Reddit reviews The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy

The Famine Plot

That link is hardly an academic source (it doesn't even have a credited author); some better sources you might want to try would be The Famine Plot, The Graves Are Walking, or The Great Hunger. Their conclusions are not all consistent (so, needless to say, I don't agree with all of them), but they constitute good, honest scholarship in any case.

Now, your problem here is that you are misunderstanding what exactly a famine is, and how to understand scarcity of food. During the Great Famine, food was indeed scarce in several senses, the most important being the following: 1) non-subsistence crops were heavily controlled in Ireland and almost ideologically bound for foreign markets by the landlord class, who legally owned it under the laws of the land at the time; and 2) the subsistence potato crop failed miserably, as a result of the blight afflicting much of Europe's potato crop at the time.

These factors caused extreme food scarcity in the sense that there was little access to essential food supplies, which is why a famine resulted. The effects only worsened when attempts to alleviate the famine proved largely ineffective or even counterproductive (e.g., the corn imported in attempts to alleviate the famine could not be processed or distributed properly; Moralist opposition to food charity led to irrational public works projects; the workhouse model relied on support from local landlords, many of whom were themselves suffering economically from the famine, which resulted in perverse incentives for famine relief; inaccessible corn prices due to predatory behaviour from global corn dealers; and so on).

The reason your reaction here is irrational, given the historical facts and the meaning of the English word "famine" (which, incidentally, is basically synonymous with the Irish word "gorta") is that "famine" does not connote an absolute absence of food but an extreme scarcity due to lack of access to food, for whatever reason (crop failure, state policies, weather, war, etc.). We know this because otherwise, there would virtually never have been any famines anywhere, because there is always food somewhere, even if it would be impossible to access. Put another way: people suffering from a famine face famine conditions due to lack of access to food whether that lack of access is due to all available food being on the other side of the world, due to it being priced above their means, due to it being shipped away to foreign markets, or due to it sitting unground in corn warehouses. All of these situations can contribute to/result in famine (and several of them did, in the case of the Great Famine), and your bizarre view of English semantics on the matter doesn't do much but make you look less credible.

Also: have you spent much time in Ireland? People use the term "famine" in this context all the time (just off the top of my head, take the example of the famous "Famine Walls" of the Burren, in County Clare). Calling it the "Potato Famine" is controversial, but there's really not much controversy in referring to it as a famine, since we all recognize that famines can be the result of deliberate state policies which limit access to otherwise available food sources.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Famine-Plot-Englands-Irelands/dp/1137278838