But I do have a source I consider reasonably objective in the matter - it is Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger - Ireland, 1845-1849. Highly recommended. It pulls no punches as to the role bigotry, hatred, and political repression played in the famine.
Without going too deeply into the book, the famine itself would not have occurred through political repression alone, or through overpopulation on too little land alone, or on overdependence on a single food crop alone, or on a hitherto unknown biological agent alone, but on a catastrophic combination of all of these and more. My point about the grain ships is simply that it is ironic that they have become a symbol of the neglect of the Irish people because they were in actuality intended to be otherwise. Far too many others either disbelieved that there was a famine at all or tried nothing to relieve it until it was far too late. There isn't much excuse for the former - the famine lasted actually for longer than the five years the book chronicles. For the latter there is the weak excuse that governments until then were not really in the business of large-scale famine relief. Two thousand Irish died of starvation in a normal year before the potato crops failed. To us these figures are grotesque, scarcely believable. They are fact.
We don't seem to disagree. Also see ref: http://www.nde.state.ne.us/ss/irish/irish_pf.html Basically the same as Wiki except:
Approved by the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education on September 10th, 1996, for inclusion in the Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum at the secondary level. Revision submitted 11/26/98.