FAQ

The specific events were invented. The Connaught Ranger didn't even serve in Afghanistan.

But the shocking neglect of the Irish poor was real enough. Likewise the export of grain during the famine, when it could have fed everyone.

The British 'Economist' magazine supported those policies. And endorsed them in a history of the magazine published several years back. See 'Needless Suffering in the Irish Potato Famine', at the website 'Long Revolution'

The introduction of the potato from South America had led to a massive population boom in Europe and the blight ruining the crop was consequently disastrous. Areas such as Flanders and Prussia lost a third of their population to starvation and emigration, Scotland and Cornwall had whole villages left ghost towns as the inhabitants left in a desperate search for food. Ireland however was worst hit as it had 8 million people (as compared to only 5 million today) and it's soil and climate could not sustain it's population. It was also on the extreme periphery of Europe and thus lacked the alternative industries and/or natural resources such as coal or tin that Great Britain enjoyed. Furthermore it was an island so people had to emigrate by sea in government sponsored voyages (nicknamed "Coffin Ships" due to their high death rate) and therefore could not afford to eventually return home as many of those in Great Britain and Continental Europe did.

The governments of the 1840s were only composed of the rich who did not see it as their duty to provide for the poor. In the United Kingdom they were either landed gentry who had recently made millions destitute through the Enclosure Act land reforms or self made men newly enfranchised to parliament, enriched through the ruthless exploitation of their workers in the industrial revolution. Therefore both resisted simply giving direct relief to the starving masses preferring to fund projects such as road building, cutting the price of corn and sponsoring the desperate to emigrate, all of which proved hopelessly inadequate. .

Even over a century later the famine is still divisive in Ireland. Irish Nationalists consider that the British government would have done more to help the starving poor if they had not been Irish and mostly Roman Catholic and that things would not have been so bad if Ireland had been independent. Irish Unionists by contrast point out that the era was terrible for the poor everywhere (a single failed harvest killing 16000 people in Paris alone, half of all children in London dying before turning 5, the life expectancy in Manchester reduced to 17 from 30 even in Norman times) and that Ireland was no different. Poverty and emigration in the independent Irish Free State would actually be much worse and it would even suffer it's own famine in Connemara as late as 1925.