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Red Legs in Barbados


The Irish Times IWAS DELIGHTED that Caroline Walsh focused on the plight of Ireland’s lost tribe, the Red Legs, in her article a couple of weeks ago on Barbados. This group, made up of the descendants of 50,000 Irish men and women who were sold into the white slave trade between 1652 and 1659, have been largely ignored, apart from in Seán O’Callaghan’s wonderfulTo Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland , published almost 20 years ago.
They were innocent Irish people who were rounded up from across the country by teams of Oliver Cromwell’s “man-catchers”, bound in chains and shipped to Barbados to work on sugar plantations.
Their descendants are still there today – some of them in absolute poverty – isolated, unassimilated and uneducated. It is about time we acknowledge them, our beleaguered kinsmen, innocent victims first of British injustice, then of landlord cruelty and now of our lack of interest.

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I hate to look at the Barbados tourists site that give the history of Barbados.The ones that talk of Columbus discovering these islands and the other foolish tales that the Bob Marley and Burning Spear called 'mis-education'.I agree with them as a matter of fact Burning Spear referred to Christopher Columbus as a 'damn blasted liar'.Thank god for Rastafari. One of the funniest stories is the one of the bearded fig tree and the name Los Barbados which was supposed to mean 'the bearded one'. In the words of Gary Cole from the book reflections; The Colonization of Barbados is one of the darkest events and evil stories of modern history.Four centuries ago,Spanish and Portuguese slavers started to kidnap,kill and drive out the thousands of peaceful Indians found on the island the Indians called Ichirouganaim.The exact location of the island was a carefully kept secret but Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and sailors knew the island as the barbarous island,"Los B