MORE than 150 years after the great potato famine in Ireland, a university lecturer in Preston has claimed that Irish and British merchants indirectly contributed to the deaths of 1,000,000 Irish people by exporting food which could have fed millions.

In a new book, The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Rebellion and Ideology, Christine Kinealy, a lecturer in Irish History at the University of Central Lancashire, debunks the popular myth that the suffering of the Irish people was unavoidable after blight devastated the potato crop in 1845, or that the British Government was largely to blame for the tragedy.

After months of painstaking research examining the records of ship cargoes stored at Liverpool, the author uncovered some surprising facts about the export of food from Ireland.

For example, in 1846, some 186,000 oxen, 6,000 calves, 259,000 sheep and lambs and 480,000 pigs were shipped to Britain. And in 1846 and 1847, some 430,000 tonnes of grain was exported - enough to feed 2,000,000 people in Ireland for 16 months.

"The trade in eggs was also massive and remained buoyant throughout the 1840s," she said. "By 1850 an estimated 90 million eggs were being imported into Liverpool each year from Ireland. Even allowing for a massive shortfall in potatoes - which accounted for only 20 per cent of agricultural produce - immense quantities of food stuffs left Ireland between 1845 and 1851."

Kinealy's theory is that the Irish merchants, together with British counterparts, followed a commercial ideology which was against any intervention in the market place.

"In short, human life was sacrificed to ideology and, more importantly, high profits," she said.

Kinealy also argues that Irish historians have deliberately played down the significance of Irish food exports between 1845 and 1851, and the famine itself because they didn't want to fuel republicanism.

The famine set a precedent for international aid, with donations coming from the Sultan of Turkey, the Tsar or Russia, ex slaves in the Caribbean, native Americans, the Pope and even Queen Victoria, who is still remembered as the Famine Queen in Ireland.