How did the Irish Potato Famine end?

[purplecat]

Everyone is terribly coy about the subject. Wikipedia, for instance, just says it ended.

I've found one web site which attributes the end to the reduced population but that doesn't really make sense to me. The small-holding population of Ireland was dependent on the potato as its one crop and the blight, as I understand it, was pretty pervasive especially in any damp season (which are not uncommon in Ireland).

So it seems to me you need a diversification of the basic diet, possibly to other varieties of potato or some other change in farming practices that limits the spread of the blight. Or, you need sufficient population decrease that potato fields are widely enough apart that the blight has difficultly spreading - even assuming a 20% decrease in the population (based on census records which most historians seem to agree are inaccurate) that seems unlikely to me. Or some sort of mutation in the potato, or the disease, or climate change (given the blight was worse in damp years)?

Or am I misunderstanding how the blight works? I mean it came back consistently four years out of five, only letting up in one dry season so it seems pretty pervasive to me, not the sort of thing that burns itself out?

Anyone have any idea how the famine ended?

Comments

[purplecat]

Could it be that they didn't understand what was going on at the time and there's no extant proof one way or the other?

That's quite likely. I suppose I'm a little surprised at the apparent lack of speculation on the part of historians but maybe I'm over-estimating their willingness to admit to total ignorance.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Intrigued by this issue, I did some googling and found:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010611071858.htm

which suggests the blight might be a form we don't have now...

Interesting that there are enough samples of the potato plants for this sort of thing to be tested.

[purplecat]

That's very interesting. I'm beginning to tend towards a theory that there wasn't much/any blight in 1850 and the pressure on the poor relief reduced significantly after that any no one has ever analysed in detail what factors actually contributed to the end of the crisis.