"Joel Mokyr's Why Ireland Starved took pains to refute the Malthusian argument that the Famine was inevitable due to the overpopulation of pre-Famine Ireland. Indeed, Mokyr found that "there is no evidence that prefamine Ireland was overpopulated in any useful sense of the word. This is important, as Cullen's argument regarding the irrelevance of the Famine was essentially Malthusian" - as posted by Jim Carroll

Really?? Because here is what Joel Mokyr and Cormac O Grada wrote in their paper "Famine Disease and Famine Mortality: Lessons from Ireland, 1845 -1850" dated 30th June 1999:

"The Irish famine was not caused by war but by a series of catastrophic crop failures. Its impact was very uneven across regions and classes, but the virtual destruction of the people's main subsistence crop, the potato, for a number of successive years dominated "entitlement" considerations. This, then, was a real famine
in the old-fashioned sense of the word and not a case in which, following Alex de Waal's distinction, a "scarcity" was being confounded with a "famine" (de Waal 1989: 25-28). The Irish famine was a disaster with strong Malthusian features: a catastrophic reduction of the food supply led to major demographic re-adjustment.

So which one is it?