If the Famine had not happened in Ireland in the 1840s what do you think the country would be like?

Impossible to tell. What is undeniably true was that the country's population growth was permanently retarded by the famine. It was 8.5 million before the blight hit. A million died and another million emigrated, triggering a wave of emigration that would endure for several decades.

Those maps paint such a stark picture. Whatever about pictures being worth a 1000 words, those maps in sequence? Devastation and exodus.

The population of the island of Ireland is now just over 7 million. I'd quite like to see 2023 maps included in the above as they'd be quite a way on from 2002 where the population was 5.5 million.

That's one funky looking map!

Shame we cant see it using the same scale as those blue maps, 2022 shouldn't look too far off the 1841 map now. We're 82% of the way back to pre famine numbers. So certainly getting there.

It's interesting to wonder how we'd be without the famine though. We were almost half the UK population which sat at 18 million.

They are currently 67 million now. If we were half that we'd be a whopping 33.5 million. Hard to imagine!

To claim that the pre famine population of Ireland was unsustainable is something of a fallacy, what was unsustainable was the was of life imposed on the Irish by the landlord system. The majority of tenant farms were small - mostly under 15 acres, with a significant number under 5 acres, hence the over reliance on the potato crop for food (as it was the one thing you could grow enough of on a small plot of land). Other lands were being used to grow cash crops of grain for export (crops that required significant effort to turn into usable food).

With our current population, we're frequently at or near the top of the global Food Security Index and a figure often quoted is that we produce enough food to feed 40-45 million. There are plenty of countries with far higher population density than ours that seem to be managing just fine.

Using the famine as a way to spout drivel like this is just disingenuous and highly disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands who died.

You posted Anglophobic drivel without a single source and finished with a linkdump.

You'd have also had to industrialize the country. The famine is only the tipping point of de-population. There are other factors to consider.

A genocide is 'the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.'

The UK's inadequate response to the potato blight was not a 'deliberate killing of'. If anything it was just severe neglect and indifference. Those two things are not the same.

That's actually a really interesting angle I never considered, has to make you then wonder what the landscape in the US would look like without that Irish diaspora.

The British Empire was the largest and most powerful empire that has ever existed. If they wanted to exterminate the natives of a small island in the eastern Atlantic, nobody would have stopped them. The Irish had no friends after the defeat of Napoleonic France. It's why the genocide theory falls apart IMO.

Indeed. It opens up a whole lot of interesting questions. Would there even be an independent Irish republic I wonder?

Jeysus Tipperary took some battering. You always hear about the Connacht counties and Clare but there are some surprisingly high populations like Tipp and Tyrone.

We would have a little bit more hard power though with a Dutch or Belgian size population.

Not true.

John Mitchel, who lived through the Famine in Co. Down, was the first person to say it.