"Take a look at the alternative are you honestly trying to tell me that it would have been easier to..."

"Yeah far "easier" to ship them off to America or allow them to starve - after all they were only a nations of indolent morons besotted with their "whining" patriotic songs - they deserved everything God bestowed on them (fascinating when the mask slips, isn't it?)." - your words Christmas - not mine

Well yes logically it is easier to move people from a place in which all they will ever be able to do is subsist and suffer, with ever increasing frequency, chronic food shortages and unemployment.

As to shipping them off to America? Another myth, the vast majority of those who emigrated from Ireland did not go to America they went to the British mainland, next most popular destination was Canada and thence to the USA. Very few sailed directly to the USA for reasons that Cecile Woodham-Smith explains very clearly.

I believe the whinging ballads written retrospectively came a lot later down the track.

As for them deserving "everything God bestowed on them" if you try to find out what the Roman Catholic Church did to help their parishioners you will discover that the view you express was widely held and believed by both the people themselves and the clergy. (In one case they regarded the blight as God's punishment for the college at Maynooth accepting grant money from the Government - Dr Paul Cullen, Rector of the Irish College in Rome. While in 1846 a Father Theobald Mathew, stated his opinion that the, "potato crop was no more than one wide waste of putrefying vegetation....due to Divine providence again pouring out upon us the vial of its wrath.")

This letter of Trevelyan's that you seem to like waving about like a flag yet seem unable to comprehend if indeed you have ever actually read it castigates the land owners, identifies the need to move people off the land so that agriculture can be reformed so that enough food can be grown and the population sustained.

Russell and the British Government did nothing!!! £9.5 million more than all other forms of aid received lumped together by quite a significant margin. That £9,500,000 would be the equivalent of £1,045,000,000 today, our last hand-out to the Irish Government amounted to £7,000,000,000 - you might knock it all you want, the one thing you cannot do is deny that it was ever given.