At least they didn’t blame climate change?
Via Paste Magazine:
Put on the U2 and The Cranberries and lets down some green brew folks, it’s that time of year again. But while St. Patrick’s Day is cause to celebrate everything Irish-American, it’s also a good time to ponder just why more than a million Irish were forced to leave Ireland while another million were dying of starvation in such a short period of time in the first place. The answer, which also explains why millions of children are currently going without enough food in the U.S., has much more to do with market systems than Mother Nature.
Most of us were taught in school that the Irish Potato Famine, which took place from 1845 to 1852, was simply caused by a previously unknown fungal blight (Phytophthora infestans) that wiped out the potato crop of the Emerald Isle just at a time when too much of the population was dependent on a single type of potato for daily sustenance.