Prof Stephen Davies, same piece.
"In traditional Irish history the blame for this great disaster is placed firmly on the British government. For exponents of this view such as Cecil Woodham-Smith, the death and suffering happened because of the incompetence, callous indifference, and rigid attachment to laissez faire of the British government and its Irish chief secretary, Charles Trevelyan.2 For some the culpability was even more serious. For nationalist historians the British policy was genocidal and the outcome intended or welcomed. This view is still widely held, and not only in Ireland. In 1996 an act was passed in New York State requiring that all schools teach the Irish famine as an act of British genocide.3 The reality is more complex, more interesting in some ways, and leads to very different conclusions about events both then and today.
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How culpable were the British ministers of the 1840s? They are charged with having given inadequate, limited relief because of their commitment to a doctrine of laissez faire. However, given the scale of the problem and the acute nature of the crisis once the harvest had failed for a second time in 1846, there was little they could do. Moreover, the root of the problem, as most contemporary observers agreed, was the nature of the Irish land system, and to support the system would only lead to further famines in the future. A policy that had the effect of keeping large numbers on the land and preventing agricultural improvement was bound to have disastrous results. Moreover, the Corn Laws prevented large-scale importation of grain into Ireland until after they were repealed in 1846 (partly because of perceptions of their impact on Ireland) and so the initial response of market forces to the acute food shortage caused by the blight was so blunted as to be minimal.
What should we learn from this terrible story? First, governments are not as powerful or effective in relieving disaster as many believe. The cry "We must do something" is very seductive, but often "doing something" will be ineffective, may even make matters worse, or will preserve the factors that produced the problem in the first place.


Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/lessons-of-history-the-great-irish-famine#ixzz2Z8HmKZss