What happened in Ireland during the potato famine is reasonably well known. Why it happened in the first place is more of a mystery. Historians can point to many causes. But it is the broad brush question that puzzles: why did famine overtake the island?
Historian A N. Wilson puts the issue this way:
The population of Ireland by 1845 had probably reached some 8.3 million. True, it had increased dramatically over the years, as had the populations of other European countries, but apart from isolated cases of hunger in times of bad harvest, cases which could be (and usually had been dealt with by the charity of landlords or others in the locality, there was no obvious sense in which this was an island incapable of feeding itself. 'There was no evidence that pre-famine Ireland was overpopulated in any useful sense of that word.' [A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow Books/Random House, 2003), p.77.]Historical causation is a minefield. More often than not causation is a complex, multivalent hydra. Doubtless this is true with respect to the terrible Irish famine and the consequent horrendous loss of life. The superficial (and immediate) cause, however, was the widespread dependence upon potatoes.
When the potato blight hit, and successive plantings and crops of the legume failed (1845-50), the landowning aristocracy and those farmers working more than twenty acres of land, were able to survive in the main. Infrastructure, however, was pathetically backwards in many cases.
