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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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.
We did have plenty of other food. But the english were taking it as “rent” to feed their army who was invading India.
On top of that, we had hundreds of years of oppression. One particularly evil thing that was bestowed upon us were the Penal Laws. Look them up. One of them was that you had to divide your farm per each child, so within a few generations, people were trying to eke out a living on “land” the size of a modern bathroom. And then the bastards took your food as rent, to live in your own land.
Not going to write any more, getting too angry.
The English already saw Ireland as a starving nation when they took it over, and the Napoleonic Wars led to an even higher demand to steal Ireland’s food. The English shoved them off into some corner and took all the good land with its wheat and corn for themselves. The Irish had only small fields of poor soil to feed themselves with, and the only crop that did well enough to survive off of was potatoes – they’re very space-efficient and much more tolerant of poor soil and other conditions than other plants.
The Famine *might* have been less devastating had there been more variety *of* potatoes, but they were pretty much all the same cultivar (Irish Lumper).
I see a number of people here think that only potatoes were grown in Ireland. The reality was that Ireland produced large amounts of grain and animal products like pork, beef and dairy. However *everything* other than potatoes was sold to pay rent on their “farms” which had been made tiny by the enforced division among children – the traditional Irish way was the oldest inherited the land but the British imposed their ideas instead, reducing the population to devastating poverty. While all these goodies were being exported, the Irish actually did quite well on potatoes and milk, probably better than their equivalents in other countries who subsisted on bread and cheese.
However once the potato blight hit, their food source was wiped out. The US sent some grain ships to try to help but, because of the English Corn Laws, they were not allowed to land their cargo in case they depressed the prices in the markets. [Turkey did send some grain](https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201501/an.irish.tale.of.hunger.and.the.sultan.htm) and snuck it into Drogheda with the legacy that the Star and Crescent is now a common motif in the town, even appearing on the [local football team’s logo](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDrogheda_United_F.C.&psig=AOvVaw2r2Ipj6h_oKePOKgCVYn2i&ust=1675891431403000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCIDEw52shP0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE). Probably the most notable contribution was the few dollars sent by the [Choctaw Nation](https://xyuandbeyond.com/irish-famine-and-the-choctaw-nation/) even though they had almost nothing after the Trail of Tears.
The tiny amount of relief provided by the British was to set up soup kitchens where the starving could get food if they changed their religion to Protestantism, and support for road building where the work was stretched out by the creation of winding roads.
TL;DR: The other foodstuffs they had to hand were sent to England to make money for their landlords, so the potato crop’s failure meant starvation.
A quick note on potatoes in the 19th century. They tasted like shit but could be grown on poor land and produce a lot with comparatively small plots devoted to them. What wasn’t understood at the time was that they were a really nutritious staple food. Potatoes and milk fulfil the vast majority of the bodies requirements.
So the English ruled Ireland. They were complete fuckers about it. To keep their English landowners from tearing their homes down they had to grow crops that the English wanted to eat, not grubby dirt tasting potatoes but proper wheat and meat products. Of which the English took and exported. Unless they decided they wanted to follow a trend like converting their farms to pastures then they’d destroy the Irish farmers roofs as soon as winter set in to force them to flee the property or freeze to death.
Anyway. Ireland was not in a position to make their own decisions. They ate potatoes because they had to. A mostly potato diet being accidentally very healthy at the time led to many decades of booming population. A massive population of healthy farmers growing lots and lots of crops for the use of their colonial masters and eating potatoes.
The potato blight did not destroy the majority of the available calories in Ireland. It just destroyed the calories the Irish were allowed to consume. England forcefully exported literal armadas laden with food from the staving Irish. Food that their own hands had grown.
The English suppression of industry, which reached epic proportions in Ireland, was one of the keys to understanding how they worked:
“There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops…
To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection– and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless– was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies.”
[https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html](https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html)
If you look at the former colonies of England you see a pattern: their exports are overwhelmingly of agricultural and material commodities. Not a lot of industrial stuff. They made sure the industrial center of the Empire was England, and they did that forcefully. The former colonies, with the outstanding exception of the US, are still stunted that way.
The English took everything else to sell and it was illegal to fish or hunt without permission Ireland has always had plenty of food the rich never starve.
After a few centuries of Apartheid rule (Catholics weren’t even allowed to own land), over 95% of the Irish population lived on land they didn’t own. That makes sense if you’re from a city, but Ireland is a rural country the size of Tennessee. This also predates any concept of “tenants rights,” and discouraged any improvement of land, as landlords would raise rents based on improvements made. If you built a house for your family to live in, your rent would go up to the point where you couldn’t afford to pay it, and you’d be kicked off the land while your landlord would keep the new house.
Most Irish didn’t pay rent in cash, they paid rent by working the land to raise crops for their landlord to export. They also weren’t paid wages; instead, they were given a small plot of land to grow their own food to survive. Irish cuisine changes at this point, and dairy disappears as cows take too much land to graze. Not so impoverished families can still afford pigs, but one crop takes hold. Potatoes yield 4 times as many calories per acre as the next best thing. In time, the entire population becomes dependent not just on potatoes, but one genetic variant of a potato: the Irish Lumper.
Over a century and a half, more and more people cram onto smaller and smaller plots of land. While the Irish don’t have access to cattle, large tracts of land are used to fuel the burgeoning corned beef industry (corned beef being a vital foodstuff for naval trade, as refrigeration doesn’t exist).
Potatoes fail all over the world for 5 years, starting in 1845. It starts in Mexico, then spreads to the USA, Continental Europe, then England and Ireland. The reason we don’t hear about potato blight in other countries is because they weren’t wholly dependent on potatoes to feed the entire working population.
The response by the English starts off with denial of the scale of the crisis, costing time and lives. Next is the conservative parliament refusing to interfere in the free markets. Ireland never stops exporting food during every year of the famine. The protectionist “corn laws” (“corn” referring to any grain) make the import of wheat/rye/barley either illegal or only possible with heavy tariffs, so English farmers don’t lose out to cheaper American grain. The Prime Minister attempts to get these repealed, but is defeated by parliament. He finds a workaround, buying up American Maize (corn), which is possible since no English farmers grow corn. This has a drawback. Since nobody in Ireland eats corn, only two mills in the entire country are setup to actually mill corn into edible grain. Also, if the modern American diet has taught us one thing: corn is barely nutritious crap.
The next fight comes over how the corn is to be distributed. The contemporary government started selling the corn at cost, but are soon replaced by a more conservative government that sells the corn at market rates. Not believing in handouts, the government starts a bunch of “make work” programs to give the population a chance to earn money for food. This includes building a bunch of roads to nowhere, which you can still see traces of today. This obviously doesn’t work, as a starving, now disease ridden populace (yes, disease runs rampant in malnourished people) cannot complete physical labor.
At its height, the population of Ireland was around 8 million. 1 to 2 million starved, with another 2 million leaving for Liverpool, then onto Canada and the US. Ireland lost about half its population, and still hasn’t surpassed its pre-famine population to this day.
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.
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.
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