Ok this is my first thread ever made here and it is a challenge one.
What would it take for the British government to act in a more humane way towards Ireland during the potato famine of 1845? What would be the basic outline of some of the butterflies? And what would be the biggest threats to this idea?
1) there actually was large scale relief, just not nearly enough.
2) the government of the day in Britain was "Free trade", non-interventionist. Producing THAT scale of aid would require a rather different political philosophy. Since push for free trade had been under way for a generation or more, you need a PoD at least 20 years beforehand.
3) if they have a 'liberal' (US sense) enough mindset to provide enough relief to feed 8 million 'Poor Irish Papist breeding-like-rabbits peasants', they're going to have a very different attitude toward good Protestant factory workers and slum-dwellers. Which might well impact how successful and productive British Industry is (i.e. make it less competitive).
Feeding 8 million people on imported food is EXPENSIVE, especially as steamships are just coming into service and long distance trade is still quite expensive.
Besides. What are they going to do with all those Irish afterwards? Ireland really doesn't have the carrying capacity for all those people, and the English would really hesitate to set a precedent where they'd be expected to save ever increasing numbers of Irishmen from famine.
Could they have done better? Yes.
Should they have done better? Yes.
How much better could they have done, given the political philosophy of the time, that made Britain the world's great trading empire? Not very much.
Should food EXPORTS from Ireland have happened?
Yes. What was being exported was high price wheat from private farms. 1) to stop the export would involve nationalizing all farms in Ireland, essentially.
2) if you can export (to England) expensive wheat and buy twice as much cheaper grain, wouldn't that be appropriate?
Also. Infrastructure. Even if a sufficient amount of grain miraculously appeared in Irish ports, getting it inland to all the isolated tiny Irish farms was probably impossible.
Ireland simply can't support 8 million in a reality that has potato blight (short of modern fertilizers and crops). The best result possible would be to feed the population an inadequate subsistence diet long enough to ship millions of Irish overseas. OTL, 100s of thousands (I think) were fed, but not enough, and not long enough.
My TL, which, yes, I need to get back to, has a more developed Canada, slightly earlier steamships, and a more practical view of religion (as opposed to the moral hypocrisy of OTL's Victorian era), all of which make the Irish famine only a catastrophe instead of OTL's near extinction event.