Scientists discover what caused Ireland's Great Potato Famine

It was the British that caused the famine in Ireland,silly.You do not need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Look I agree with all you have said but some good may come from this something that may help to prevent from happening again. Ind 68 michagan st 67

This dead horse is now practically fine dust from your beating it over and over. Life is not fair, you know, and it wasn't fair back then. Young Queen Victoria was kept from knowing the very real situation of the Irish at the time. It is a pity that Mr. Dickens didn't write one of his books, but he had his own upwardly-mobile agenda at the time, and "A Christmas Carol" sounded a whole lot better than "An Expose of British Neglect of Ireland".

Dopey Wee Willy fails to acknowledge that non catholics also died during the famine and their ministers lived off the fat of the land denied to the poor. Wee Willy should understand that some Protestant landlords helped feed the dispossessed. Wee Willy is an orange bigot and deserves to be ignored on this site.

It was no potato famine, it was genocide. However the meglomaniacs who have destroyed this planet from the dawn of time while living in palaces with slaves waiting on them hand and foot are the true monsters. Inbred, possessed with insatiable greed, they destroyed the lives of the decent people and yet they are glorified in every history book and most recently by Hollywood. The Irish in Ireland were the first people on earth to declare that "All men are created equal" the foundation of the USA.

Uhhhh.... It was the english rulers lack of compassion for a beaten down and oppressed people.....

So does this get the English off the hook, then? Bureaucraphobia Trevalyanensis is superceded by phytophtora infestans? Or is it just that the latter was aggravated by the former. More important still, has an antidote yet been found in the beakers of any laboratory for the genus 'imperialismus angleterres'.

The largest percentage of my European heritage comes from Ireland (40%) and all of my Irish ancestors emigrated to the US in the mid 1800s. I am guessing it was because of the potato famine. I am so relieved that they were able to survive.

Enda Delaney writes, “Anti-Catholicism was a central component of British national identity in the middle of the nineteenth century, ranging from street-level, ‘no popery’ agitation, which reached its peak in the early 1850s, to long-held suspicions about the aspirations of Rome in influencing British affairs."

How many Roman Catholic priests, bishops and upper management died of starvation during the famine? None! It's like the time "bishop" Eamon Casey made an appeal on TV for the people in Ethiopia where he had just been helping (token grandstanding) the starving. There was silence in the pub until someone pointed out that for a man who had just come back from a famine he was "as fat as a little pig".

Nonsense. The mold only caused the potatoes to rot. It was England that caused — and perpetuated — the famine. It was England that created a population that was at near-starvation and vulnerable. It was England that removed an average of seven shiploads of food from Ireland every day during the famine. It was England that brought in Indian maize that was too hard to eat, that had to be ground twice and then decided to stop altogether. It was England that enforced the landlords' evictions.

We now know that of 8 million people during the 1840s one-third of the population was at the precipice of starvation at any point in time. While oatmeal, milk, and fish featured into reports of contemporaries as eaten by poor people, there is no doubting the pre-eminence of the potato. The Irish poor ate 10 to 12 pounds of potatoes a day.

“Where was the Vatican during this blight?” The Vatican has been consistently hostile to the interest of Irish nationalism and the indigenous population from at least the time of bill the orange.

Portia_O'Neill: Poor people supplemented their diet with buttermilk and oatmeal; A perfectly balanced diet. They only made butter for salle but used the valuable buttermilk for their family.

Some people really do believe that one million people starved to death because of a potato crop failure, just one failed vegetable.These are the same people that believe that there was no Jewish holocaust either.Sad ill informed creatures.