oh that's easy....England hoarded all their other produce, they had taken off with livestock years before that. Food was literally rotting on the docks waiting to be shipped to England. All that we were left to subsist on were potatoes.
I lost too many family members in the Potato Famine.
"The Great Famine or the Great Hunger (Irish: An Gorta Mór or An Drochshaol) is the name given to the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. The Famine was due to the appearance of "the (potato) Blight" (also known as phytophthora)– the oomycete that almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority of the island's population. The immediate after-effects of The Famine continued until 1851. Much is unrecorded, and various estimates suggest that between 500,000 and more than one million people died in the three years from 1846 to 1849 as a result of hunger or disease. About 12% of the population. Some two million refugees are attributed to the Great Hunger (estimates vary), and much the same number of people emigrated to Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia.