Buildings and roads yeah. Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then, this was the time of the New Poor Law (oft called the starvation act) and the workhouses.
Being poor was considered a major personal failing.
Yeah, it's definitely a change to the narrative for people outside of Ireland. The podcast opened my eyes to it, and also the Famine song by Sinead O'Connor
FTA (for anyone's benefit):
> In London, the realization that this was not a temporary crisis coincided with the coming to power of a party with a deep ideological commitment to free trade. The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.
> The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.
It would be darkly poetic if Brexit brought these same conditions to the UK as a whole if they had crop failures one year.
(To make it clear for the pedant literal crowd - I'm not saying it's a good thing, nor do I want it to happen. I'm simply commenting on how poetic it would be.)
> Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then
That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.
Nope! I’m not going to claim it was great before, but Britain was actively regressing as the Whigs took control and followed the ideas of Malthus and Bentham. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (new poor law) was specifically design to check on and significantly downgrade the body of old poor law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conolly%27s_Folly
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/irelands-famine-follie...
Blindboy did an interesting podcast on this:
https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/pineapplefolly