According to Joel Mokyr in Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the Irish Economy, 1800-1850, the pre-famine Irish were comparatively well-off in terms of physical health compared with other Europeans of the time. One academic estimate (Bourke & Austin, 1968) suggests that the average adult male in Ireland consumed at least 3,800 calories per day, which would have been enough to sustain most lifestyles, and a number of scholars have agreed that the pre-famine Irish generally had access to necessary vitamins and protein (Connell, 1950; Burton, 1968; Crawford, 1978). The potato made up the bulk of the Irish diet in weight and calories, but most of the population also consumed milk, butter, oats, and eggs.

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Regarding your question about whether or not people at the time seemed healthy according to contemporary accounts, all available evidence seems to indicate that they were particularly physically fit (although these accounts are likely also influenced by English prejudice towards the Irish and tendency to view them as more animalistic than themselves). Arthur Young (1779) described the health of the Irish glowingly: "When I see [their] well formed bodies. . .their men athletic and their women beautiful, I know not how to believe them subsisting on an unwholesome food." Mason William Shaw's Parochial Surveys of Ireland collected between 1814-1819 overwhelmingly reported that the Irish were "healthy, vigorous, and robust," and other yearly surveys from Hall & Hall (1825-1840) and GL Smyth (1844-1849) maintained that the Irish peasantry was healthier than that anywhere else in Europe. Regarding height, Robert Kane (1845) reported the average Irish height as 70 inches while the English average was 68.5 in and Belgian 68 in. Similarly, he found that the Irish were stronger (as measured by a spring dynamometer) than the English or Belgians.

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As you've said, the typical Malthusian narrative describes pre-famine Irish as showing no signs of undernourishment in their fecundity, and the nation-wide population was certainly growing up until the disaster. According to Kenneth Connell's The Population of Ireland 1750-1850 (1950) , Ireland's population growth was higher than all other European countries apart from Finland, Hungary, and England. However, Cormac O Grada tempers this narrative in The Great Irish Famine (1989) by demonstrating that the growth rate was actually declining from 1800 to 1845, partially due to smallpox and typhus, and partially due to a measured decrease in marriage rates. Typhus particularly, it appears, was worse in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe, which could be influenced by nutrition but was probably more heavily affected by other factors (weather, demography, economics).

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Overall, it seems that the Irish were healthy and well-developed by the standards of the time.

This was very interesting and informative. Thank you!