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The Irish Potato Famine, more recent students of history have begun to realize, was but a facet of a broader European disaster hitting societies across Europe with peasantries dependent on the cultivation of the potato. Belgium seems to have been the worst hit per capita, with upwards of fifty thousand dead, but even that is a far cry from the catastrophe that hit Ireland.

Ireland escaping the potato blight altogether is unlikely so long as the potato blight exists. Is there any possibility of Ireland escaping as relatively lightly as Belgium?

Honestly, I'm not sure. As Joel Mokyr suggested in an examination of Irish living standards in a European context, Belgium avoided the demographic catastrophe that hit Ireland because Belgium had begun industrializing, creating stores of wealth which came in handy in the crunch. Irish living standards may have been no better than Belgian, but Ireland lacked this.

Equally, I would suggest that the political structure of Ireland was important. Belgium in particular was a self-governing country, with a government at least minimally responsive to the needs of the general population. The odds of the Belgian government allowing the general population to be devastated were accordingly low. Contrast that with the situation of Ireland, a minority region in a much larger country that happened to be mostly populated by people who were looked down upon and actively discriminated against on account of their ethnicity and religion.

To change the outcome of the potato blight in Ireland, would it be necessary to remedy both Ireland's lack of industrializatio and its lack of self-governance? Would self-governance alone be enough?
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