Did you mean to type "unpreventable," Jim? Potato blight in the 1840s might have been unpreventable, but the famine certainly wasn't. At the height of the famine Ireland was still exporting tons of butter across the Irish Sea, for example. Many commentators have railed against the use of the word "famine," for the very reason that it's a word that implies that the starvation of thousands of people was unavoidable.