In reading accounts of the so-called Potato Famine that ravaged Ireland, there is frequent mention of the so-called “Corn Laws”. From what I read, these were laws passed by the British Parliament, intended to favor English farmers. One would assume that this would mean establishing minimum prices for grains, and nsuring export markets (when production increases drove prices down). So, did these laws exacerbate the famine in Ireland? Ireland produced grains (whjeat and barley), as well as potatos. However, the poor of Ireland depended upon the potato for their food supply-so when a blight destryed the potato crop, they had no recourse but grain. It is said that the corn laws encouraged the export of grain from Ireland, thus making the famine worse. Is this true? Or were the Corn laws a minor factor-the main one being the dependence of the Irish food supply upon the potato crop?
It wasn’t so much the Corn Laws themselves as it was the entire mindset of the absentee landlords and the British Parliament. Ireland remained a net exporter of food during the famine. Throw in the fact that there was plenty of food right off-shore that the Irish historically did little to utilize, the callousness of the landlords, the sheer size of the crop failure and you have a disaster. Economics were just a part of it. Rents had to be paid, so grain was sold rather than eaten. Maize was brought in, but Ireland didn’t have the mills to process it and it lacked Vitamin C, so scurvy became an issue. Etc, etc.
Seafood wasn’t a useful option; the ability to harvest on the scale required didn’t exist, and even if it had could not have fed the considerable interior region. Aside from which, the Irish did not posess the shipbuilding capability to massively increase their resource exploitation, and even if they had it’s doubtful the English would have let them, as that would have been competition against another significant and influential English mercantile group.
The Corn Laws placed a high tariff on imported grain. Due to the high tariff, foreign grain was kept out of British markets. This benefited English grain growers (who were mostly large landowners) because they could sell their produce in Britain for an artificially high price and pocket a lot of profit.
Due to the high grain price, poor people in the British Isles couldn’t afford to buy grain. Irish farmers were generally poor and had been compelled for economic reasons to sell their most productive land to English landowners for grain production. The Irish farmers then lived on potatoes which could grow on the remaining small farms with less-productive soil.
Then the potato blight hit and wiped out the potato crop. A natural disaster for which nobody was to blame. But the political issue arose from the fact that the grain fields were untouched. Ireland was still producing full harvests every year - but the crops were then shipped out of Ireland to England where they could be sold for higher prices. And cheap grain which the Irish could have afforded to buy at world market prices was unavailable to them because of the high tariff.
So the Irish starved to death as they watched food being grown and harvested in Irish fields and then shipped over to feed Englishmen. And then they were told they couldn’t buy food because of English laws designed to protect the profits of the people who owned those fields.