Bill Kennedy,

Don't put words in our mouths or motivations behind our words. No one was trying to shamefully mitigate the sufferings of people who died. Some are just offended by the use of the word famine because it covers up the political nature of the starvation. People did not starve because of a natural disaster, as "famine" suggests, but because others would not let them eat. If people starve to death in the US (and they do), does it follow that we have a 'famine' here? No, we have a system of social stratification that keeps some rich and others hungry. This is the same with Ireland in the 1840s, except that there the group who fell below starvation level was suddenly magnified to horrific proportions.