our land!"

- Jane Wilde

The method of the imperialist is to indirectly control what they cannot own, & to destroy what they cannot control. They could'nt control the people of Ireland, so set out to destroy the populace.

Long before they had also installed a British local majority in the North of Ireland.

Every possible effort by local organizations to feed the starving was thwarted and frustrated by a British government intent on teaching the Irish a lesson and forcing market reform on them.

Charles Trevelyan, the key figure in the British government, had foreshadowed the deadly policy in a letter to the “Morning Post”, after a trip to Ireland, where he heartily agreed with the sentiment that there were at least a million or two people too many in the benighted land and that the eight million could not possibly survive there.

“Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.”

Shortly after, he was in charge of a policy that brought that situation about.

One Trevelyan story and one quote suffice.

“British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, when he saw starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his attempts to feed the starving, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan…”

The Trevelyan quote is...

“The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Potato blight, "phytophthora infestans", did spread from America to Europe in 1844, to England and then Ireland in 1845 but it didn't cause famine anywhere. Ireland did not starve for potatoes; it starved for food.

Ireland starved because its food, from 40 to 70 shiploads per day, was removed at gunpoint by 12,000 British constables reinforced by the British militia, battleships, excise vessels, Coast Guard and by 200,000 British soldiers (100,000 at any given moment).

The attached map shows the never-before-published names and locations in Ireland of the food removal regiments.