In the 1600s, both England and Scotland colonized Ireland. As they colonized Ireland, they took the best farmland.
The potato crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the Peru (in the Americas) to Europe through the Columbian Exchange. The potato fed Europe’s rapidly growing populations that developed during the Industrial Revolution.
By the early 1840s, the potato was the main source of food of Ireland’s rural poor. In 1845, a bacteria arrived accidentally from North America through trade and a blight or fungus destroyed the potato crop in Ireland. The 1845 crop failure was followed by more devastating failures in 1846–49. Each year’s potato crop was almost completely ruined by the blight.
Other crops such as wheat and oats were not affected by the blight. However, these crops were not available to the Irish for food. Under British rule, most of the Irish farmland was used to grow crops that were exported or sent outside the country for sale. The British landlords that owned most of the farmland shipped the uninfected crops for sale overseas, leaving the Irish with the infected potatoes. This led to a famine or extreme shortage of food. This became what historians call the Irish Potato famine.
The British government’s efforts to relieve the famine were controversial. Charles Trevelyan was in charge of Irish relief efforts during the famine. He believed in minimal intervention and attempted to encourage the Irish to be more self-reliant. He wrote, “...Besides, the greatest improvement of all which could take place in Ireland would be to teach the other people to depend upon themselves for developing the resources of the country, instead of [relying on] the assistance of the government on every occasion…”
The Irish landowners themselves were expected to provide relief. However, when the poor and starving ran out of money to pay rent, the landlords soon ran out of funds with which to support them. The British government limited their help to loans, soup kitchens, and providing employment on road building and other public works. Throughout the famine, many Irish farms continued to export other high-quality foods to Britain because the Irish poor did not have the money to purchase them.


Using the reading above, identify evidence of the following types of “failures” that exacerbated the Irish Potato famine.

- Production Failure
ex: Crops fail due to fungus and bacteria or a natural disaster destroys crops.
- Access Failure
ex: The cost of available food is too expensive.
- Response Failure
ex: Governments do not intervene quickly or aggressively enough to address the famine.