That, the rent system, and the British actively preventing aid (not at their expense!) really turned a bad situation into a full-blown genocide.

The Irish at the time also grew wheat and meat and everything else that was grown on the British Isles back then. The problem was the colonising English owned all the land and exported all the food

Potatoes were the emergency food, the only thing Irish could grow and eat

When Irish were dying of starvation the farms they were forced to work were growing plenty of wheat and sheep