We shouldn't allow history to be written by the manipulators of people.
Kind of difficult to avoid. Actions have consequences. How those actions are explained immediately polarises opinion. Therein lies the problem.
To judge the irish famine in terms of today's mores totally distorts a true explanation, that was a child of it's time. Against this must be judged modern famines. With modern infrastructure, International aid agencies and the UN the only reason modern famines occur is because of lack of political will to alleviate the problem. In the time of the Irish famine conditions and attitudes were totally different to the modern day . Back then social relief programs were embryonic. I am not going to get into an argument about the causes of the famine because no agreement will ever be reached. I will point out though that In the wake of the Union, Ireland's economy declined rapidly, and abject poverty and subsistence farming became the norm for a majority of the rapidly increasing population. As a result, by 1840 most Anglo-Irish families were heavily in debt. The famine completely beggared them. It is very easy to blame the English but that needs to be tempered by a full appreciation of the Poor Law in Ireland and that the landowners were responsible for paying the local rate on holdings worth less than £4(Ithink) Like any other complex subject the true explanation is shades of grey. The potato blight in Scotland also had a major impact but those supposedly "heartless" landlords were in far better financial state than their Irish Cousins and did help.

" Devine stresses that recent historical opinion suggests that some landowners were very active in famine relief and a good few went bankrupt in their struggle to help distressed people on their estates. As early as 1843, for example, out of an estimated 7,000 estates in Scotland “one twentieth” were already in the hands of the receivers, accounting for land with a total rental value of over £700,000 – and this was to rise to £1,300,000 in 1847 and increase further to £2,000,000 by 1849."


http://www.drb.ie/essays/cruelty-grievance-denial

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/oct/05/weekend.lukedodd

https://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/welfare/articles/crossmanv.html

The high dependency on the potato as a(the) staple food crop created the major problem in Ireland, but it need to be considered in a wider context of crop yields throughout Europe over the same interval.