There is no evidence for these 1 million victims.

Lots of people sank in the old wooden ships.

The population figures are fairly well-established through parish records and archaeology. Pre-Cromwell, close to 1.75 million. After? Below .75. The Brits kept pretty good records for what they shipped off to the Caribbean and other penal colonies. Most of the “missing Irish” vanished into the maw of the sugar industry, and for a long time, the Irish bought into the whole “…they’re in the Americas…” thing that the British told everyone who asked. Turns out, though, that there are no records and no historical verification for there being that large a transfer between the Caribbean and the various supposed “final destinations” for those Irish. Not in South America, not in North America, not in Central America. It’s the equivalent of the story your dad told you about little Sparky going off to the nice farm in the country…

It’s not at all well-documented, but you can find the facts out if you are willing. I learned of this story from an Irish atheist who converted to Catholicism and became a priest; subject of his original studies were the “Irish Diaspora”, with an emphasis on tracing out the lives of those Irish who’d been transported to the Caribbean. The accepted line, for a very long time, was that they’d migrated on to the various colonial areas in the Americas, but… When he went to look, he could find no evidence for that, aside from a token one or two like that poor old woman who got hung as a witch at Salem. The numbers that should have been there in the time frame that this should have been going on are simply not there, not in any records, and not in any other historical evidence. It’s just about as bad as what the Turks did to the various Christian ethnicities, and entirely forgotten. The English ought to be held up as outstanding genocide conductors, because they’re completely forgiven for all of this. Hell of a trick, too…

It’s amazing when you go back and discover that one of the key reasons that the Anglican Church was advocating for black slavery was that they thought that the plantation owners would take better care of labor they had to buy, rather than just sign for down at the docks. It also didn’t hurt that the landowners in Ireland were beginning to complain of labor shortages…

My point is that you can not talk about free market when the ports are closed to import several products. I remember being in school about that period, we in Portugal had Industrial revolution period and i was surprised even as a teenager that they would use that terminology when it was more mercantilist than free market.

The reality was that when other European nations in similar situations were hit with the blight, they banned food exports and managed to feed themselves. Alone of the European victims, Ireland kept exporting food to England and other places, to the tune of 4,000 shiploads of it during the height of the famine. They actually managed to increase exports on several commodity items, like beef and other sorts of meat.

The reason the Irish starved was due to the fact that the vast majority could afford no other food besides the potato, and that the English landlords did nothing to prevent their tenants from starving. Starvation was a policy they set on, so as not to lose money.

It’s notable that during a subsequent famine during the 1870s, Ireland was able to block the harbors and stop shipment of foodstuffs. No famine resulted, just a bit of economic suffering.

If you go back even further, and look at what happened after Cromwell raped Ireland, you’ll find a population drop that’s yet to be “explained”, and which would indicated that somewhere near a million Irishmen and women were “exported” to the Caribbean as indentured slave labor, where their treatment was such that the Anglican church authorities there advocated for bringing in African slaves on the theory that if the plantation owners had to buy their labor, they would take better care of it…

Before Cromwell’s depredations, there were something like 1.75 million Irish. After he was done, it was down below three-quarter of a million, and we really do not know where those people wound up for certain. The fantasy has long been that they made their way to the Americas via the Caribbean plantations, because that’s where they were transported to. The reality is that you can find no signs of such a thing having happened in the various registries and documentation of the Colonial-era authorities here in the US. Those Irish just vanished into the maw of the sugar plantations, and that’s it. To this day, the various governments of the Caribbean do not like people who go looking for the evidence, in the form of the plantation graveyards. You can’t get a permit to excavate or investigate–So far as they are concerned, the only people who were ever exploited there were the Africans.

Lies. Potato disease. If there was free trade why food wasn’t imported?

“Graham, the good Scotsman Thomas Carlyle recorded some thoughts about unrestrained globalization”

Good?! A slavery defender?