Un articolo su RTE ripercorre la storia della grande carestia in Irlanda del periodo 1845-1849.

Morirono un milione di persone, e 1.25 milioni dovettero migrare per evitare la morte per fame, sotto il dominio della corona britannica:

Over a million people perished and a further million and a quarter fled the country which, by the Act of Union in 1801, was an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the largest empire in history.

All’arrivo della peronospora che distrusse i raccolti irlandesi ci fu inizialmente un tentativo di aiutare i cittadini affamati, come l’aumento dell’importazione dei cereali dall’estero, la distribuzione di aiuti alimentari (Soup kitchen Act) e l’avvio di imponenti lavori pubblici. Ma presto per motivi politici ed ideologici la distribuzione di aiuti fu cessata e il costo degli aiuti alimentari fu rovesciato sulle popolazioni irlandesi ormai stremate:

In the summer of 1847 three million people were being fed in the soup kitchens. However, legislation had already been passed in June 1847 (Poor Law Amendment Act) that shifted the financial burden for relief from central government to local Poor Law Unions in Ireland, many of which were financially stressed and heavily in debt.

With the phased closure of the soup kitchens from late August to September 1847, the relief of famine would henceforth be financed by local taxation and would cease to be a burden on the British government.

Un articolo BBC del 2011 basato sul libro The Great Irish Potato Famine di James Donnelly illustra nel dettaglio le ragioni ideologiche che portarono l’Inghilterra ad abbandonare alla morte i sudditi irlandesi, mentre le elite di origine inglese esportavano i raccolti depredandoli del cibo necessario per la sopravvivenza:

There existed – after 1847, at least – an absolute sufficiency of food that could have prevented mass starvation, if it had been properly distributed so as to reach the smallholders and labourers of the west and the south of Ireland.

What, then, were the ideologies that held the British political élite and the middle classes in their grip, and largely determined the decisions not to adopt the possible relief measures outlined above? There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of ‘moralism’.