Refusal to interefe?
The markets were completely and utterly interefered with - the Corn Law tariffs were in full effect as the famine got underway: the famine began in an atmosphere of coercive government intervention in food prices.
and hoping that the simple expedient of abolishing the corn laws would drive down food prices and negate the effects of the shortage was woefully flawed.
Abolishing the Corn laws was a necessary first step - but your fellow anti-capitalist market interventionists refused to allow them to be abolished outright, and demanded that there be only a gradual reduction in tariffs over time. Why? Because Disraeli argued that repeal would favor "commercial interests" to the detriment of the landed aristocracy.
People were dying, but the opponents of free markets didn't care.
You prove my point. Government intervention in the market created an enormous and deadly inefficiency in the allocation of resources.
This is to say nothing of the lack of decisive intervention in the years before the famine to wean the Irish off their over-reliance on the potato as a subsistence crop...
Why were the Irish dependent upon the potato in the first place? Do you even know?
Because of the English laws that restricted the market in land to Protestants only, forcing the Irish to work as tenant farmers on tiny patches of subdivided land - patches where the potato was the only crop that could be grown economically. Moreover, the protectionist Corn laws kept the price of grain far too high for the average Irishman to afford.
Government intervention in the land market that made cultivation of grain impracticable as a product created the potato monoculture in the first place.
Government intervention in the grain market ensured that grain would be unattainable as a food.
And you are now claiming that yet a third government intervention would have saved the Irish from the first two?
Unreal.
The free market forced the Irish to become dependent on the potato in the first place.
Ireland was a very densely populated country by the standards of the day, and should have been as urbanised as England was. However, with the act of Union in 1801, Irish industry was forced to compete with the far more efficient industry of England. It couldn’t do this, because for various reasons (not least the fact that Ireland did not have large deposits of coal) Irish industry could not compete with English industry on an equal footing. Which meant that the Irish could no longer depend on worker’s wages fulfil their needs, and instead had to grow potatos to subsist on.
Without subsidies, intervention and protectionism. Over-populated Ireland, so dependent on the potato, was heading for disaster, and Trevelyan’s insistance on applying the principles of the free market to solve the problems of the famine, ignoring the fact that even IF non-intervention and repealing the corn laws would drive food prices down, the Irish labouring classes had no spare income to buy food anyway, being almost totally dependent on potatos they had grown themselves on the land available, and therefore it didn’t matter HOW cheap food was, they still couldn’t afford it...