Irish Potato Famine

The problem with making a judgment about who is at fault for an event such as this that took place over 100 years ago is not that it took place so long ago, but that it involves so many factors and parties. Such conditions of course could not really be helped at the time, and the blight hit at an inopportune time causing one of the biggest human disasters in our history. In order to improve the system there would need to be improvements in capital, but with the English landlords living back in England there was no one to preside over matters of such importance. The laws kept prices high at all times even protecting against falling prices in years where there was an abundance of grain. Some people who blame the Irish for bringing the famine upon themselves say that the huge population growth was because of the Irish marrying young and being sexually irresponsible by having too many kids for their own good. These laws were designed in order to protect the local grain farmers from foreign competition by putting a tariff on all imported grain, mostly meaning the English wheat which they called “corn. This meant that the English owned and distributed the Irish land amongst the wealthy Englishmen of their country leaving the Irish with no control in their own country. So basically there was a lot of fighting going on during the 17th and 18th centuries leading up to the famine, which did not allow a significant population of Irish to be established in order to resist the English. Again the government tried to institute more workhouses, but again they could not solve the problem of poverty and hunger. An early version of New Deal programs only made the problem of poverty worse. In 1847, the government opened soup kitchens which were pretty successful in that they were basically the same as private charity and provided nutritious meals without huge tax increases or the people having to work off more calories than they ate.

As the years went by though the Irish population began to spring up, from 4. So in this way the English helped to create the problem of overpopulation in a short span that the famine would solve swiftly and mercilessly. Another blunder was the policy established by Sir Charles Trevelyan which paid below market wages, which needless to say were ridiculously low, meant that workers earned less in food than the caloric energy they typically expended in working on the roads.