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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Ireland was quite poor at the time. It was effectively a colony of England, and the wealthy landowners of Ireland (who were mostly English) had bought up much of the land to grow luxury crops for export to England and elsewhere. That left relatively little land for poor farmers. This happened throughout Europe, but Ireland was unusually poor and was ruled by an almost completely external power, so the effect was especially strong there.
Potatoes were popular throughout Europe, but weren’t a staple food in most places. Instead, they supplemented wheat and other crops. But in Ireland, potatoes became more of a staple because potatoes require very little growing space. Poor farmers on limited land had had to resort to growing potatoes on that small amount of land in order to get enough calories.
So when an epidemic of potato blight (a plant disease that destroys potato crops) struck Europe, it hit Ireland especially hard because they were unusually poor (and therefore unable to import other foods – and in fact, [banned from doing so](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws) early in the famine), because they were unusually dependent on the potato because of pseudo-colonial farming practices, and because ruling powers in England didn’t really give much of a shit about Irish laborers and pretty much left them to die.
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