No, the Irish Famine wasn't genocide by any means whatsoever. Even reputable historians agree it wasn't, including Irish ones.
"Doyle Expounds Official Famine Line
It has taken a Government Minister, Ms Avril Doyle, to put Irish-Americans straight about the Great Famine"
- Irish News headline and article on 14th December 1996
"The woefully inadequate response of the then British authorities and the misguided relief policies which they pursued are now well established in the professional literature of Famine studies. It was a rigidly doctrinaire and ideological administration, remote from the people whom it allegedly served and determined to pursue a programme of economic modernisation, even at the cost of thousands of people's lives.
However, it goes way beyond the boundaries of acceptable analysis to argue that there was a genocidal intent on the part of the British Government at the time and that the Irish Famine is therefore directly equivalent to the Holocaust. By using that argument, we are letting the British authorities off the hook. Their hands appear to have been clean but they certainly were not.
In my comments in America and elsewhere, I have made my position abundantly clear. The British response during the Famine was entirely inadequate, but the genocidal argument has no validity and this inaccuracy does a disservice both to the victims of the Holocaust or the Famine."
- Minister Of State At The Department Of The Taoiseach, Mrs Avril Doyle speaking in the Irish Parliament on Thursday 19th December 1996
Avril Doyle was also the chair of the Republic of Ireland's National Famine Committee charged with organising the official commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine.
"It is not good for continuing Anglo-Irish relations to term the famine as a deliberate act of genocide. What happened was more a case of appalling neglect and disinterest on the part of some of the reigning officialdom. Serious mistakes were made but there was no official genocide policy. It was really the manifestation of a laissez faire philosophy — let market forces reach their own level and, in the meantime, let the people die or try to survive, as inevitably they would. Certainly it was a philosophy that failed disastrously and for which we still pay."
- David Andrews (TD representing the Constituency of Dún Laoghaire) speaking in the Irish Parliament on Thursday 19th December 1996.
"In the case of the Great Famine no reputable historian believes that the British state intended the destruction of the Irish people, and the Famine-Holocaust comparisons provide no support either. Yet one million died. Does intentionality matter?
It does matter, for at least three reasons. First, it directly determines the scale of the tragedy. It is easy to forget that had Germany not lost the war, many more Jews would have been killed, such was the strength of commitment to the Final Solution. By contrast, when the Irish economy recovered some strength at the end of the 1840s the crisis was largely, though not wholly over – to the evident relief, not only of people in Ireland but of British policy makers also.
But to narrow the focus simply to the role of the British government for a moment: for all the massive irresponsibility and buck-passing that characterised the five years of crisis, the state succeeded in organising public relief schemes that employed three-quarters of a million workers, and at one point was responsible for feeding three million people on a daily basis.
These are not the actions of a Government or a state bent on genocide."
- Liam Kennedy, emeritus professor of economic history at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland and author of "The Great Irish Famine and the Holocaust" on the QUB website
"The belief that the authorities in London did little to prevent the Irish from starving underpins the recurrent claims of genocide from some quarters in Ireland and particularly Irish-America. There is a sense in which England "slept". However, two points need emphasising here.
First is that any worthwhile definition of genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish. Certainly, stereotypical images of feckless peasants and lazy landlords abounded. They underpinned an interpretation of the Famine as a divine solution to an otherwise intractable problem of overpopulation, and justified tough policies. If policy failure resulted in deaths, then (as in the Netherlands in the same years and in India and elsewhere later) they were largely the by-product of a dogmatic version of political economy, not the deliberate outcome of anti-Irish racism. In the late 1840s, Whitehall policy makers were no less dogmatic toward Irish famine victims.....Yet even the toughest of them hoped for better times for Ireland and, however perversely, considered the harshest measures prescribed as a form of communal medicine. A charge of doctrinaire neglect is easier to sustain than one of genocide.
Second, modern accusations of genocide underestimate, or overlook altogether, the enormous challenge facing relief agencies, both central and local, public and private, at the time."
- Cormac Ó Gráda, Irish economic historian and professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin as well as author of Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory
"One word, however, is not open to our usage.....This is the term "holocaust". When you see it, you know you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred."
- Historian and author of twenty-four books on Ireland, Professor Donald H. Akenson speaking 150th Famine commemorations at the Ulster-American Folk Park in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland in September 1995
Akenson is considered to be the "world's foremost authority on the Irish Diaspora." He lectures at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
"In 1944 the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined a new word, genocide, to describe what was happening. Four years later the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Since then the term has been applied to other situations, sometimes retrospectively, for example to Armenia in 1915–18 and our own Potato Famine. But how appropriate is this? The key word in the Convention is ‘intent’. I’ll leave readers to argue whether this has been established in the Armenian case (see Letters), but as I listened to our guide, Vitold, relate the grim details of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’, I couldn’t help but conclude that, notwithstanding British culpability for the millions of victims of the Famine in Ireland, genocide it was not."
- Editor of History Ireland in an Editorial in Issue 5 September/October 2015, Volume 23
"Dr Williams, therefore, sees the Famine as “Britain’s Great Failure” – a failure of public policy. It was not genocide, but equally it was not simply the result of a natural disaster.
Moreover, he emphasises that it was the Irish poor – not the “Irish people” – who were “starved and driven out”. For the Irish upper and middle classes, Catholic as well as Protestant, life during the Famine went on pretty much as before. The framing of the Famine in nationalist terms by John Mitchel and others – to quote Williams, “as England against Ireland, the landlords against the people and, by implication at least, Protestants against Catholics” – is wholly misleading, though sadly it remains part of our popular memory and still provokes anti-British sentiment both in Ireland and among the descendants overseas of those “driven out”."
Review of Ireland’s Great Famine, Britain’s Great Failure by William H. A. Williams on the Irish Catholic website
www.irishcatholic.com/the-irish-famine-natural-disaster-or-genocide/