I just explained to you that in Ireland there was no free market in land. Perhaps you are unaware of this fact: land is an important factor in agriculture.
I also just explained to you that there was no free market in grain, but a strong protectionist policy.
In an environment where grain is artifically expensive and land is artificially expensive due to market intervention, the irish unskilled laborer was forced to rent land and then grow on that land the most efficient crop he could: highly caloric potatoes which required less soil and less maintenance.
had there been a free market in land and a free market in grain, ireland would have had a diversified economy.
Ireland was a very densely populated country by the standards of the day, and should have been as urbanised as England was.
Population density in Ireland in 1800 was 140 per sq mi. In England it was 165.
There is no reason that Ireland "should have been" as urbanized as England, given the fact that it was kept as a rural fiefdom for exploitation by England as a matter of policy.
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.
You speak as if if in 1800 Irish and England were equally industrialized nations with separate economies, and that the Act of Union combined the economies for the first time and caused the collapse of a thriving Irish industrial base.
That's ridiculous.
From 1690 to 1800 the Irish were an entirely subject people - burdened with Penal Laws that kept 80-90% of the Irish population from receiving higher education, from voting, from practicing certain trades, from forming trade organizations and commercial societies, from purchasing land, from serving as commissioned officers in the military, etc.
Ireland's economy was similarly subject to England's.
Ireland's poverty was not the result of the operation of a free market, but the calculated result of a consciously interventionist economic policy.
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.
Again, you speak as if there was a thriving Irish middle class in 1800 comprised of successful artisans, factory workers and yeoman farmers. A select few Protestants lived that way - but 80-90% of the Irish population were subsistence tenant farmers in 1800 and in 1846.
The overwhelming majority of the Irish had never "depended on worker's wages" - they depended on how many potatoes they could pry out of their tiny rented plot.
The Act Of Union had no effect on Ireland except in these particulars: the Protestant landed gentry were stripped of their disproportional power in the government of the Empire, the UK took over direct control of military matters in Ireland, and customs on some goods were phased out.
Without subsidies, intervention and protectionism. Over-populated Ireland, so dependent on the potato, was heading for disaster
Direct and punishing intervention in the land and grain markets created the crisis in the first place. Piling more chains on the Irish economy would have created no relief.
Trevelyan’s insistance on applying the principles of the free market to solve the problems of the famine
Trevelyan did not insist on applying "free market principles" to the famine at all! At this point you are just inventing stuff out of whole cloth.
Trevelyan was not an advocate of free markets and was the administrator of a state-owned famine relief bureaucracy - a bureaucracy which quite famously failed to stop a brutal famine through its interventionist efforts.
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...
Because of the famine people sold family heirlooms, slaughtered horses and milk cows, and bartered their possessions and their homes in exchange for soup and bread.
Approximately two million people survived hand-to-mouth in this way, while one million died and another million fled the country (and it cost money to travel from Ireland to America and Australia).
If grain prices had been twice the price of potatoes instead of almost ten times the price, there would have been much hardship but not much starvation the first year of the famine.
In the second year, with tax incentives for growing grain, there would have been no famine and less hardship than the year previous.
There would not have been three years of unrelenting famine while fields lay fallow because potatoes couldn't grow and grain was still protected.
To sum up:
The Catholic population of Ireland in 1846 had spent 150 years under a regime of strict government regulation that prohibited them from participating in the market for land and prohibited them from most areas of the labor market - leaving them, effectively, only the fields of tenant agriculture and domestic service.
In addition to this, the government intervened directly in the agricultural market to dictate the prices of grains - leaving the Catholic Irish with the potato as the only crop that matched their meager rented plots and their caloric needs adequately.
When the crop failed, the government considered removing its strict intervention in the agricultural market and decided to only do it piecemeal. As a countermeasure to this maintenance of its interventionist policy on grain prices, the government intervened by means of a Famine Relief Board that would distribute food and clothing according to the dictates of a government bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, like most bureaucracies, was very inefficient.
As a result, 25% of the population died and 25% of the population fled.
The Irish who best survived this 150 year unbroken history of systematic government intervention in their economy did so by fleeing to America - a much less economically interventionist country, where there was plenty to eat and a wide range of jobs.
Some 'good-hearted' protestants in Ireland took to offering the starving Catholics food for renouncing their faith and converting to the protestant flavor du jour.
What an opportunistic plot to vanquish the native papists, they must have thought, after centuries of failure that wave after wave of soldiers, landlords, UK decrees, etc. couldn't accomplish.
Those good for nothing Irish!
Charles Trevelyan was a fierce advocate of laissaiz faire economics.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/hunger.htm
The reason that so many food ships were leaving Ireland laiden with food was that, in the absence of any attempt by the government to purchase this food (thus horror of horrors, intervening in the precious free market) it was far more profitable to sell it on the overseas market than distribute it amongst starving Irish labourers.
Trevalyan advocated a free-market solution to the crisis that involved as little intervention as possible and hoping beyond hope that charity would be enough to cover the shortfall. He, and all the other free-market fanatics, were catastrophically wrong and people died as a result.
Just out of curiousity, if you were Trevelyan, how would you, presumably a firm believer yourself in free-market economics as the British Whig government of the 1840s and 50s were, have solved the crisis? More libertarianism, or by decisive government intervention?