t years there has been an effort among Tory revisionists to soften the upset of the period and downgrade the role of the British. This is very evident in the tendency to reduce the estimates of the number of deaths related to the starvation. Most of these people have suggested there were less than a million deaths, while some estimates go as low as 250,000. Even these incorrect estimates are horrifying given that they occurred only a short distance from the center of the most powerful and wealthy empire the world has ever known. We suppose that such an approach is an attempt to lessen the blame that should be placed upon the British or in some sense to cover the magnitude of the tragedy.4 Some people feel that Britain did all that they could. The famine lasted for nearly 4 years, causing devastation to the people of Ireland. However the blight did not destroy all of the crop; one way or another, most people made it through winter. The next spring, farmers planted those tubers that remained. The potatoes seemed sound, but some harbored dormant strains of the fungus. When it rained, the blight began again. Within weeks the entire crop failed. Crop failures were relatively common in Ireland, there had been famines in 1741, 1745, 1755, 1766, 1783, 1800, 1816, 1822 and 1830, although only that of 1741 was comparable to the Great Famine. Because of this, it took time before the government realized that this failure was more serious than usual. In mid September 1845, a week after the fungus first appeared, a government inquiry concluded that, although there had been failures, the crop was also unusually heavy and that the extra crop would compensate for the loss. A month later another government inquiry revealed that the crop losses were more serious in 17 of the 32 counties. The image on the left shows a family searching for unblighted potatoes in a blighted field. The government responded to this second inquiry by setting up a commissio...
