From http://www.allsands.com/history/events/irishgreatfami_bim_gn.htm
The British government and the British and Irish Protestant landowners still required the Irish peasants and laborers to pay their rent for the land they could not work due to the blight and the hunger upon them. In a lush island surrounded by water teaming with fish and land that fattened pig and cattle alike, how could one failed crop cause a Famine? According to British law, Irish Catholics could not apply for fishing or hunting licenses. Their pigs and cattle were sent to England to feed the British and to export for trade, while the landlords kept the fine cuts for themselves. Ireland was part of the British Empire, the most powerful empire in the world at that time - yet the British government stood by and did nothing to help their subjects overcome this hardship. In our time, an enforced famine such as this would be labeled genocide yet in the 1800s it was merely an unfortunate tragedy. As defined in the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1987 Genocide Convention Implementation Act, the legal definition of genocide is any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, including by killing its members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The British policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ireland from 1845 to 1850 constituted “genocide” against the Irish People as legally defined by the United Nations. A quote by John Mitchell (who published The United Irishman) states that “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”
Sounds like genocide to me. They didn’t even mention the blockades. They have blood on their hands.
Anybody who thinks the British had a "policy of mass starvation" is not thinking straight. The early Victorian governments did not have the administrative machinery for dealing with a widespread famine; they made honest efforts at relief but were thwarted by bureacratic snarls and stupidity (to expect the Irish to eat maize which they had never seen and didn't know how to cook was absurd). The government DID learn from its mistakes and later British relief efforts (in India, for example) were better organized and far more effective.
As I noted earlier, the Irish system of land tenure and the one-crop system was behind most of the problems, absentee landlords didn't help but the idea that they were (a) exclusively protestant (b) deliberately starving their tenants is simply untrue.
I've got Irish on both sides of my pedigree, plus I married a man whose maternal grandfather got off the boat from Cork. But I read history with a critical eye (it was my undergraduate major) and don't believe every rabble rouser just because they (a) claim to support the Irish; but (b) more likely just hate the English.