Comment by qwytw

> Those famines were not created by the Victorians.

The one in Ireland certainly was. The famine was an outcome of the exploitative economic system that they imposed on the native Irish population. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough of food available in Ireland (or that it didn't have the capacity to produce enough food). Rather the people living there couldn't afford to buy it and due to free trade/laissez-faire policies imposed by Britain that food was exported to England.

> • The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.

Yes they gave back a tiny fraction of resources they extracted from Ireland back. Fact is that if Ireland had its own government and wasn't an exploited colony the outcome would have been very different.