Merchants and landlords in Ireland made fortunes during the Georgian period trading provisions with the European slavocracies in the Caribbean and selling the produce of racial slavery to the Irish market (sugar, rum, tobacco), yet the IGS is quiet about this connection. https://twitter.com/irishgeorgian/status/1288196166593765376

The development of Westport House, for example, is directly linked to the Browne family’s ownership of lucrative slave plantations in Jamaica. So profitable that Lord Sligo voted against a slave trade restriction bill in 1806 and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

A root and branch study of Irish landlords and absentee landlords links to slavery in the Caribbean is long overdue.

Some searing hot takes about this out there, but the analogy of enslaved people and luminescence is the clear winner.

John F. Finerty (1898): “there is very little clashing in even the most violent era of political excitement, for the clientele of the Shelbourne was, and is, overwhelmingly in favour of “things as they are”....”

“This is only natural, because its habitues [Irish and English aristocrats] generally possess the fat of the land.”

P.S. Would be interesting to compare the reaction to the removal of the hotel’s revolving doors to the current furore. Did the outrage over this change make it to the Seanad?