[JetSetWilly]

The initial British response was to buy £100,000 of corn meal from the US to import to Ireland to combat the famine.

This doesn't seem like an action of a government intent on genocide.

It seems more to me that British policy in Ireland during the famine is marked by an extreme ideological commitment to laissez faire economics (ie, letting land owners export food from Ireland in large quantities to make money, letting ports export food etc) and no little incompetence and prejudice against imagined "workshy" irish layabouts.

But I wouldn't say there was a deliberate policy of genocide as such.

As far as I know, the potato blight was not started by British settlers gifting infected towels to the natives.

[Spooky23]

Trevelyan shut that down immediately. His credo: "Irish property support Irish poverty."

Small catch: bumper harvests of oats, wheat and meats were being exported, protected by bayonet. The citizens were living off of kitchen gardens, which is why potatoes were a staple to begin with -- the lord wouldn't give peasant rabble access to enough land to grow corn or wheat for private consumption.

After the second potato crop failure in 1846: > Trevelyan's free market relief plan depended on private merchants supplying food to peasants who were earning wages through public works employment financed mainly by the Irish themselves through local taxes. But the problems with this plan were numerous. Tax revues were insufficient. Wages had been set too low. Paydays were irregular and those who did get work could not afford to both pay their rent and buy food. Ireland also lacked adequate transportation for efficient food distribution. There were only 70 miles of railroad track in the whole country and no usable commercial shipping docks in the western districts.

> By September, starvation struck in the west and southwest where the people had been entirely dependent on the potato. British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, upon encountering starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his efforts, Dombrain was publicly A starving boy and girl in Cork hoping to find a potato. rebuked by Trevelyan. The proper procedure, he was informed, would have been to encourage the Irish to form a local relief committee so that Irish funds could have been raised to provide the food.

You can claim that denying a man dying of thirst a glass of water isn't harming him. But when you do that systematically, don't pretend that it's any different than killing him some other way.

[_Codemonkeyism]

You are right of course.

One might think though if the famine happened to Britain and not to the "inferior" Irish "race" [see other comments], wether the government would be "letting land owners export food from [Britain] in large quantities to make money".

[JetSetWilly]

I think you are right to some extent, the Irish were definitely "racialised" in 19th century britain and considered essentially subhuman.

There was a potato famine in the Highlands of Scotland as well as Ireland, so it did hit Britain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Potato_Famine

And we can see that "prompt and major charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom ensured that there was relatively little starvation" - but that similar to in Ireland, "The terms on which charitable relief was given, however, led to destitution and malnutrition amongst its recipients".

I guess in the mainland UK the scale was far smaller, but it didn't stop an extremely laissez faire and heartless response from government authorities.

[_Codemonkeyism]

Major point of the Wikipedia article too me looks like most of the help came from Scotland itself,

"The Free Church of Scotland, strong in the affected areas, was prompt in raising the alarm and in organising relief, being the only body actively doing so in late 1846 and early 1847; relief was given regardless of denomination. In February 1847 the (non-governmental) Central Board of Management for Highland Relief, supported by Relief Committees in Edinburgh and Glasgow, took over from the Free Church ; by the end of 1847 the Relief Committees had raised about £210,000 to support relief work."

Looks like your quote from the abstract of "prompt [...] charitable efforts by the rest of the United Kingdom" is contradicted by the "being the only body actively doing so in late 1846 and early 1847" of the main body of the Wikipedia article.

[pjriot]

No, it seems like the action of a government attempting to appear concerned when quite clearly humanitarian issues were a tertiary concern.

If a genocide occurs as a result of a commitment to a political or economic ideology, does intention really matter?

[JetSetWilly]

I think it matters, because the very definition of genocide involves deliberate intent and policy to achieve the goal of wiping out a people.

[pjriot]

Fair point. We need a better word to describe mass murder by coincidence.

I would note however, that the goal of wiping out a people (in this case it could be argued that "a people" could just as easily refer to "poor people" as "Irish people") was at least a bonus as far as Westminster was concerned.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...

"The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as 400,000 pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate."

[Spooky23]

Trevelyan in a letter to the poor law commissioner of Ireland:

"We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. If small farmers go, and their landlords are reduced to sell portions of their estates to persons who will invest capital we shall at last arrive at something like a satisfactory settlement of the country".

[dragonwriter]

Murder is still murder if it's done with depraved indifference rather than deliberate intent. Don't see why the same shouldn't be true of genocide.