Over in the Ireland Still in the UK thread one of the posters suggested the British simply kicking the Irish out which isn't really a sensible idea but it did remind me of a post by Rob Crauford from the old AHC: Large Scale British Relief During Irish Famine about some of the costs of the relief effort. I'll post it here
It was mostly to do with the paragraph about how even a fairly benevolent landlord like Palmerston ended up having to ship roughly a couple of thousand of people out and it costing four to five times the gross rent generated to pay for relief supplies. So what effects do people think it might have created if the British government or a group of individuals came together and offered free one-way tickets to the US during the famine? I can't track down the source now that I found a year ago during the large scale relief thread but the one-off cost of a place on a ship was IIRC much less than that of relief for an individual so from a purely economic standpoint it was advantageous, as Scrooge put it "decreas[ing] the surplus population" would likely be looked on positively since it reduced unproductive mouths, and it could even be argued, whatever the actuality of the situation might be, that it was giving them a valuable opportunity.Lord Palmerston owned more than 10,000 acres in Sligo, which he first visited in 1808. He changed systems of landowning and tried to rationalise estates, constructed a series of roads, planted hundreds of acres of grass to stabilise the sand, established a plant nursery at Cliffoney (as well as two schools, a Catholic church and a dispensary) and built a harbour at Mullaghmore. He spent over £1,000 per year between 1830 and 1841 on improvements, against an income from the estate of c.£3,500 per year.
Despite all these improvements, exceptional in their nature, Palmerston has to pack almost 2,000 people off to America in 1847 when the famine hits. This keeps the mortality rate low, but it reinforces the point that the Irish population isn't sustainable. Either they go overseas, or they starve.
Just to add to this: Palmerston's agent calculated the cost of outdoor relief in March 1847: "more than three fourths of the amount will be payable by your Lordship... it cannot fall much short of £10,000 for the next 7 months". In other words, the cost of relief was four or five times as much as the gross rent Palmerston had made per year from the land.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.