I don't think that was the problem. I read somewhere that the wheat being grown in Ireland was not human edible - only animals could digest it - so it made sense to export it to where the animals were and use the money to buy food.

The english have responsibility in that they should have organised a proper emergency response to a famine in a country they controlled, and because they set conditions for the famine by running a shitty exploitative economy there before the crops failed. It is always the long term shittyness that reaches a tipping point.

In this case, I would say Germany set conditions for their current troubles by shutting down nuclear and accepting dependency on Russian gas. The EU has an energy security strategy, and this was clearly identified as a risk, but in my opinion the German government is captured by its heavy industries and they had a competitive advantage in gas power plants so that's what they built.