Thank you Andrew, you make the points I was going to make, but nno-one got back to me with the bad 'we' did.  the Irtish were generally simple and poor, and they lived in times when the simple and poor were less well regarded andf were certainly not looked after.  In ireland you had a farm and nothing to live on, here in England you lived in a slum with 5 families and bred children to be killed in the pits or the factories.  If the typhus didn't get you first.
They used the potatoes that were spare to make chips to put on their shoulders.