GOAL chief needs a history lesson on Ireland’s debt to America

GOAL’s John O’ Shea was on radio and television during the week decrying our Government’s gesture in allocating e1 million and sending some 30 members of the Irish defence forces to help with the relief efforts in New Orleans.

“I feel that the response is inappropriate,” he said. “We could have sent a letter; we could have made a phone call; we could perhaps have sent our ministers to turn up perhaps at the funerals of some of the dead.”

Yea, the Yanks would really have appreciated it if we sent Bertie Ahern over to wade into the flood in New Orleans to have his photograph taken like he did when the Tolka overflowed! The Americans asked for help, but O’Shea rubbished the idea because the United States is the richest country in the world. “They are awash with billionaires,” he said. “It is inappropriate for us to be sending money. It’s not something one does.”

He also ridiculed the idea of sending 30 members of our defence forces, who he compared to “boy scouts”. He did apologise for this as an inadvertent comment in a letter to the Irish Examiner, but comment was obviously not inadvertent.

He said it in the earlier part of the Morning Ireland interview and repeated again towards the end, and in between he even asked if sending the figurative boy scouts to New Orleans meant that the Government would send the girl guides to Paris if the Eiffel Tower collapsed. His remarks were intended, but he had not thought out their implications. He was not deliberately insulting the Army, but the Government.

O’Shea should have learned by now to engage his brain before putting both feet in his mouth.

New Orleans wasn’t awash with billionaires; it was awash in sewage that has destroyed the lifework of thousands and thousands of people.

“What we should have done had we been asked, I suppose initially is to offer some advice because commonsense was absent from this theatre,” O’Shea continued as he exhibited an ever greater dearth of commonsense. We weren’t asked for advice on something that we mercifully know little about, but we were asked for help. O’Shea suggests that the whole thing could have been solved by a phone call.

“One phone call to Bill Gates to rebuild New Orleans would have meant that nothing was lost,” he argued. “Not a single body would have been lost, but here we are talking now about 20,000 may have died because of mismanagement.”

The damage caused by Hurricane Katrina has been estimated at well over $100 billion. Surely John O’Shea is not so naïve as to think that Bill Gates has anything like that much money, or that he would just hand over his whole fortune, if he were only asked.

This is the greatest natural disaster ever in the United States. The devastation was not just in the city of New Orleans; it covers parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The affected area is actually larger than the whole of Great Britain.

As such it can be compared with the Great Famine in this country. Both were undoubtedly made worse by administrative incompetence, but in the matter of incompetence we were in a league of our own because we exported food during the famine.

Only the potato crop failed. Other crops grew as normal and the price of meat remained static throughout the ordeal, which suggested there was no shortage. The problem was that poor people were dependent on the potato and could not afford other food.

Most people actually died of disease as a result of unhygienic conditions and malnourishment. We were part of the United Kingdom then, and it was the richest country in the world.

Did the Americans respond to our cries for help like John O’Shea argues that we should treat them now? A bill to allocate $500,000 for Irish famine relief was introduced in Congress. The Senate passed it, but it ran into difficulty in the House of Representatives due to the hostility of President James K Polk, who felt the government had no right to give the people’s money away for charity. “My solemn conviction is that Congress possesses no power to use any public money for any such purpose,” the president wrote in his diary.

THE White House effectively blocked such government help, but the American people responded magnificently by organising a massive relief effort. It started with a number of meeting in cities like New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans.

Governor Isaac Johnson of Louisiana opened the meeting in New Orleans on February 4, 1847. Senator Henry Clay, one of the most distinguished senators in US history, delivered the main address. He had narrowly lost the presidential election of 1844, in which Irish-Americans had reportedly voted against him en masse, but he still came out in favour of sending famine relief to Ireland.

“It is not fervid eloquence, not gilded words, that Ireland needs,” he said, “but substantial food. Let us rise to the magnitude of the duty which is before us, and by a generous supply from the magnitude of our means, evince the genuineness of our sympathy and commiserations.” His speech stands out in marked contrast with the empty platitudes that John O’Shea was prescribing this week.

Five days after the 1847 gathering in New Orleans Vice-President George M Dallas convened a meeting to set up a national committee in Washington, DC. It consisted of politicians from each of the existing states. In addition to the vice-president, it included famous politicians like John C Calhoun, Sam Houston and Congressman Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, who later became president.

Daniel Webster, another of the country’s most famous senators, proposed a resolution calling on “the inhabitants of all cities, towns, and villages in the United States” to collect and forward contributions to the general committees in New York and New Orleans so that the money could be used to purchase flour, Indian corn or meal and other provisions to be sent to Ireland.

Businessmen contributed generously, but it was not just the wealthy who were moved. Black slaves on an Alabama plantation collected $50 for Ireland. Choctaw Indians - no strangers to famine themselves - collected $710 for famine relief in Skullyville, Arkansas, and members of the same tribe collected $150 in Doaksville in the wilderness of what later became the state of Oklahoma.

“The whole country is aroused to the obligations incumbent upon us as men and Christians to extend relief to the famishing poor of Ireland,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune noted on February 23, 1847. “Throughout the country, measures have been taken and are now in progress to swell the sums which are going forward.”

By July 1847 the New Orleans committee had sent $50,000 in money and produce to Ireland.

The American relief changed the course of Irish history.

Hitherto Ireland had always looked to Europe for help, but thereafter it was to the United States. Our Government should now be commended, not condemned, for its gesture in sending help to a people who have helped us so often in the past.