As has been pointed out, The Famine was only part of the problem of what happened in Ireland.
Mismanagement was common and misappropriation of relief supplies occurred regularly. Relief supplies were stolen by those given the task of distributing them and resold; relief money was misappropriated regularly.
Around here they still refer to the walls around the fields on one of the old landlord's estates as "the shilling walls" because, although the workers on famine relief where supposed to be paid half-a-crown for their labour, they were in fact given one shilling, the landlord pocketing the rest.
A local building here is still referred to as "Balls' school; it was run as a school by a clergyman, Mr Balls, who was what they still call "A souper". The children were given free soup, but only ON CONDITION THAT they changed their religion to Protestant.
Landlords evicted tenants who were unable to pay their rent and knocked the houses down so they could not return to them. If the evicted tenants were lucky the local County Home (workhouse) would take them in, but usually they died at the sides of the road.
There is a tradition here called "the hungry grass" - they are stretches of land said to contain unmarked famine graves, and if you walked over them it is claimed that you get hunger pains.
One of the positive stories from that time was of how a cart going around collecting the bodies of those who had died on the roads turned from the main street and up the hill towards the graveyard. One of the bodies rolled off and landed at the side of the road outside a smithy.
The smith ran out and found that the 'corpse' wasn't dead; took him in, fed him up and offered him a job. He survived for another 20 years.
One of the best historical accounts of the Famine the book, 'The Great Hunger', written by an Englishwoman, Mrs Cecil Woodham Smith, and probably the finest fictionalised reconstruction, simple entitled 'Famine' was by Irish Author Liam O'Flaherty.
The most horrific episode I've come across of this time took place in Cork - I think in Skibbereen, one of the worst hit places in Ireland.
Jim Carroll

From the 'Cork Examiner' of March 19th, 1847 reporting on a court case in which a man had been charged with stealing food.
He said he was driven to it by what had happened to his wife. The court was told: The starving woman lay in her hovel next to her dead three year old son, waiting for her husband to return from begging food. When night fell and his failure to return led her to imagine him dead in a ditch, she lay there in the faint fire's dying embers, caressing with her eyes her dead son's face and his tiny fists.
With death searching her and now with her own fists clenched, she made one last effort to remain alive. Crawling as far away from her son's face as she could, as if to preserve his personality or at least her memory of it, she came to his bare feet and proceeded to eat them.
When her husband returned and saw what had happened, he buried the child, went out, and was caught trying to steal food. At his trial the magistrate from his immediate district intervened on his behalf, citing the wife's act as a circumstance deserving special consideration. The baby's body was exhumed, the flesh of both its feet and legs found to have been gnawed to the bone, and the husband released and allowed to return to his wife.