Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes as a staple food at the time of the Great Famine? Why couldn’t they just have turned to other grains as an alternative to stop more deaths from happening?

Question

Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes as a staple food at the time of the Great Famine? Why couldn’t they just have turned to other grains as an alternative to stop more deaths from happening?

In: 5352

Answer 1

Potato blight was not the ultimate cause of the Great Famine. The underlying problem was England’s colonial exploitation of Ireland. The economic relationship between the two was so imbalanced that the Irish could not *afford* to eat the fruits of their own agriculture; they needed to export food in order to pay rent. English absentee landlords owned all the land. Every day during the famine, the starving Irish had to sit and watch their best food get loaded onto ships bound for England.

So the potato blight was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Irish today regard the famine as an act of genocide, rather than a natural occurrence.