The Great Irish Famine

'The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.'
- John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) 1860
Ireland, even more so than Scotland, had for a long time been the very trampled neighbour of England. If the Scottish were regarded as vermin, then the Irish must have seemed like dirt itself to the English - thus was the attitude towards the Irish and hence might be the answer as to why the English let so many Irish live in utter poverty and why the government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel was so slow to respond when news of the extent of the famine starting in 1845 - one million dead and more than two million refuges - came out. To us today it seems horrific, yet at that time it's hard to see what a different government, or even a govenment based in Dublin itself, could have done.
It is true however that the famine had been at least fifty years in the making, the fungal disease known as Phytophthora infestans or the potato blight as it's more commonly know, had already come to the Netherlands, Belgium and Scotland. All three countries had a large population of poor agrarian workers, but the will and capacity was also there to help those afflicted. There was still hunger and hardship, but never to the extent of what the Irish suffered. A large portion of the Irish population, at least three million, ate nothing but potatoes and when the blight struck the Irish potato crops it proved to be devastating. Huge scores of people perished from the hunger and that while they watched good Irish corn be transported out of Ireland.
Some of the landlords were compassionate and in their areas starvation was often avoided. This wasn't common though as most of the landlords showed no mercy or weren't even present during the famine. By the end of September 1846 the people were living on blackberries or cabbage leaves. By 1850 the worst of the famine was over, but instead of hunger, disease swept across parts of Ireland in 1848 killing those who were strong enough to survive the famine.
It is perhaps unfair to state that the British government did nothing. They did still manage to give seven million pounds in relief to the famine-sufferers, but this amount is bleak when you consider that the British government easily found seventy million pounds to finance the Crimean War - and this coming from a government that had convinced itself that it were extremely strapped for cash! Peel also tried his hardest to abolish the Corn Laws so to get cheap food into Ireland quicker; he succeeded so in 1846. The import duty was however phased out gradually and proved no relief to the starving Irish.

In the end, what else can be said than the bare fact that the English simply left the Irish to die. It was thought by some people (a political economist being one of them) that one million dead would hardly be enough to do much good. The newspaper Manchester Guardian even had the gall to blame the Irish themselves for their feckless attitudes towards agriculture, family and life in general, ignoring the fact that the Irish had no choice but to live the way they had, out of economic nessesity. In the words of Sydney Smith:
'The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.'