(Ireland)

how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?
none!

those who died in the famine were subsistence farmers who could not afford to buy fish and grow anything other than shitty potatoes

all the fame tells me is that the English fucking suck at getting the job done.

All they had to do was keep the food blockade up and prevent anyone from leaving the island, and the Catholic problem would have been solved in 8 months, instead they only succeeded in purifying Ulster.

Pathetic.

>tfw population still hasn't recovered
yeah ulster sure did go 100% protestant

The coastal areas didn't starve for this exact reason, you fucking idiot.

It wasn't feasible for peope inland to fish because there was no wood to make boats or rods out of, the English had cleared it all for lumber.

What is this, the iron age? Anyone who wanted a rod or a boat could have just bought one. There was hardly any lumber left in england either, the royal navy was built with vast quantities of imported wood

>Anyone who wanted a rod or a boat could have just bought one.
Is this bait?

Are you aware of just how poor the average Irish person was in the mid 19th century?

That's a slightly different argument from "muh english took away all the wood"

>people who subsistence farmed on like half an acre of bad land
>having enough money to buy...well, anything

great famine of 1695-1697 killed OVER THIRD of finnish population and it's still the worst recorded famine in european history but yet nobody cares about them

If fishing might have saved them, they could have used some of the millions of pounds of aid they got from England to get it going. The idea that fishing could have saved the inland population is fanciful at best.

Why didn't they start eating their babies?

Records show that Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests.[78] No such export ban happened in the 1840s.[79]

Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.[80]

The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote in The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland "as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation."[82] John Ranelagh writes that Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.[83] However, both Woodham-Smith and Cormac Ó Gráda write that, in addition to the maize imports, four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland at the height of the famine as exported.[84][85]

In 1845, Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid declared his intention to send £10,000 to victims of the Irish potato famine, but either British diplomats or his own ministers requested that the Sultan send only £1,000, so as not to donate more than Queen Victoria, who had sent £2,000.[4] The Sultan sent £1,000 along with three[3] or five[5] ships full of food.