A potato blight killed a million people in a country that kept exporting food

When potato blight destroyed Ireland's staple crop from 1845, roughly a million people died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated, shrinking Ireland's population by a quarter within a decade. Grain and livestock continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the famine under British trade policy, a fact that still shapes how the disaster is remembered as much a political failure as a natural one.

— Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 — Hamish Hamilton, 1962
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