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This is a fairly old and hot debate - a fellow named Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote a book called The Great Hunger in 1963 which details many of these claims of genocide. The problem is that he, and the screed above, left out some pretty important details in an effort to give extra weight to their accusations.

For one thing, primogeniture was not an Irish custom in terms of land inheritance; instead, parcels owned by a father were apportioned equally to all sons, and they to theirs. By the 1840s this resulted in a plethora of very small holdings which were only barely capable of supporting their families, and this (among other reasons, including dietary changes) resulted in an overdependence on a single, relatively new, and not genetically diverse, food-crop, the potato. When the Blight came around (no mention of that above, incidentally...) the Irish were far more vulnerable to a single crop failure than their immediate ancestors were.

For another, and the British certainly aren't devoid of blame here, the custom of absentee landlordship meant that management of these small-holdings was conducted by agents of agents, and the real human cost was not well communicated to the actual land-holder once the tenant got behind in the rent. Eviction was a cold, mechanical process of economics, and the bodies alongside the road weren't visible to the British, Scots, or Scots-Irish landlords. And it took awhile for the magnitude of the problem to be evident over the religious and political partisan screaming, much of which was even worse than the stuff quoted above.

There's a pretty good book that examines the claims made in The Great Hunger against the intense criticism it engendered, and against what has been learned since of such matters as grain exportation and relief efforts. It's here:

Click here

My own opinion - insensitive, surely. Hateful, definitely. Organized genocide, probably not. IMHO, of course.

One other thing - call me a pedant, but this usage irritates me:

Taylor’s analysis of the Great Starvation seems to beg the question - was it genocide?

This is NOT "begging the question" although it may raise the question. Begging a question is a logical fallacy which results when an assumption is made that a question has already been answered. "When did you stop beating your wife" 'begs the question' of whether the person ever started. Harrumph!