Now, dig back to recent history\\\'s potato famine in Ireland, where a blight knocked out the whole crop, which consisted of just a few varieties, and millions of people died of starvation.

And a strange penultimate chapter on the Irish potato famine in which the potato blight is the villain, responsible for many deaths and massive emigration (shades of McNeill?).

It was the tragedy of the Irish potato famine of 1845, in which 1m Irish perished when the potato crop on which they subsisted succumbed to blight.