Deaths from Irish potatoe famine mitigated

[Sarthak]

This. IOTL the British government was basically like 'Irish Catholics? Nah let 'em starve'. I mean, they didn't do nothing but what they did do was ineffective af, especially once the public works projects got rolling. Those actually CONTRIBUTED to the death toll rather than mitigated it.

No it didn't. Allocating 60% of the entire country's agrarian budget and feeding 3 million mouths per day for 2 years straight and ignoring the European famine's deaths in England, Wales and Scotland to feed Ireland is not what we call 'Let em Starve'. Despite popular misconceptualization of the famine, Britain, even the idiotic Whigs when they took power, did try to mitigate the famine, but in less than stellar ways. Another major problem the british found was that the millions of tons of grain they were sending to ireland were rotting in the docks and were being stolen by poor Highlander and Irish sailors in the transport duration between the celtic channel.

Anyways to go to the OP, have Peel stay. His program was successfully feeding 3 million irishmen and the numbers were rising approximately 1000 to 2000 per day and would have mitigated a lot of deaths. Prevent Russel's folly and the deaths of the Irish famine would have looked similar to the scottish, welsh and english tallies of the greater european famine of the time.

 

[BELFAST]

I remember reading somewhere that the British government was turning away foreign aid, but I'm not sure how true that is.

Insert Dan Quayle joke about the title here.

That was as the rumour goes the was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. It May not be true.

At a time when Ireland was enduring the terrible loss of a million dead and the mass exodus of a million more during the Great Hunger, the story goes that the Ottoman Sultan, Khaleefah Abdul-Majid I, declared his intention to send £10,000 to aid Ireland's farmers. However, Queen Victoria intervened and requested that the Sultan send only £1,000 because she had sent only £2,000 herself.
So the Sultan sent only the £1,000, but he also secretly sent five ships full of food. The English courts attempted to block the ships, but the food arrived in Drogheda harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors. That £10,000 that the Sultan pledged to the Irish would be worth approximately £800,000 ($1.7m) today.
It's a wonderful story.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/generous-turkish-aid-irish-great-hunger

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[BELFAST]

It is problematic when the guy in charge of the situation had this to say:

"The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people"

Averting the Potato Famine in Ireland would be to reform the land system as well as the Corn Laws. After all the potato famine is better called the European Potato Famines and was known at the time as the Hungry 40's.

That reflected some thinking at the time that God punished the wicked. Blame the victim.
The more logical conclusion was it was an unintended result of British long-term policy in Ireland was not thinkable, that had created an unstable economic model where people were dependant for food on an unstable super crop for food(potato) and the export of wheat to pay rent on land that had been taken by the British in a war of conquest.
So it must have been a combination of ignorant Irish peasants and lazy Irish landlords.

 

[manitobot]

If deaths from Irish famine are mitigated it might mean a better implementation of famine policy in British India (25 million deaths, terrible anthropogenic disaster).

One idea was to give Irish a bare minimum diet to transport them to colonies and America where there was food security.

 

[galanx]

That reflected some thinking at the time that God punished the wicked. Blame the victim.

More Thomas Malthus than God. Politicians, especially Whigs (Liberals) believed that population inexorably outstripped food production and that to intervene would make the situation worse by trying to keep alive unsustainable numbers.

 

[BELFAST]

More Thomas Malthus than God. Politicians, especially Whigs (Liberals) believed that population inexorably outstripped food production and that to intervene would make the situation worse by trying to keep alive unsustainable numbers.

That works too, It was not my fault and there is nothing I need to do. If I ignore it long enough it will go away.