Holocaust & Healing

Ireland's Starvation Trauma 1845-1850

Cathy O'Brien is a survivor of the horrendous CIA MKUltra mind control program in the States. One of the insights the program is based on is that when we experience severe trauma, too painful to assimilate, the mind responds by shutting down that part of the brain. That part then becomes susceptible to outside forces accessing it and inserting a program that can be controlled from outside. Cathy O'Brien was a young woman at the time she was co-opted into MKUltra and was programmed as a sex slave and used by high ups in the military and politics in the US.

The journey she details from trauma victim back to sovereign human being is an incredible one. With the help of her CIA handler, who had pity on her plight, she managed to escape her controllers and gradually regain control of her own mind by giving voice to the silent trauma within and reopening those parts of her brain which had been closed off. She reclaimed her sovereignty as a human being and the insights she gained from that process are invaluable to any individual or group of people who have experienced a serious trauma and struggle to regain their sovereignty as an individual or people.

Ireland is no stranger to trauma. The starvation experienced by the Irish people in the years 1845-1850 has left a deep scar on the Irish psyche. Our continuing struggle as a nation to reclaim our sovereignty is intimately bound up with our struggle to give voice to that starvation trauma whose memory has been burned into our DNA but still remains largely hidden. Like Cathy O'Brien we need to journey into that painful experience and reclaim the truth of what happened to us. One indication of the work remaining to be done in Ireland is the fact that so many of the mass graves from that time have been left unmarked and unremembered to this day. This is not normal in a country and a culture which places so much emphasis on paying respects to the dead. It is a sign of our reluctance to deal with the by now inter-generational starvation trauma we continue to experience from our history. What is also clear from Cathy O'Brien's story is that it was only through reclaiming the truth of her own story that she regained her own sovereignty. It is only by choosing a story that reflects the truth of our experience that we also can fully reclaim our sovereignty. But it must be the story of those who experienced the starvation and not those who tried and indeed continue to try to cover it up.

In 1845 the British Viceroy in Ireland was Lord Heytesbury. On November 3 of that same year he received a twenty-two man delegation at the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park, a place now known as Áras an Uachtaráin (The Residence of the President). The delegation included Daniel O'Connell, a prominent political leader at the time and the local Dublin city mayor O'Sullivan. Ireland was seriously affected, like the rest of Europe at the time, by the potato blight. In response Belgium and Portugal had closed their ports to food exports so their own people would be fed. The delegation pleaded with the Viceroy to do likewise, to stop the export of foodstuffs from Ireland during the crop failure. He refused, and reading from a prepared script questioned whether the blight was as severe as was claimed and “bowed them out”. A diplomatic phrase suggesting the delegation were effectively told to 'fuck off'. The Freeman's Journal described the attitude of the Viceroy towards the Irish in the meeting as “they may starve”.

From this historic meeting two different and competing stories of the starvation emerged which continue to compete with each other down to the present day. One is the view of the Viceroy, who refused to acknowledge that tons of food was being exported from the country and although he acknowledged the potato blight, downplayed its significance. The other is the view represented by Daniel O'Connell and the delegation of 22. They believed people weren't dying because there wasn't enough food, they were dying because of the political decision by the British government to export the much needed food from Ireland even though people were starving because of blight on the potatoes that people were forced to subsist on. If the Irish had been allowed to consume the food they themselves were producing there would have been no starvation.

Christoper Fogarty, in the research for his book Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect", unearthed key information from the public records office in London “identifying the British regiments that removed Irish food” during this period. He adds “They were deployed only where resistance proved too much for the carbine toting British constabulary and militia.” So the widespread presence of British military around the country was evidence that not only was food being removed from the country but that there was stiff opposition to it from local Irish people. In his book Fogarty reproduces a map with this information on it about specifically what British regiments were present in Ireland and where they were stationed. On the same map he also identifies the location of the mass graves of those who died of starvation during the same period. As an Irish person it's a most heart rending graphic but how many Irish people would be even aware of its existence today?

Graphic : Christoper Fogarty

The Viceroy's version of events is still doing the rounds. Ironically, an example of this is Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and resident in Áras an Uachtaráin (previously the Viceregal Lodge), who described the Famine as a 'natural disaster' in a speech in Canada in 1994 and never made any reference during her tenure as president to the export of food during the 1845-1850 period. Examples of the second view, championed by Daniel O'Connell and the delegation of 22, are hard to find. A reason for this was given by award-winning journalist John Pilger who, while visiting Doolough in county Mayo during a starvation commemoration walk in 1997, said “The Anglo-American publishing establishment will still kill any book that tells the truth about the starvation of Ireland.” If true, and John Pilger was well acquainted with the world of publishing, this shows how politically sensitive the issue of what story is being told about the starvation has remained right up to current times. But why should this still be the case so long after the event itself?

The experience of Cathy O'Brien might suggest an answer to that question. As part of training in the MKUltra mind control programme she describes how subjects were deliberately and repeatedly traumatised by being forced to, for example, witness a CIA operative killing a completely innocent homeless person in a car park. Through that trauma the trainers were then able to shut down more parts of the brain and exercise control over it through the use of buzz words or pieces of music or children's fairy tales or whatever. When the subject was then triggered she would switch on an inserted program and effectively become a robot and carry out instructions of those controlling her.

Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist has looked at a similar dynamic from a social perspective in his theory of Mass Formation following the so-called Covid pandemic. The theory has its critics but in relation to attempting to understand the British government's attitude toward the starvation in Ireland it has a few helpful insights. In relation to the traumatic fear and anxiety generated during 2020 Desmet says “The real enemy is not a virus, but the fear and anxiety that makes people susceptible to authoritarian control.” Imperial regimes are quite happy to inflict traumatic experiences on their populations as it increases the population's malleability to that control. Naomi Klein also looks at this area but from an economic perspective in her book “Shock Doctrine” which echoes that famous phrase from the Obama era to "Never let a good crisis go to waste". And we shouldn't exclude the possibility here that many of these crises are deliberately engineered. The essential point here is that centralised power structures can and do use traumatic crises to control both individuals and whole populations and that includes fabricating the story around what happened.

In 1910 in the townland of Kilcooley/Ballyglass near Ballymoe in county Galway a local farmer, Jim Flanagan, set out one day in early Spring with his horse plough to till one of his fields. It was the one furthest from the house and the best one for tillage. He had recently acquired the land after the British government at the time had adopted a policy of buying out landlords and redistributing the land locally. Soon after Flanagan started work in the field, though, he discovered the plough had turned over extensive human remains. Flanagan immediately stopped ploughing and contacted the local priest but because of the sheer number of remains it wasn't felt practical to give each a Christian burial. Flanagan reburied the remains and never dug the field again according to his daughters Margaret and Kathleen who gave a signed affidavit to Christopher Fogarty during his research (Exhibit E5 in his book).

If you discovered human remains in your back garden today it would warrant investigation by the authorities. The area would be cordoned off, an incident tent erected, bones exhumed, tests carried out, reports issued and actions taken. But with the mass graves from the days of starvation the bodies are simply and silently returned to the land. There are no cordons or tents or tests. With a few exceptions the place itself is left unmarked. Apparently we were not yet ready to disturb the energies of those painful days. This is no reflection on Jim Flanagan. I can only imagine what the traumatic effect of the experience of ploughing up those bodies might have had on him personally. We shall never know. All we do know is that the bodies were returned to the ground in which they lay and the field was never ploughed again. Perhaps, like Jim Flanagan, we needed time before we would be ready to face the trauma of our brothers and sisters buried beneath us.

In the last few days we had two major demonstrations in Ireland; one in Dublin and one in Letterkenny. Both were marked by large turnouts and a sea of tricolours. The tricolours in particular were significant and carried with them a strong assertion of national sovereignty by local people in both city and country areas. It's a sign that things are beginning to change rapidly. While the assault on national sovereignty in the West by globalist forces may not be at an end just yet it's clear that feeling is now rising in these same countries to a threshold level which will be very difficult to turn back. There’s an indisputable wave now from forces outside our control to restore power back to a local level from the globalist power structure and just as Cathy O’Brien’s personal sovereignty was restored by healing her past traumas, our own path to national sovereignty must include healing the trauma of 1845-1850. Our continued susceptibility to outside control will be ended when we make this healing journey.

Photograph : Roscommon People

Those who died in that period through forced starvation were bereft of a modicum of human care and compassion in their final hours. The shallow graves indicative of the little strength that was left in those who remained to dig any deeper. Our healing journey as a nation requires that we give these souls something they lacked in the manner of their death. We carry the race memory of their passing in every cell of our DNA and it cries out now for healing. The bones just beneath the surface in these unmarked mass graves around the country are beginning to wake up too in these fevered times. They can feel something is in the air. Something they haven't felt for a long, long time. They are beginning to feel again that they are loved and cherished. We have neglected our dead for too long and we have neglected the Earth that holds them. It is the Earth itself that has waited for us to ask. It is the Earth itself which will return them to our loving embrace.