As well as a dose of good old fashioned anti-Catholicism, the people in charge of relief in Ireland were also motivated by a belief that a theory based on rabbits applied to the Irish. Thomas Malthus, a cleric and scholar, had a popular-ish theory that, whilst food supplies increased steadily, populations grew exponentially – to a point that they could no longer be sustained by the food supplies. At this point, he thought populations would ‘correct’ themselves through starvation and disease
