If the Famine had not happened in Ireland in the 1840s what do you think the country would be like?

Those maps paint such a stark picture. Whatever about pictures being worth a 1000 words, those maps in sequence? Devastation and exodus.

The population of the island of Ireland is now just over 7 million. I'd quite like to see 2023 maps included in the above as they'd be quite a way on from 2002 where the population was 5.5 million.

That's one funky looking map!

Shame we cant see it using the same scale as those blue maps, 2022 shouldn't look too far off the 1841 map now. We're 82% of the way back to pre famine numbers. So certainly getting there.

It's interesting to wonder how we'd be without the famine though. We were almost half the UK population which sat at 18 million.

They are currently 67 million now. If we were half that we'd be a whopping 33.5 million. Hard to imagine!

To claim that the pre famine population of Ireland was unsustainable is something of a fallacy, what was unsustainable was the was of life imposed on the Irish by the landlord system. The majority of tenant farms were small - mostly under 15 acres, with a significant number under 5 acres, hence the over reliance on the potato crop for food (as it was the one thing you could grow enough of on a small plot of land). Other lands were being used to grow cash crops of grain for export (crops that required significant effort to turn into usable food).

With our current population, we're frequently at or near the top of the global Food Security Index and a figure often quoted is that we produce enough food to feed 40-45 million. There are plenty of countries with far higher population density than ours that seem to be managing just fine.

You'd have also had to industrialize the country. The famine is only the tipping point of de-population. There are other factors to consider.

A genocide is 'the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.'

The UK's inadequate response to the potato blight was not a 'deliberate killing of'. If anything it was just severe neglect and indifference. Those two things are not the same.

That's actually a really interesting angle I never considered, has to make you then wonder what the landscape in the US would look like without that Irish diaspora.

Sending your army to provide armed protection for food exports to your own country from one facing starvation , is a deliberate act , at any time. To try and infer that that was the way things were done back then is rubbish. As I’ve said , the paperwork is there . It’s not something I’ve just invented . But to get back to the original post , if there wasn’t the great hunger, we’d be a happy British country of the uk

Jeysus Tipperary took some battering. You always hear about the Connacht counties and Clare but there are some surprisingly high populations like Tipp and Tyrone.

We would have a little bit more hard power though with a Dutch or Belgian size population.

Not true.

John Mitchel, who lived through the Famine in Co. Down, was the first person to say it.

While I dont ascribe to the it was a genocide view, the situation was certainly not helped and made significantly worse by British policies. Look at what they did in India. There is nothing Anglophobe about correctly denouncing the atrocities carried out by them.

Ok.. look it is a fact that huge amount of food was exported from Ireland at the time, it is a fact that Queen Victoria demanded the Ottoman downgrade their donation from 10k to 1k so her 2 k seemed more substantial. That is enough sh1thousery from our former colonialist masters to warrant anger being directed their direction for the effects of the famine. There is also the fact that every genocide has some people that either down play it or outright deny it happened. So I wouldnt ascribe to the view it is cynical exploitation.

It's not a narrative imported from the US.

John Mitchel, Archbishop MacHale, and other native Irish nationalist/Republicans who lived through the Famine are the origin of the genocide theory.

Maybe like Halloween it went out and came back.

I certainly hadn't heard that narrative much (I didn't say never) until recently.

Probably would have mounted a better fight in any uprisings, a larger proportion of Irishmen would have died fighting in WWI.

The potato blight was a larger part of the famine but given the land wars population density and the general industrial revolutions taking place at the time Galway Cork Waterford Dublin Limerick and Belfast and Derry would have seen mass exoduses towards them leaving very similar fates to what we have now in Dublin high rents ,illnesses such as Cholera TB and others wiping out large amounts of poorer people forced into slums.

If someone is starving on the street and you take food away from them and then they die, that is a bit more than neglect. Wasnt that the whole issue with Somalia when the UN was providing food and the warlord scum were stealing it and letting their own people starve?

Im not automatically believing the story that Ireland was exporting food but I imagine that the landowners in England that were exporting and owned that food may not have been that sympathetic to the starving in Ireland.

We are still suffering from inter-generational trauma, and survivor guilt. Perhaps a better class of internet warrior would have emerged from the population mixture, if the millions of deaths had been avoided.

MacHale was a prominent bigoted hypocrite, who cared more about expanding the influence of the Catholic church and building grandiose churches than he did of the ordinary welfare of people. An empire builder he was. Take Achill Island - good example. MacHale couldn't give a toss about the people there starving or otherwise until the Prods moved in, started a mission and a school to help educate with new farm practices. Then MacHale takes notice when he sees his Catholic souls being stolen and set up rival Catholic schools and a religious war.