Flora
A huge over-simplfication on your part I'm afraid, which totally ignores the mass-evictions, the corruption (it was calculated that an 'aid ship' could cross and recross the Irish Sea three or four times without being unloaded, while dealers pushed the price of the cargo up) the massive incompetence, the indifference.... but most of all, that mid-19 century Ireland was as much a part of the British Empire as was Birmingham, and if the famine had happened in the latter, there would be no doubt whatever of the culpability of the British Govenment - can you honestly imagine any government blaming the depopulation by death and emigration of, say Walsall on the people for "having too many babies"?
I live in an area where they still talk about "the soupers"; the Protestant missions which doled out famine relief soup to the starving - on condition that they changed their religion, or "the shilling walls" where English landlords who had been paid two shillings and sixpence by relief agencies for famine-relief labour, but paid the men only one shilling, pocketing the rest for themselves.
Look up the Vandeleur evictions, or Clements, Lord Leitrim (who exercised the feudal 'right' of droit de signeur - sleeping with the bride of his tenents on their wedding night) to see how English landlords behaved towards the Irish at the time.
Jim Carroll