Opinion | Irish Potato Famine Didn't Just Happen (Published 1995) (2024)

To the Editor:

Those who would commemorate the Irish "potato famine" (news article, Feb. 20) must start by truthfully describing what happened.

There was no Irish potato famine; the starvation of Ireland was planned in London. The million-plus Irish who starved to death did not die from lack of potatoes. They died from lack of food; from the gunpoint removal and export of the abundant wheat, oats, barley, beef, mutton, pork, poultry, eggs, butter, milk, fruit and vegetables that they themselves produced. Nassau Senior, economist to the Crown, is quoted as saying in 1845, "only one million Irish are likely to die; and that will not be enough to do much good."

When in 1845, the potato blight, phytophthora infestans, finally spread to Ireland from America via Europe, the British Government responded by withdrawing troops from its empire and redeploying them to Ireland, 100,000 of them, to implement its food removal policy. The reason? The Times of London reported Sept. 31, 1845, "in England the two main meals of a working man's day now consists of potatoes."

The British 40th Regiment of Foot, which my grandfather joined in Abbeyleix in 1857, had been reassigned in early 1845 from Australian death-camp management to Ireland. Its new mission: removal of south County Galway's foodstuffs to the port of Galway for export.

The "famine" ended in 1849, when British troops stopped removing the food. While enough food to sustain 18 million people was being removed from Ireland, its population was reduced by more than 2.5 million, to 6.5 million.

The many grain kilns and mills that I saw operating in 1946 are indicated on the 1837-41 Ordnance Survey Map of Ireland. That map indicates that grain kilns or mills were more ubiquitous during the starvation than, for example, churches, further refuting the lie that "the potato was crucial to Irish survival." CHRIS FOGARTY Vice Chairman Friends of Irish Freedom Chicago, Feb. 20, 1995