In reality it was the last straw after decades of English landowners pushing a rapidly increasing local population further and further into the weeds and denying access to traditional lands and their resources.
"The Irish Question" had been debated at length and from afar in the British houses of Parliment for years prior, and there were a number of small famines before the big crop failures that saw millions displaced.
It's another in a common pattern of invaders colonising a country resulting in dire outcomes for those already there.
During the famine, Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid of the Ottoman Empire offered £10,000 to the Irish people to help ease the suffering. Queen Victoria intervened and requested that he reduce the donation to £1,000 since she had only allocated £2,000 herself.
And to add the complex icing to the complicated cake, Yeats was Anglo-Irish, from a family that had come over as part of William of Orange's forces during the 17th century Williamite vs. Jacobite war.
(Technicality trivia - he was born in Sandymount, which wasn't part of Dublin until the 1930s)
Eh, that's probably pushing the technicalities too far. Sandymount was part of a a separate administrative region until the 30s (in much the same way that, say, SDCC is today), but for practical purposes it was part of Dublin, and it was contiguous with Dublin; I'm pretty sure even in the mid to late 19th century you could walk from the city centre to Sandymount without leaving the urban area.
Thus my comment. I am glad it can help people realize that people’s governments, economic systems and the way people organize through a crisis can play a huge role — to mitigate a major crop failure or to massively exacerbate problems.