ABSTRACT
The prefamine history of Ireland inevitably will be interpreted and evaluated in terms of the famine. I have argued in Chapter 2 that one useful way to define poverty is in terms of the probability of subsistence crises. It could be argued, however, that the assessment of Ireland’s prefamine economic performance as a “failure” just because it was followed by a disaster of unprecedented magnitude rests on a logical fallacy. The reliance on the potato as a staple food in the century before the famine had been almost complete. Although local scarcities occurred, they seldom lasted longer than the summer, and even the disastrous year of 1816 did little to signal to the Irish that their dependency on a single source of food was ill-advised. By the time they realized that the potato was not dependable after all, and that diversification in the food supply was advised, it was too late. Dependence on potatoes was “uncertain” but not “risky”, in the sense that people were not aware of the true variance of the crop over long periods of time. It could be maintained, thus, that poverty had little to do with the famine. The “reason” for the famine was bad luck: the system emitted misleading signals, but the response to those signals was wholly rational given the information available at the time. The fungus that struck the Irish potato crops in the 1840s had never struck before and could not have been anticipated.
