There was no real market competition within Ireland. All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism. Regular Irish could only pay rent to this group to farm themselves. Import/exports were controlled by the British shipping and enforced by the military when locals resisted, all in direct coordination with the small amount of landowners. Particularly difficult situation on an island. It was extractive colonialism without a strong equal rule of law or self representation. Calling it laissez faire was just a cover to benefit the British.
> All the farms were owned by an elite mostly British class living in England which was a direct hold over from Feudalism.
I think that’s a misconception-yes, there were a significant number of absentee landowners from England, but they were never the majority - the majority of wealthy Irish landowners lived in Ireland. Only around a third of large Irish landowners lived outside of Ireland.
One issue was that the land-owning upper classes were near exclusively Protestant, while the vast majority of the poor were Catholics-which is not to say no Protestants died in the famine, many did-but, while at the time Ireland was 80% Catholic 20% Protestant, famine deaths were 90% Catholic only 10% Protestant-so a Catholic was 2.25 times more likely to perish in the famine than a Protestant. Even though by the time of the famine, most of the formal legal discrimination against Catholics had been repealed, the consequences of it were still very evident.
Although there were many poor Protestants, the average poor Protestant was still better off (and hence more likely to survive) than the average poor Catholic, having benefited from generations of anti-Catholic/pro-Protestant discrimination.
Protestants also benefited from the greater wealth of Protestant charities - even though many Protestant charities were willing to help Catholics too, most Catholics were fearful to accept their help, viewing it as an inducement to conversion
Some Irish Protestants were descendants of recent immigrants from Britain, others were descendants of Irish converts from Catholicism.
Consider for example, Edmund Burke (the famous conservative philosopher) - he was born in Ireland to a Roman Catholic mother and a Church of Ireland father; his parents raised him Anglican and his sister Catholic - this was not an uncommon compromise for middle class Irish families of the time, discriminatory laws limiting career and education opportunities for Catholics largely didn’t apply to women who were excluded from careers and higher education irrespective of their faith. It is unclear whether or not his father, a lawyer (at a time when Catholics weren’t allowed to practice law) had converted from Catholicism, or if one of his ancestors had - but given Burke’s paternal line came from an old Hiberno-Norman family, descendants of the 12th century English invaders who over the following centuries assimilated to a Gaelic identity, it is obvious that one of his patrilineal ancestors must have switched from Catholicism to Protestantism at some point.
