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Potential Question From Hell for Mark Weisbrot

In Tim Pat Coogan’s new history of the Irish Famine, The Famine
Plot , he compares Ireland then and now-

“The influence of the unacknowledged portion of the legacy (of the famine years) is the
stark warning to today’s Republic of Ireland’s citizenry of what can
happen when a country has no government of its own and must rely for
its sustenance on the droppings from the table of a wealthy neighbor.
Ireland’s tragedy at the time of the Famine was that, through
conquest, she had no government of her own.

As this is written, Ireland…..has lost its economic sovereignty and …currently stands in a dole queue in Brussels to receive the handouts of the Europeans and the
International Monetary Fund. The famine bell does not merely toll for those who died during the nineteenth century; it has resonance for those who live in the twenty-first.”

In your report Macroeconomic Policy Advice and the Article IV Consultations
the IMF recommendations for Ireland include ““limiting
tax relief on mortgage interest,” “raising social security
contributions,” as well as the possibility of introducing a
property tax” among other plans, most of which seem to remove cash from the working
class of Ireland and make ownership of property expensive if not
impossible mirroring in part the English policies of the century
leading up to the great Famine where many Irish farmers were driven
off their land by punitive rent and debt schemes, leaving many in
penury to emigrate or starve.

Are today’s IMF policies of austerity for Ireland going to create a new Famine?

Thank you