UK could damage Ireland again

WITH regards DC Sage’s letter on Brexit and the Irish border problem (Western Mail letters November 13), it’s worth looking back to the greatest atrocity to have befallen our British and Irish islands, namely the Great Hunger (1845-52). One million then-British citizens were left with no food and even ate grass before ultimately starving to death and another million were forced to leave their homeland in a tragedy which many argue was nothing less than a holocaust or genocide. To a large extent this terrible, avoidable tragedy was caused by our Westminster Government’s obsession with free market ideology which they believed would solve all problems (where have we heard that before?) and its insistence that this doctrine had to be pursued whatever the consequences.

Countries like the Netherlands with similar potato blight problems stopped exporting grain so their people could be fed whereas Westminster insisted free market policies must prevail and grain together with cattle were exported from Ireland. The million British citizens who perished have never had justice from Westminster and UK Governments past and present have always refused to fully acknowledge and accept their institution’s role and responsibility for this holocaust. Indeed, there is no memorial anywhere near the Palace of Westminster and in the UK you have to go 150 miles from there to Cathays Cemetery in Cardiff to find the nearest memorial remembering the dead of Westminster’s worst atrocity inflicted on its own people.

So in light of this, when DC Sage suggests Ireland can either accept Brexit and have a hard border, leave a chaotic open border with the North or leave the EU then he is wrong. If any of these options come to pass then Brexit means Britain will again hugely damage Ireland. Clearly it’s sad that Mr Sage urges that Ireland be ignored for the sake of Brexit and it neglects our considerable obligations and debt to that country. So ditching the shameful Brexit is the only reasonable way forward and would be a start in bringing justice for a million United Kingdom citizens killed in a genocide. Chris Lewis Cathays, Cardiff