When 25% of the of population of a territorium dies and another 25% emigrates you answer shouldn't be:
While the Potato Famine also hit other countries, none of them was hit as hard and some them was as agriculture monoculture as Ireland. Ireland continued exporting food under the famine, that what Sudan is condemn for today.
When 25% of the of population of a territorium dies and another 25% emigrates you answer shouldn't be:
While the Potato Famine also hit other countries, none of them was hit as hard and some them was as agriculture monoculture as Ireland. Ireland continued exporting food under the famine, that what Sudan is condemn for today.
This is utter claptrap I'm afraid.
The number of dead due to the famine is around 130,000, of whom 20,000 were starvation deaths and the other 110,000 malnutrition linked diseases*****. That's a log below your figure. The number of emigrants is similarly much lower, and spread out of vast periods of time.
Exaggerated numbers largely come from the erroneous notion that the Irish population was growing. Some pundits say the Irish population should have been 9.3m be 1851, in fact it had turned the corner in 1838 and was starting to shrink. This isn't surprising as the boom that doubled Irelands population in a generation of course created a demographic well* and that the baby boomers were dying off and not being replaced.
That Ireland continued to export some food isn't surprising; there was no food shortage on the island. Government subsidies and free trade turned Ireland from a major exporter to a major importer of food, but the markets were full and the price of food in Ireland halved between 1844 and 1846. The question is the ability to access that food.
Due to the population boom and the vagueries of Irish law**, Ireland had 2m people with no source of income who lived as subsistence farmers. The failure*** of their main crop (the potato) left them destitute. This population ended up largely on state handouts, had no money for the expensive passage to America &c. For this group, things were grim.
As for emigration, while there was a minor upswing, the numbers leaving Ireland weren't much greater than before the hunger****. However, people stopped coming back. Immigation into Ireland collapsed for a period. This combined with the collapse of fertility in the late 1830's is chiefly responsible for the large decrease in the Irish population.
Looking at the US, we tend to forget that there was a largee Irish in the US
before 1845. Indeed, the famine cause no "tide or Irish", it was a much longer process....
Enough for now.
* We're on the cusp of one in the west now, with all the associated deflationary pressure.
** The boom also had the effect of causing a collapse in other industries as well. The Province of Connaught, the worst effected by the famine, was a major manufacturing centre in 1815, but had no manufacturing capability beyond making agricultural tools in 1845. In 30 years Connaught moved backwards in development several centuries.
*** While we say failure, in 1845 only 1/3rd of the crop failed , and even in the worst year, 1846, around 1/4th of the potato crop was successful. The non-famine crop was maybe around 15m tons (Bourke's estimates, which many contemporaries criticised as too high, I agree with the criticism, since Potato acrage increased after the famine, but yields were only 6m tons pa), of which 7m tons were eaten by people, 5m tons by animals, 2m were used for seed and the remaining 1m were exports and wastage. The 1.2m tons of extra grain in the market more than made up for this shortfall.
**** The numbers leaving Ireland for America only show an excess in 1847, when about 97,000 left Ireland for the Americas rather than the usual 40-60,000. Much of the emigration must have been via the Port of Liverpool. In 1847, 151,000 Irish emigrated to England via Liverpool. 48,000 emigrated further (including 15,000 who returned to Ireland), mainly to the Americas.
***** We may be able to add about 10,000 victims of "Irish Fever" in England.