What Does the Poppy Mean to You?
To this day, all over Ireland the landscape bears mute testimony to the events that occurred in the horrific period from 1845 – 1850.
Starvation graveyards offer silent tribute to the millions of Irish men, women and children buried in unmarked mass graves. Thriving villages were replaced by heaps of moss-covered stones.
Although historians have not agreed on the numbers who perished, most estimates range between one and three million.
Today a growing number of historians believe the term “famine,” often used to describe the lack of food leading to this desolation, is totally inappropriate. Although it is certainly true that the fungus eliminated the potato as a food source, it is also true that only one crop failed. While our people cruelly suffered, Ireland was producing more than enough food to feed them.
That same food was being removed at gunpoint by British Queen Victoria’s troops garrisoned in Ireland for this purpose. In 1847 alone, 4,000 ships carrying £17,000,000 worth of foodstuffs, 10,000 head of cattle, and 4,000 horses and ponies sailed to England. That same year, etched in memory as “Black 47,” saw over half a million Irish people die of starvation and related diseases.
For many, the poppy means hunger; it means food forced from hungry hands at gunpoint; it means death by the roadside as homes were tumbled in on themselves to prevent the return of its previous inhabitants; it means the taste of grass or empty stomachs; it means genocide.
