The Holodomor: Starvation of more than 6 million Ukrainians by Stalin

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

And those charities were ....British. The quakers being foremost amongst them.

Not entirely true. A good deal of the relief monies were raised in the US and Australia, as well as in England. In point of fact, the first several thousand pounds in aid come from India.

The grain would still have been in private hands. You seem to think that it would just have been handed out.

It wasn't just grain. Even at the height of the 'famine' Ireland was exporting - literally - tonnes of food to England. Closing the ports (i.e., prohibiting the export of food from Ireland and keeping it in Ireland to feed the Irish) is precisely what alleviated the famine in the early 1780s. There is no rational reason to think that it wouldn't have worked in the 1840s.

There was a collapse of the potato crop due to disastrous practices of farmers using the same strain all across the country coupled with the ludicrous habit of splitting land over and over again so that there was bare subsistence

I'm unsure how desperately impoverished subsistence farmers were supposed to have varied the varieties of potatoes they had available to grow. I think it was more a case of necessity than an option.

Erm...it was the absentee Irish and English landlords who split the land. When it was leased from them by the gombeen, the latter divided the tracts into as many parcels as he could rent. Tenant farmers were never paid a working wage (repeal of the Penal Laws aside), and his own farm was subsistence for his own family, and he had to work the landlord's property merely to pay his rent. In essence, the abject poverty, the widespread use of the Irish Lumper, and the tiny subsistence plots were the result of British policies, not Irish practices.

Anyway you are denying that charity money given to the Catholic church was used to buy gold plate?

I don't doubt that some of it was. I thought you were referring specifically to the corn and corn-meal purchase made by Peel, which is the disaster I was referring to. Apos if I took you wrong.

Do you have a source for the misappropriation of relief funds by the Church?

Boru