SGR

I think it's because 'potato monkey' doesn't have enough phonetic zip to it. I propose 'spud monkey' instead, e.g.:

"Shut your Guinness chute, you useless spud monkey!"

The Batlord

Just call them potato fags ffs.

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jwb

I think it's insulting in a dismissive way which feels appropriate for the Irish as a people. Even the negative stereotypes for your people is stuff like being sloppy drunks or leprechauns. Any true vitriol directed at the Irish would be taking them too seriously as a people. Really the most insulting thing to call them is brits, which to my eye they are basically just a more backwater region of the same pasty breed of imbred island folk, just with more gingers sprinkled in and a touch of catholicism.

Trollheart

Reported
Not really.

Holdings were so small that no crop other than potatoes would suffice to feed a family. Shortly before the famine, the British government reported that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support the tenant families after rent was paid; the families survived only by earnings as seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[41] Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.[42]

The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of people depended on agriculture for their survival but rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system that forced Ireland's peasantry into monoculture since only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity to meet nutritional needs.

With the "expansion of the economy" between 1760 and 1815 due to the Napoleonic wars (1805–1815), which had increased the demand for food in Britain, the tillage increased to such an extent, that there was less and less land for small farmers, and the potato was chiefly adopted by the people because of its quick growth on a comparatively small space.[44] By 1800, for one in three of the population, the potato had become a staple food,[44] especially in winter. It eventually became a staple year-round for farmers.[45] The widespread dependency on this single crop, and a disproportionate share of the potatoes grown in Ireland being of a single variety, the Irish Lumper[18] i.e. the lack of genetic variability among the potato plants in Ireland and Europe, were two of the reasons why the emergence of Phytophthora infestans had such devastating effects in Ireland and in similar areas of Europe.

We were just given the crappiest lands, and nothing else would grow
This is a double whammy, and I will present it as the official Irish insult at the next meeting of the Thick Paddies Committee, if we can ever all be sober enough to fix a date and all turn up.
Wouldn't work, as fag means cigarette over here. So the phrase, "gasping for a fag", don't mean the same as it would over there.
We were never British. The British invaded us and tried to make us part of their United Kingdom, but we pulled at the leash so hard for 700 years that they could only come away with six counties, with all their armies and navy, the bunch of pussies. We beat their cannon with pikes and pitchforks.
Or was it the other way round?

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jwb

I know you hate eachother but that's a cain/able deal. Brits and Irish are pasty cousins with a blood feud.

The Batlord

Wasn't there also a thing where the economic trend at the time for English landowners was to deem potatoes as not lucrative enough so they'd evict all the Irish, raze the plots, and turn it into sheep pastures? So a not insignificant percentage didn't even starve to death but died of exposure cause they were homeless desperately sheltering in ditches?

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Psy-Fi

ftfy.

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She's a Brick House

Trollheart

No it's not. We're Celts and they're not. We're more cousins to the Scots and the Welsh. even a little to the Vikings as so many settled here. But not the English. As distinct from the Brits. Of course, we all come essentially from the same gene pool stock, but then, so do you.
Quite possibly. Like all events of this nature, there wasn't just the one cause for the famine or our overdependence on spuds.
Again, English word, not used here.

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Lisnaholic

^ Trollheart, of course, knows of what he speaks. There's been a huge historical divide between Celts and English, going back to the Roman conquest approx two thousand years ago. ( Celts fought the Romans, until forced into the hills to the West and North. English bent the knee and huddled in servitude south of Hadrian's Wall.)


^ Not so sure about the accuracy of your description, jwb: "pasty", yes, but "inbred island folk" ? With, at one time, the biggest merchant fleet and biggest empire in the world, Britain was and is more international than you seem to be imagining:-

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rubber soul

There was a lot of Irish immigration to the US during the 19th century and, according to the history books anyway, much of it had to do with the potato famine.

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