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but when crisis arose they ran away from it. The
British were handling human beings as ciphers on a bit
of paper. They looked up the answers in economic
textbooks without ever setting eyes on the living
skeletons of the Irish people. They excused the Irish
for being hit by the blight once, but they condemned
them for persisting in planting the potatoes after the
blight appeared again. Most of all the British
government feared that the entire social structure
would topple down if men and women were once given
food they could not pay for. It was easy for the
British to believe the blight was the fault of the
Irish because blight occurred in England too, but it
was not nearly as severe. The first step they took to
relieve the situation was to send over a shipload of
scientists to study the cause of the potato failure.
Money could not be used for seeding the lands,
reclaiming the millions of acres of bog, or building
railways because that would be giving the Irish farmer
an unfair advantage over the English (MacManus, 1944).
The government was accused of genocide by the Irish
and even of instigating an "Irish holocaust". The
Irish were accused of marrying too early and having
too many children. The efforts of the British
government for relief of the Irish were half-hearted
and inadequate. They set up relief schemes and pubic
works to avoid mass revolt (Costigan, 1969).
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