Hi Laurine, It was a quotation from a website talking about quarantine stations in an earlier post - and while the website doubtless just threw those few words in, I felt I couldn't let them pass as they are so misleading. The words were: " A shortage of > potatoes occurred because the British exported their potatoes leaving > millions of Irish to starve to death. " I'm not trying to say the British landowners were saints: they were driven by self-interest as all human beings are. And sometimes self-interest got the upper hand. The blight surely caused the famine. You might find some Americans who have knowledge of the suffering the same blight caused there too, in the years before 1840 if my memory serves correctly, and the Americans had wholly different political systems and wealth distribution from Ireland. There was a separate problem of land reform, which as you say was being carried out across the whole of the UK, and which created a condition in which the blight's economic effects were more quickly turned to disaster because in trying to get a more efficient use of land, there was a move generally to concentrations of one usage in any one area. So it was exaggerated. But I find it hard to blame agricultural modernisers for trying to make more efficient use of land. Yes, there were Poor Law Unions in Ireland which acted exactly the way the Poor Laws were enacted in England via the parishes. One major difference was that because of the poorer quality of the land in Ireland, it had always been a poorer country to start with. In both countries (I can't really speak for Scotland) the Parish or the Union raised a kind of local tax to pay for relief to the poor. And when suddenly local wealth or income dried up, so did their funds. The assisted passages were, as far as I know, at the discretion of the individual landowner: a man who wanted to move smallholders off his land in order to change its use to cattle-grazing would have considered it - and I hope would have preferred it to forcing people to become landless, though I know both happened. And the clergy? I don't know - but if they saw it as a way to solve their flock's endemic poverty, who could blame them if they pushed emigration? What annoys me is the way the Famine has been hijacked to enhance modern political points of view as a form of propaganda. It was a disaster. But it was in origin a natural disaster, compounded by many factors, rather than a demonstration of the evils of colonialisation. If anyone's interested, the Wikipedia article at _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Irish_Famine) is quite good and readable. Sorry to sound off about it: no-one can blame Canada after all! :) and maybe it's not appropriate on this list. If so, apologies to all. best wishes Maggie Are you saying there was no potato blight or was that someone else? My understanding was the blight that with the corn laws caused famine. However, what is often missed is the landowners desire to get the tenants off their farms by increasing rents so high, they could not pay. Doubt there is anyone who wouldn't say the English land owners closed the commons in England, the farms in Ireland and the crofts in Scotland for their own profit. The Aristocrats and Parishes in both England and Scotland encouraged mass immigration at one point using assisted passages. My knowledge of what happened in Ireland is limited to not if there was assisted passages there. Keep in mind that the closures of the Commons in England made many English peasants as desperate as the Scottish & Irish clearances. In Scotland and England there were Poor Laws which had Parishes responsible to some extent for their poor. The clergy in the parishes encouraged by their wealthy land owners pushed immigration. Was this true in Ireland as well? So far have not read anything about the British exporting potatos as they were rotting in the fields. Lauraine