Hard Times attack on laisser-faire economics inspired by Irish potato famine?

I have just been reading a bit about the Irish potato famine from 1845-51. Dickens rarely mentions Ireland or the Irish, so far as I know, but he must have heard what was going on. In Hard Times, written in 1854, Dickens attacks laisser-faire economics, advocated by Adam Smith (I believe), after whom Tom Gradgrind named one of his sons. Since Tom Gradgrind named another his sons after Robert Malthus, I assume he was no fan of his neither. Robert Malthus believed each species of animal increased in numbers until its food supply ran out, and that this applied to humans too. Dickens is very harsh towards the Houses of Parliament. This interesting. One of the reasons that the British government did not do enough to relieve the Irish potato famine was that it believed in laisser-faire economics, i.e. leaving alone, letting the invisible hand do its work. This was particularly the case after Robert Peel was defeated by Lord John Russell in the 1846 general election. Robert Peel had brought in limited aid, for example American maize and Indian corn, and had initiated work projects to enable Irish labourers to pay for it. This relief stopped with the new government. The Irish population had increased 5 million in 1800 to 8 million in 1840, but had not undergone the same sort of industrialisation as England had, and the majority of the population still lived and worked on the land, in ever-more subdivided plots. When the potato blight came along and the Irish started to starve, Lord Russell and his cabinet probably thought, well, that's Robert Malthus for you.