Why did so many people die during the Irish potato famine? Couldn’t they have imported food from the mainland?
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In addition to all the comments pointing out that Britain continued to export potatoes despite the famine, it’s important to remember that the potato famine happened long before our modern globalized supply chains happened. Today, global trade takes up about 55% of global GDP. In 1850, that number was 5%. Countries were far more dependent on local production for their wealth and means to live than nowadays.
It wasn’t about the amount of food available. It was about the ability to buy it. Most Irish people lived on rented land, worked for the landlord, and ate the potatoes they could grow in their gardens.
When the potato crop failed they had no money to buy other food. Other food was still being grown, and exported, because that’s where the buyers were.
In other parts of Europe (including England) the potato crop also failed, but more people were involved in a cash economy, working and being paid in cash, so they just bought other food.
The podcast “Behind the Bastard” did a 4-part series on this. The host makes clear in the beginning that there was plenty of food for the people, so the famine shouldn’t have happened. I really recommend giving it a listen.
Could you please adjust your question. By using the term “mainland” you insult Irish people. While we were ruled by Britain at the time we were still a separate country. The UK is NOT the mainland
Potatos were cheap so poor people in Ireland were dependent on them.
The land was mainly owned by absentee rich aristocrats, English, Anglo-Irish, often protestant, acts in the past 2 centuries had taken land from rich catholic landowners and given it to rich protestant or English ones. They rented it to well off tenant farmers who made a profit by selling off the produce or sub-letting to smaller farmers. Most of the people were landless labourers or small holders who did almost all the work for almost none of the reward, they couldn’t afford much except potatoes, when the crop failed they could no longer afford them either.
Almost none of the rich landowners were going to sacrifice their lavish lifestyle to feed people they were so disconnected from when they started to starve, the well-off farmers were generally different culturally and religiously and just as unlikely to sacrifice their comfort; the government and law was firmly on the side of the rich and against the Irish. An upper middle class intellectual movement in the UK sickeningly viewed the famine as a necessary, even welcome ‘correction’ which Jonathan Swift mocked in [A Modest Proposal..](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal). Even measures meant to help just made things worse, eg the poor law was supposed to help but it taxed the wealthy landlords and tennants, who attempted to transfer the burden to their small holders, who couldn’t pay and were evicted, so fields went unploughed during a sodding famine while the poor were sent to die in a workhouse. Sympathetic, competent landowners like 2nd Marquess of Rockingham were rare.
Even with the blight and upheaval Ireland could probably have fed itself but the rich continued to export massive quanities of grain and **increasing** quantities of most livestock and many other foodstuffs. Even potatoes were exported from Ireland to England during the famine.
[https://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/ireland/ire-land.htm](https://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/ireland/ire-land.htm) explains the situation more thoroughly but it’s worth mentioning that by the famine Irish people had been downtrodden in their own land for a long time. Before the famine there were the enclosures, before the enclosures the confiscations of the Jacobites, before that the plantations and the atrocities of Cromwell, before that the invasion by the Normans, before them the Vikings.
While the act of union in 1707 granted UK citizenship for the Scots, Welsh and English, as well as mass bribery for the rich members of parliament, Ireland was left out as a client state, practically a colony, with catholics and presbyterians and anyone not a member of the unpopular, crown controlled Church of Ireland severally discriminated against. Even though in 1801 the Irish were granted citizenship they were still discriminated against and politically under-represented.
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