I was in Ireland a few months ago. Someone I met in Galway said this famine wasn't really a famine; that there were plenty of crops. The king simply withheld the potato supply, forcing the famine.
It is correct that there were plenty of crops, but these were grain crops, not potatoes, which were raised largely for export. In earlier famines the government had banned exports and made those non-potato crops go to feeding the Irish. That was very unpopular with businesses. In the Great Famine the government did not curb exports, and so even though Ireland was producing enough non-potato food to feed those who had been depending almost solely on potatoes, that food was exported instead. So in that sense, much of the blame for results of the potato crop failures can be laid at the hands of the government.
Edit: there is an interesting song, written by Steven and Peter Jones, based on letters their great-great-grandfather in Ireland sent to their great-grandfather, who had immigrated to the United States. There are five verses, covering the contents of five of the letters, between 1860 and 1892. Although this is after the Great Famine, it provides an interesting look at what life was like in Ireland for ordinary farmers as they went through hardship and had family members leaving the country.
Here's a nice performance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRHQAtKbRTk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%937...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876%E2%80%937...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland#Union_with_Great_Brita...
* English people owned the land and the produce of the land in Ireland.
* Irish people had little choice but to work for English people, and were allowed tiny plots of often-horrendous land on which to grow their own food.
Potatoes were one of the few things that could grow on the land the Irish were allowed to use. When disease affected the potato crops, the English simply shrugged, kept exporting their own produce, and let the Irish die (and notably took steps to try to prevent foreign aid reaching Ireland, on the theory that it would be shameful for foreigners to do more for the Irish than the English were doing).
There are strong arguments to be made, especially given the historical English attitude toward Ireland and the Irish, that it turned into an opportunistic genocide: the English didn't set out at first to kill so many Irish, but given the opportunity to simply sit back and let the Irish die off, they took it.
Of note, the english landlords didn't own the land out of any deservedness. The english crown had passed a number of penal laws fully intended to — and very successful at — transferring irish land from catholic owners to anglican owners.
Amongst these:
* catholics were mostly barred from education
* catholics were barred from buying or inheriting protestant land
* catholics could not buy land under leases of more than 31 years
* catholics were barred from primogeniture (inherited land had to be equally split amongst all sons, fragmenting it), unless the heir converted
Over just the 18th century (between 1688 and 1776) Catholic ownership went from ~25% of irish land to ~5%.
And it started that low because the 18th century round of Penal Laws followed from the early 17th century one between 1606 (gunpowder plot) and 1660 (declaration of breda), which had already generated significant land transfer from irish catholics to protestant english and scottish settlers.
The Government imported millet from India to help feed people, but Irish radicals called it "Peel's Brimstone" (it's yellow remember) and said those who ate it endangered their immortal souls. They preferred the propaganda value of dead children.
As for the "English", we were thrown off our lands by the Enclosure Acts, and forced into the factories as the only way to avoid starvation - by the same Norman-British upper classes that were abusing Ireland as well. But for some reason, although we are fellow victims, we are the ones that always get the abuse for acts not of our doing.
There was a potato blight, potatoes were grown by the Irish folk for sustenance.
Many Irish peasants & farmers starved to death on Absentee Estate Farms which were exporting food crops to be sold - worse aid from England was withheld for considerable time.
It is a shameful episode in the History between Ireland and England.
In those times many viewed the lower classes and other nationalities as somehow less human than themselves.
Just look at the current migration issues (I refuse to call it a "crisis" or "problem", as that dehumanizes the refugees) in Europe. These times are (no longer) past, they resurface right now with all the ugliness.
Especially Eastern Europe, where millions of people fled the Sowjet bloc and were accepted by Western Europe, now refuses to aid others. It's sick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Irish_f...