People really did believe that you interfered with the operation of the market at your peril, (critics could point to the ‘Speenhamland System’ as an example of welfare payments actually depressing agricultural wages still further) and that the relief works were probably making things worse. Also few English people actually travelled to Ireland to see for themselves and most assumed that things were not as bad as the reports made out.
In fact, the blight hit potato crops over much of northwestern Europe, causing food shortages and rising food prices. If you look at the population data for the region, you can see an excess of deaths and a shortage of births over a wide area. The Scottish Highlands were also hit hard. Like Ireland, the Highlands had a large number of tenant farmers who were already teetering on the brink of economic disaster before the blight hit. Unlike Ireland, there was enough organized famine relief in Scotland to keep most people alive - if barely.
About a million people are believed to have died in Ireland, and about 100,000 in the Low Countries, Prussia, and France combined. The blight was the same for all; access to other food was not.
“The way the world tends to work” – but, contemplating such hard, cold facts inevitably makes many folk feel rather queasy.
Brings to mind an anecdote about the Victorian academic Benjamin Jowett, long-time Master of Balliol College, Oxford. At a London social event attended by various learned folks, during the period of the Irish potato famine; Jowett met an economics pundit of the day, called Nassau Senior. This guy was blithely discoursing on how the famine needed to get worse before it got better, so that through people’s starving to death and / or emigrating, Ireland’s population would be reduced to a sustainable level. Jowett remarked, long after: “Since that day, I have never felt altogether comfortable in the company of political economists.”
That is an interesting article as I believe 1848 is the only year that the Canadian Hoseshoe part of Niagra falls froze over completely.