Since Elon Musk has taken charge, Twitter has changed to the point of rebranding its name to X. Before this takeover, it was a ruthless place for those in the dissident sphere with the ban hammer at the ready for even milquetoast opinions on migration, lockdown measures or transgenderism. There was a total Lib consensus on the site that reigned supreme. Many a SIM card was bought in those years.
Post-Musk, this has dramatically changed, wherein an Irish politician can comment on Tidy Towns, with responses being flooded by éiReheads complaining about migration or the WEF. This has gotten to the point that many Libs have fled for the refuge of Mastodon and BlueSky. However, a dominant nucleus of Libs still remains in Ireland on Twitter, and recently, a great account got caught in their snares.
The other week, @TuathaIreland, a fabulous account that posted stunning imagery of Ireland along with tour guides and events, uploaded a standard image of Kylemore Abbey. A regular person looking at this wouldn’t think much – a stunning piece of architecture in the heart of Connemara, well visited by tourists. However, they made one fatal mistake.
Tuatha, wanting to keep the tweets at 280 characters for obvious functional reasons, decided to leave out that the builder of Kylemore Abbey, Dr Mitchell Henry, may have profited from the slave trade. Now, granted, they did mention this in their longer form article linked in the thread, for anyone who read it, but it was too late – they committed an unforgivable sin to Irish Libs.
An hour after the post, the intellectually intelligent Blindboy replied ‘Cotton magnates in the mid 1800s? Come on, lads.
This was met by further scorn and ratios in the replies and quote tweets.
Despite repeating over and over to Libs that this information was in the longer form article, none paid heed.
Historical detail isn’t needed, as again Tuath Ireland had stated in their longer form article
‘Like many Manchester merchants, Alexander sourced cotton in the United States, from states such as Alabama, therefore it is reasonable to assume that at least a significant portion of the family wealth derived directly, or indirectly, from slavery.’
So quite clearly, Tuath wanted to keep the tweet at 280 characters and thus the detail of where the cotton was sourced by Henry’s father wasn’t the most important thing to fit in a small tweet about Kylemore Abbey. But let’s go over the historical details.
Dr Mitchell Henry was the son of successful cotton merchants but he himself was also a successful eye surgeon, becoming one of the youngest ever speakers at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Mitchell Henry was a much-respected figure in the area of Connemara in which he lived. He did inherit wealth from his family’s cotton trade, however, for the people of Connemara, he helped bring 100s of jobs for the destitute locals. Much of his estate at Kylemore was bogland, which he began to reclaim, while encouraging his tenants to do the same.
He built a school for the children of his tenants. As MP he held his seat from 1871-85, representing the absolute poorest of the poor in one of the areas worst affected by An Gorta Mór & Land Agitation. He was pro-Home Rule (though he would fall out with Parnell in later years) and his own life was mired with tragedies, he was a very well respected figure in the Connemara area and he fought very hard for the people of Connemara in relation to Tenants Rights and Home Rule.
This was a time when Slavery had been abolished in the United Kingdom but for Irish tenants, they still found themselves fighting for the 3 Fs. Henry was an early supporter of the Land League but did fall out with Parnell over his ‘aggressive’ tactics.
So although Dr Henry inherited wealth from his cotton magnate father, that doesn’t mean Kylemore Abbey is in any way ‘tainted with slavery’ – in fact its construction started in 1867, after the American Civil War.
Also, the cotton that his father Alexander Henry used for the business is just assumed to have been from the southern states of America but a lot of the raw cotton used in the products it sold was likely from India. In fact the business’s main activity seems to have been in the Jute business, including export of the same to the USA which it sourced from a number of factories in West Bengal, India. Where sweatshops still exist today.
In summary, Dr Mitchell Henry never even worked in the family business, given he had a successful medical practice, and essentially spent the whole family fortune, ill-gotten or not, trying to improve the economy of Connemara and the condition of its inhabitants. He also left a legacy in Ireland’s architectural heritage with Kylemore Abbey. This fixation on an irrelevant detail of where his father got the cotton from by the bag-on-head-intellectual and mob, just shows how Yankified the Irish Lib worldview has become.
Unfortunately, Tuatha felt this was all too much and decided to now exodus from Twitter. A great page lost, but you can still find them on Instagram. Though nowhere near their pre-Musk zenith, Irish Libs still can attack on Twitter, leaving those not politically engaged buckling under the tirade.
To finish on a positive note, pages like Tuath are necessary to counter the doomslop constantly being spammed on social media sites. Whether it’s AI Slop, Indian run Roman Statue pages, or British Bulldogs shouting about how ‘Ireland is finished’ – sometimes we just need something more positive in the newsfeed.
Share this: