I have to agree with you , I would prefer it was called The Great Hunger ! There was food in the country but the ordinary working person (then called peasants) were working for the wealthy overlords .

For balance, Presbyterians and other dissenters (Quakers, Baptists etc) were also discriminated against under the penal laws and many of their number also starved and/or were forced to emmigrate.

Agree. The famine was actually a result of Lord John Russell’s government’s slavish devotion to free market economics. It was a huge national tragedy, and a monument to the colossal ignorance and callousnness of the British, but I still wouldn’t call it genocide. That being said, the former Lord Mayor of Dublin who described it as a “shared British-Irish” experience was a moron of the first order. As one commentator said at thw time, it was like equating the Holocaust to a shared German-Jewish experience. The British to blame? Definitely. Deliberate genocide? No.

Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, KCB (2 April 1807 – 19 June 1886) was a British civil servant and colonial administrator.
was appointed in 1840 as assistant secretary to HM Treasury, and served to 1859, during both the Irish famine and the Highland Potato Famine of 1846-1857 in Scotland. In Ireland, he administered famine relief, whilst in Scotland he was closely associated with the work of the Central Board for Highland Relief. His inaction and personal negative attitude towards the Irish are widely believed to have worsened the Famine.[1] In the middle of the Irish famine, Trevelyan wrote that the famine was a “mechanism for reducing surplus population,” a view apparently influenced by the thought of Thomas Robert Malthus. Trevelyan wrote:
“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated… The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”[2]
In another letter dated 29 April 1846, Trevelyan wrote:
“Our measures must proceed with as little disturbance as possible of the ordinary course of private trade, which must ever be the chief resource for the subsistence of the people, but, coûte que coûte (at any cost), the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.”[3]

If this doesn’t sound like a well orchestrated plan to deliberately starve a population, then i don’t know what proof you need.

When the country is full food, and exporting it, that is not famine. It is enforced starvation by cruel social engineering. That’s not just negligent or immoral, it’s genocide, the definition of which is “The deliberate killing of a large group of people, esp. those of a particular ethnic group or nation”

The British may have sent the Army in to “deliberately” kill people (like in other circumstances), but their policy makers certainly did deliberately kill people.

Sir Charles Trevelyn (the man in charge of administering “famine” relief)
“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated… The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

He also also said the famine was a “mechanism for reducing surplus population”

@ Cal – thanks for this. CET obviously thought a spot of ethnic cleansing would be a good idea. The next step would be to link these letters to other official documentation to show that these were not just his personal, and quite twisted, opinions, but were also governmental policy.

I want to make it very clear that what occurred in Ireland was primarily caused by British policy and was brutal, ignorant and most of all unnecessary. What I have a problem with are claims made without any reference to objective evidence. That is what is called an opinion, not a fact. If I can be shown evidence that The famine was an attempt at ethnic cleansing, then yes, I’ll say I’m incorrect and it was an act of genocide. But when commenters simply state it was genocide, and reply with a variant of “because I say so”, it demeans the debate for all sides. Sorry for being pedantic, but emotionally based arguments don’t seem to be helping anyone in Ireland at the moment….

John, I think you’re being a little too pedantic there.

Trevelyn was the man appointed by the Government to deal with the problem. How can you argue that these are just his views as an individual since the evidence shows he made his opinions clear in letters, writing and verbal statements? He wasn’t replaced or reprimanded in any way. That indicates to me that his views were widely endorsed by the establishment of the time.

Ireland was supposed to be part of the union. If this had occurred in County Surrey, do you really think the response would have been the same? (and that Punch would have had the same cartoons?)

Not trying to excuse what happened, but there is no evidence to suggest that it was a deliberate genocide, more a blind following of capitalist idealism (as illustrated by the last quote attributed to Trevelyan above) combined with a widely held belief at the time that the reports of famine in Ireland were wild exaggerations of the true situation (there is a huge body of evidence to suggest that the ‘establishment’ didn’t even realise how bad things were in Ireland).

@Cal
You shot your argument in the foot with your quote [3] from Trevelyan when you’re trying to make a case that it was a deliberate and planned genocide. You may not like my previous post (you’re not alone judging by the thumbs) but any objective historian cannot disagree with it. Proinsias is spot on. The folk memory and popular belief is of course very different, but that doesn’t mean its true.

But there wasn’t a scarcity of food, it was enforced starvation.

@gearoid – there was a scarcity of food caused by the British Empire exporting produce and so making it unavailable to the population. The result being a lack of available food, widespread starvation, ie famine. The word tells us what happened, not why it happened.