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

[bunn.livejournal.com]

NMP, but I understand there is a view that the repeal of the corn laws didn't help much because the people in Ireland who had been living off potatoes had no income at all, so even cheap corn was not much help, as they had no money to buy it with.

That said, if British political moves such as the repeal of the corn laws, relief aid, workhouses, and the various work creation schemes actually did have any effect, then you may find that people are a bit reluctant to write about that. It might be a bit politically charged.

[(Anonymous)]

"Corn" can refer to any grain back in those terrible times

[bunn.livejournal.com]

...? Yes, I know corn referred to a mix of grains. In fact, in the UK, where I and the other people posting on this thread live, 'corn' is still a generic word for grain.

I believe that it is largely in the USA that the word 'corn' is used to mean maize, and maize only? We say 'maize' in general food manufacture, or as flour, or 'sweet corn' for the tinned stuff or fresh cobs.

Of course none of that helped the Irish. They had no money at all, and no potatoes, so it didn't help that much that the repeal of the Corn Laws applied to lots of different grains!