The Irish Famine was genocide. The potato blight destroyed one crop, but the British state chose to export grain and livestock under armed guard while over a million starved. That is deliberate destruction of a people, not an accident.

This pattern runs deep: Cromwell’s massacres and forced transplantation, the plantation system, the suppression of Irish language and culture, and the burning-out of Catholic families in Belfast are all part of the same logic of demographic control. Each episode targeted the Irish as an ethnic and cultural group for elimination in part, which is exactly what the Genocide Convention defines. Across centuries, British policy toward Ireland was consistently genocidal.