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?
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It isn’t as simple as switching to another crop. As others had mentioned, all food produced in Ireland, aside from potatoes, was taken as rent and used to feed the British military. Not to mention the forced division of land between sons caused many to have very little land to grow food on. These two forced a complete reliance on Potatoes to feed themselves, since potatoes need less land to feed the same number of people compared to other crops.
But even if they could just grow something else, that food was considered rent for their landlords. If they didn’t pay their rent, landlords would evict them. So now thousands had no land and no way to grow food to feed themselves. So not only were they starving from lack of food but also many were now homeless.
Sometimes it wasn’t even a lack of rent that would encourage landlords to evict their tenants. Look up the Ballinlass Incident. The landlord evicted the entire village of Ballinlass, over 300 individuals, simply because turning the village into grazing land for cattle was more profitable for her.
The apathy of the British government is more responsible for the deaths of over a million Irish than just the mere lack of potatoes to eat.
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