Ah Christmas:

1: Very pleased to read that you do not think that 625,000 people died crossing the Atlantic and for confirming that the 125,000 figure you stated was untypical as stated by Joel Mokyr.

2: Who assembled hastily acquired and unprepared ships? Not the British Government. By the way there was nothing hasty at all about the trans-Atlantic timber trade and the trade in goods between Canada and America and Great Britain.

3: Neither the United States of America or Canada would have been built or established as the countries they are today without the influx of immigrants. Those nations desperately wanted them the people who lived in the landing port cities did not.

4: Very pleased to hear that you consider Mitchel's work on the subject to be purely propaganda and should be ignored as a source of reliable information with respect to this subject.

5: The concept of the workhouse was introduced to Ireland in 1838. By 1845 there were 128 workhouses in Ireland, by the end of the famine there were 163 of them. A question for you Christmas. If all the workhouses were closed in 1846 as you say, what were the additional 35 workhouses built for, and who built them?

6: IIRC Christmas it was yourself that proposed Tim Pat Coogan as a bona fide Historian and dismissed Hastings because he was a tabloid journalist. I pulled you up on your hypocritical double standard (Not for the first time and I am sure it will not be for the last)

7: I don't think Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan is in any state to sue Tim Pat Coogan for defamation or libel. But didn't you state that you had tried to find any corroborative evidence of the letter and proof that it was written by Trevelyan but could find nothing whatsoever?? As far as I can see there is no proof at all. Does it have to be challenged? No. Does the lack of a challenge indicate that it must be authentic? Again No.

8: "I should have thought a denial of Trevelyan's authorship would have sent Coogan's case tumbling, don't you?"

Ehmm Christmas the letter was sent under a pseudonym, you said. Who can authoritatively deny or confirm it? If the letter has been ignored by contemporaries and historians it was probably because it was deemed to be irrelevant. There is no mention of his "fact finding mission" to Ireland in 1843 and no reference to any connection between Philalethes and Charles Edward Trevelyan. But if there was such a mission entrusted to a senior civil servant then the fact that his report details some extremely honest opinions voiced as pretty unpalatable truths that should come as no surprise (Modern day equivalent – Wikileaks diplomatic cables?)

The Trevelyan letter to Lord Mounteagle castigates the land owners in Ireland NOT the people, not surprised that you haven't picked up on that as it does not comply to your prejudices. In the popular thinking of the time as previously stated the "God's punishment" was pretty common not only amongst the rich and powerful but also amongst the Irish people and the Roman Catholic Clergy ministering to them. That by the way was another fact that you conveniently ignore as you vector in on Trevelyan.

"Indolent Irish"? Refer to Professor Joel Mokyr he paints a picture that explains why things happened the way they did, your inference that all things were sweetness and light prior to the arrival of the famine and that evil Great Britain took advantage , is a monstrous misrepresentation. If the famine was a case of deliberate genocide then the British Government made a pretty ham-fisted attempt at it don't you think? Surely if it was deliberate then they would have killed people off with far greater efficiency? I mean 5,000 trips across the Atlantic and only 59 ships sink? Why not all of them? That would certainly have been within their power and competence.

The problem is that you and sciencegeek look at the period and apply 21st century thinking to it. Your paucity of solutions practicable at the time is the best indication of this. You also ignore facts that work against you with a perverseness that defies belief.

1: Britain should have closed Irish ports to export of domestically grown foodstuffs

This would have hit and harmed those producing the food and not all food grown in Ireland was exported. The production figures for home grown produce in Ireland fell dramatically during the Famine years while the imports of products particularly cereals expanded enormously. The repeal of the Corn Laws allowed that to happen. Had the Corn Laws not been repealed then the effects of the famine would have been worse but Peel's Tory Government would have remained in power. Peel crashed his Government on purpose to give the people of the United Kingdom a voice and that election returned Russell's Whig government. The hand-over of the handling of the situation in Ireland was smooth, and NO Christmas, NOT ALL Government aid was stopped.

2: Irish crops should have been sent to the parts of Ireland affected by the blight.

Yes fantastic idea as long as you can actually transport the stuff there and get it distributed before it rots. The physical means of transportation simply did not exist so that blows that "remedy" out of the water. Did they try to get food to where it was needed? Damn right they did. Was the lack of food the thing that was killing the people – NO IT WAS NOT, and the means to counter what was actually killing people was not understood until THIRTY YEARS AFTER the end of the famine. Typhoid was a killer taking crowned heads of Europe as well as the poorest in society.

3: Public works? Ask any farmer how walls benefit windswept fields. "Roads to nowhere"? Well they didn't lead to nowhere back in the late 1840s and if you are going to bring in food to distribute you have to roads that can allow transportation by wagons – cart or pony tracks just don't hack it.

4: Could things have remained as they had been in Ireland? No most certainly they could not. The series of famines that preceded that of 1845 and the burgeoning population all tied to land that simply could not support them was only going to perpetuate the problem and exacerbate it with increasing frequency. As I have stated before not even sheep are stupid enough to remain on hills with no grazing.