‘No man died of famine’. Or so the Freeman’s Journal, the main nationalist newspaper in Dublin, claimed about the first year of the famine in an article published in April 1847. Historians often compare the success of Sir Robert Peel’s relief policies in avoiding excess mortality in his final year in government in 1845–46 favourably with the record of Lord John Russell’s ministry after 1846. In Russell’s period in office, the number of deaths accelerated, and excess mortality remained persistent even after potato yields began to recover from 1847 onwards. As far as the available data for workhouses goes, the number of deaths peaked as late as the winter of 1848–49. \ In the 1970s researchers found the question as to why Peel’s more generous approach to relief was discontinued in 1847 – just at the point that mass mortality surged – ‘one of the most surprising aspects of the Whig programme for Ireland’. Since then the explanation for the change that has become favoured among scholars is that adherence to ideology in the form of laissez-faire ideas held sway over Russell’s incoming government. As Cormac Ó Gráda summarised the state of academic opinion in 1999, the main cause of inadequate relief efforts after 1846 was ‘doctrinaire neglect’. He starkly contrasted ‘Peel’s determined action’ with ‘the harsh policies of Russell and Wood’.