What made the Irish famine so deadly

Maybe a closer comparison would be famine of 1876-8, where some estimate go as high as 8.6M fatalities on a population of ~58M.

> In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence)

Compare this to the 1876 response in which "relief work" camps had workers doing strenuous labor in order to receive a meager ration of far fewer calories than would have been expended in the work.

> ... this 'Temple wage' consisted of 450 grams (1 lb) of grain plus one anna for a man, and a slightly reduced amount for a woman or working child,[12] for a "long day of hard labour without shade or rest."[13] The rationale behind the reduced wage, which was in keeping with a prevailing belief of the time, was that any excessive payment might create 'dependency' ...

If only the Irish had been supported and Indian left to fiend for themselves.

Famine? Only one crop failed. Ireland was a net exporter of food to the UK..

There’s another word for this, not a famine…

I went to school in Scotland 65-78 and it was mentioned, studied extensively, as was British colonialism and the post war independence movement. Perhaps Scots education ran to a different agenda to the English one.

(the Scots diaspora as a result of Land clearances, and the Irish independence struggle and its links (and opposition) to Scots Protestantism and Irish migration to the mainland might have driven this. We have both Irish independence fights at football matches and orange order parades)

In the US, we covered a lot of old world colonial abuses in AP Euro and World History, but they are only briefly mentioned in regular courses. Irish and Armenian genocides were given special focus, probably mostly due to the demographics of the area I grew up in.

US and Eurocolonial treatment of the Native Americans was covered extensively in regular courses though, often alongside and explicitly compared to the Holocaust which is also covered extensively.

In Germany the colonial period is taught, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference and global maps. The German colonies are hardly mentioned, Germany lost them all 100 years ago, and I don't think many Germans could name the countries/regions even. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_Wars ("systematic extermination of native peoples") isn't taught.

Of course food shortage was a factor;

> Rice yield per acre had been stagnant since the beginning of the twentieth century;[25] coupled with a rising population, this created pressures that were a leading factor in the famine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Add to that transport impact (floods, war), the drop in imports from Burma and other factors.

This is another great one by Sinéad O'Connor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZIB6MslCAo

  OK, I want to talk about Ireland
  Specifically I want to talk about the "famine"
  About the fact that there never really was one
  There was no "famine"
  See, Irish people were only allowed to eat potatoes
  All of the other food, meat, fish, vegetables
  Were shipped out of the country under armed guard
  To England while the Irish people starved

One of the most interesting and informative books I've ever read. Depressing as fuck though.

Eerie.

I agree with your conclusion, but this story is very badly sourced and really should not be used [0]. We only have two sources from the 1800s that claim it: one is contemporary but provides no attribution and we have no reason to believe they had firsthand knowledge. The other is 40 years later and is attributed to a conversation with the son of the sultan's personal physician. Yeah.

With such bad evidence for such an incendiary claim, I think we're better off sticking with the enormous amount of other evidence that policy caused the famine and letting this particular story die.

(What is true and backed up by evidence is that the sultan sent £1k. The rest has no reliable source.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland%E2%80%93Turkey_relat...

I wrote a song called greenocide where my Irish friend explained this in a particularly straightforward way.

The English already owned all the land so they figured let the Irish die out. In essence.

Something even more remarkable, the Indians that where only a few years ago forcibly relocated and experienced their own starvations during the events of the Trail of Teers, collected about 700$ in donations and send it as aid to the starving Irish in a grand gesture of empathy amongst oppressed people.

Is there an academic source available for that?

Crop failures are natural disasters. Famine's are political disasters.

The Indian economist Amartya Sen wrote a book in 1999, _Development as Freedom_ which argues, relatively convincingly, that famine's don't happen in functioning democracies among their own citizens. The book makes the observation that famines happened regularly in British colonial India, every few decades, but basically stopped in democratic, self-governing India. (1) And, as far back as the Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese many of the stories told about what good governance looked like involved beating famines- either because they were able to organize shipments of food from unaffected areas or because they stored up enough grain in the good times to survive the crop failures.

It is the general consensus among people who study this sort of thing that, as the United Nations OHCHR wrote in 2023, "Hunger and famine did not arise because there was not enough food to go around; they were caused by political failures, meaning that hunger and famine could only be addressed through political action." (2) Yes, a particular crop failure can be a natural disaster, but a famine happening requires a political failure on top of that (and the research does seem to indicate causation: the political failure is not caused by the crop failure but was pre-existing, and caused the crop failure to turn into a famine).

So, basically, yeah, the general consensus of people who study famines today and in the past is that the British government made choices that turned a crop failure into a famine. The same with the Great Famine of India, the Bengal Famine, the Soviets and the Holdomor, etc.

1: Generally, my understanding is that people who look at this think that Sen was basically correct. There might be a couple of occasions where a democracy failed to govern and suffered a famine, but, the way that democracies distribute power makes it far more unusual for them to fail so catastrophically that they can't deliver food to an area experiencing crop failure. This is one of the reasons that democracies are better than authoritarian governments!

2: https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2023/03/conflict-and-violence-...

Also Irish person here. My primary school was 100m from one of the old workhouses, and I was taught from maybe age 7 what happened there. All the old stone walls in the nearby fields were built by forced famine labor. There's abandoned roads to nowhere (famine roads) all around, likewise built by forced labor.

I think it was taught quite well, and people around me while I was growing up didn't downplay it. It's still a significant event in the Irish psyche, especially in the parts of the country most deeply effected at the time.

The things it's, though, it's a fairly distant historical event at this stage, and I don't think it's healthy or helpful to the Irish collective psyche to hold on to it as strongly as we still do - not just the famine but all aspects our being "the oppressed". We're no longer oppressed, we're a privileged and filthy rich country (even if it doesn't feel like that right now, but we have no one to blame for the housing crisis except our own politicians and capitalists).

While we should be mindful of the English tendency to play down and rewrite history, I know many Irish people who are straight up racist towards the English - defended with the tired caveat the "oppressed people can't be racist towards the oppressors". Yes, they can. Maybe it's a less harmful form of racism, but it holds back the psychological development of the person with racist views nonetheless.

In secondary school "Up the Ra" was a common slogan shouted by my classmates. There's still pubs in Dublin and other places around the country where you wouldn't want to go with an English accent.

I'm not saying any of this to defend the English - they did terrible things in history, and those must not be forgotten or rewritten. There's also a fair few English people who are racist towards Irish too, not to mention a lot of "harking back to the glory days of Empire", mostly from older English men whose ancestors were probably peasants back then.

But for us Irish, holding onto this old identity of "the oppressed" is a part of our collective psyche which I struggled with a lot growing up, and it holds back out country. It's time we moved on.

Yes, I know that's hard when a quarter of the geographical landmass of Ireland still belongs to the old oppressors. But that's another thing we need to let go off. The people living in the North voted, several times, to remain in the UK. It's their choice, not ours. If they look like they're leaning to vote differently in the future we can restart the conversation.

They also did that to Bengal in the famine there much later. It's a pattern with the Brits.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not on divisive topics, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html requests:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."