On what basis do some historians accuse the British government of genocide during the great Irish famine?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Been reading a bit around the great famine of late. It's something that seems to have slipped from public consciousness in Britain, although the suffering it engendered seems horrific almost beyond belief. It certainly seems clear there is a great deal of truth to support the famous quote that:

"The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."

Most modern historians seem to have coalesced around the view that the inadequate response of the British government was down to a destructive mixture of ideology and religion. That, together with the weakness of the Irish legislature that made it possible for Irish landowners and the government to pass the buck between them with neither accepting final responsibility.

Some have even suggested their intentions were good, and that there was a genuine belief, born of ignorance of conditions in Ireland, that laissez-fare would help. The reviled Trevelyan even apparently said in his instructions:

"People must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve."

Which suggests that, in private, his attitude was not quite as viciously inhumane as some of his other public proclamations suggest.

Genocide is currently defined by the UN as acts intended to

"destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group"

And even those who sought the "improvement" of poor, overpopulated Ireland through death and suffering do not seem to have sought deliberate ethnic cleansing. Rather, these attitudes seem in line with the general, brutal, opinions of poverty held by the middle and upper classes in the 19th century.

Given the modern view of incompetence and ideology over malice, what evidence do those nationalist historians who claim the famine - such as John Mitchel and Tim Coogan - was a deliberate genocide, base their view?