Potato Famine… When the Ottoman Sultan intervened to save the people of Ireland!

Of course, you will be surprised when you know that the Irish club Drogheda United F.C bears a star and crescent, but the star and crescent are related to the emblem of the Ottoman Empire on the one hand, and on the other hand they refer to one of the largest famines in Europe (the potato famine), which occurred in the mid-19th century in Ireland.

This famine caused a massive demographic change in Ireland. Nearly a million Irish died, half a million emigrated. By the end of the famine, Ireland had lost about a quarter of its people at the time, and at the same time had won the sympathy of the Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Majid.

Ireland… the stubborn island of Great Britain

British control of the island of Ireland began in the early sixteenth century, and although the British Empire was one of the most powerful empires rising at that time, the island of Ireland represented a constant headache for it, for its refusal to do so, until it was completely subjected to it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in 1801. At that time, Britain was almost the most powerful in the world.

British colonialism was, of course, greedy to add new lands to its authority, and thus expand the agricultural and industrial inputs of the empire, and thus Britain began its policies towards Ireland, as a reservoir full of food and vegetables, and the reins of matters in Ireland became in the hands of a handful of wealthy Irish people, loyal to the British government in the first place.

Potatoes…the main meal of the Irish

When the potato came to Ireland it was just an ornamental plant, but over time it became a staple food for the poor who are the majority of the Irish, and 33% of the population relied on eating potatoes for their nutrition, and it was also used as fodder for livestock, and in this way any crisis in this crop would cause In a major catastrophe.

In the forties of the nineteenth century, specifically in the year 1845 AD, an agricultural pest began to change everything. The “late blight” blight led to a crisis in Europe in general, but in Ireland in particular it led to a major disaster.

This pest destroyed potato crops across Europe. As for a country where 33% of the population uses potatoes as food, this pest represented a calamity, and from here the potato famine began in Ireland. That pest destroyed a third of the crop in the first year, and the next year it destroyed 90% of the crop, and after another year the crisis reached a frightening point, when the Irish had to eat the seeds instead of planting them.

The impact of the potato famine in Ireland was great. Apart from the starvation that killed a million Irish, another half a million Irish traveled to America, and some sources indicate that the travelers were about a million, in difficult travel conditions.

The Potato Famine: British Dry Deal and the Ottoman Humanitarian Response

When Ireland’s President Mary McAleese visited Turkey in 2010, she expressed her thanks, and her people’s thanks to Turkey, for the position of the Ottoman Empire on this famine, saying that “the Irish people have not forgotten this unparalleled generosity. The symbols on your flag (the crescent and the star) have become the emblem of the city, and we even see this beautiful Turkish emblem on our soccer team’s uniform.”

To explain this situation, we return to the potato famine. When that disaster occurred, the British Crown dealt with it very weak and lacked real solutions. Queen Victoria donated only a thousand pounds to confront this disaster in which a million Irish died, and half a million others emigrated to escape death.

The Sultan of the Ottomans at that time was Sultan Abdul Majid, and when he learned of the news of the famine, he decided to donate 10,000 pounds sterling to Ireland. This figure is now close to 8 million Turkish liras, roughly 1.3 million US dollars, according to Anadolu Agency.

When Britain learned of this donation, the British government asked the Sultan to reduce the number to only a thousand pounds, because the Queen of Britain herself did not donate more than a thousand pounds. The Sultan agreed, but with the thousand pounds he sent 3 ships loaded with food and medicine to Ireland.