Lol the chatgpt response. Where you made light of it was posting the Samwise GIF. It wasn't a famine, it was a genocide. We call it An Gorta Mór. Nobody would be reflexively associating the Irish with potatoes if it wasn't for the genocide. It's like making jokes about the indigenous of Turtle Island and diseased blankets or Jews and ovens.

Your very surface level regurgitation of history is pretty reductionist. The Irish of the time were subsisting mostly of potatoes - a relatively new crop - because the British priced them out of the rest of the produce and livestock that they were farming. They certainly didn't choose to do this and it definitely wasn't ideal... try living almost entirely off potatoes and see how you feel after a while.

By the time the blight hit, the British had been applying the colonial genocidal tactics that they later used in America, India and others on the Irish for centuries. Yes about 1 million died and about 1 million left during the period of blight but do you think they 1850 hit and everything went back to normal? Nope. The country and its people were completely broken. What was left of our culture after centuries of British oppression was all but destroyed. Someone who had visited Ireland before and after an gorta said that there was no longer any music in Ireland. Their spirit was crushed, workforce decimated and they memory of family and friends slowly dying with grass stains on their mouth didn't just vanish.

The population continued to decline for a hundred years, going down to 4 million... half of what it was before the blight. To this day it still hasn't recovered. Many of us refuse to refer to it as "the potato famine" because we want to disassociate the agricultural genocide of our people with a root vegetable.

If Irish people make jokes about potatoes think of it in the same way as African Americans using the "n" word. We've learnt to deal with our pain using humour which is why we're great craic but there's unimaginable amounts of suffering under there. An Gorta Mór was not that long ago, our country is still occupied and if you go around with this "ask the Irish about potatoes" nonsense we'll definitely think you a cunt.