Petition To Change ‘Irish Potato Famine’ To ‘British Genocide’ Reaches 4.5mn Signatures

A CAMPAIGN to remove the phrase ‘Irish famine’ from the history books has garnered huge support among people polled on the island of Ireland, but is struggling to win favour among British people who don’t much care for the term ‘genocide caused by the British government’.

The 7-year famine starting in 1845 claimed the lives of over 1 million people and caused a wave of emigration that saw 1 million more leave Ireland, and has historically been attributed to Irish people just loving potatoes so much they starved to death rather than eat anything else.

So far, efforts to reframe the disaster as being more to do with the British response at the time to the failure of the potato crop have been met with resistance by some British historians, many of whom don’t like the notion that they haven’t always been the good guys of history.

“Which is as good a reason as any to change the name, to be honest,” said one member of the association that is trying to get at least the Wikipedia page of the ‘Great Famine’ changed to something like ‘The Brits At It, Big Time’.

“We don’t like the phrase ‘Irish Famine’ because it suggests we caused it, or at least we were somewhat at fault. ‘British genocide’ works better because it suggests that they let a million people die just to keep us under their heels. We’re at 4.5m signatures at the minute, so we’re looking good”.

Should the petition succeed, expect to see changes in the naming of the Bengal Famine, the Iranian Famine, and the ‘time thousands of Kenyans beat themselves to death’.