It seems like such a contradiction to me, that in one of the richest agricultural lands in the world, with plenty of crops to feed the population that so many people were dying of hunger. Parliament's next idea was to force the English landowners in Ireland to bear the cost of the famine. The way the landlord's dealt with the situation was to ship the poor tenants out of Ireland and to dump them on the United States or Canada. This became the age of the 'coffin ships'. The only means of improving your situation is to leave the country.
Many people have said that is something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
This is an understatement in this situation. Starving from an artificially created famine, and disease ridden because of it, the poor tenants were easy bait. The cruelty of the landlords is well known, but life aboard the coffin ships is hardly documented and the ultimate fate of the emigrants is rarely adverted to. To put it simply, the route from Ireland to Canada is littered with the bodies and graves of Irish tenant farmers. It seems to me that when one country invades and conquers another country, it should advance the culture and help the people.