March 15th, 1847: Two west Cork clergymen are a welcome contrast to the bigoted Mr Nangle. The Rev Richard Townsend, of Skibbereen, does not see the Famine in terms of divine wrath; he blames British government policy for much of the suffering and describes the local population as victims of "a most mistaken national policy on whom the principles of political economy have been carried out in practice to a murderous extent".
Of the parish of Schull, where deaths in a population of 18,000 number 50 a day, the Rev Dr Traill writes: "Frightful and fearful is the havoc around me ... the aged, who with the young - neglected, perhaps, amidst the widespread destitution - are almost without exception swollen and ripening for the grave."
One visitor mistakes children of nine and 10 "for decrepit old women, their faces wrinkled, their bodies bent and distorted with pain, their eyes looking like those of a corpse".
A commander of the Navy is taken on a tour of Schull by the rector, Dr Traill. J. Cruford Caffin finds three-quarters of the villagers are reduced to skeletons: "the men in particular, all their physical power wasted away; they have all become beggars". He finds people dead or dying in every one of the 30 cottages visited.
The first house that Cdr Caffin enters is above the nary in appearance and comfort. Young people are crouched over a fire, while the parents lie in another room. The father's voice is gone; the mother's cries for mercy and food are heart-rending. The family kept their cow and sheep in the house at night, until they were stolen during the day.
In another cabin the visitors find an emaciated daughter keening over the body of her mother. In an adjoining hovel are three children belonging to the daughter, whose husband has abandoned her. She doesn't know what to do with her mother's corpse, being too exhausted to remove it herself.
The door of the next cabin is blocked with dung. An old woman bursts into tears on seeing the kindly Dr Traill. Shea has been unable to sleep since a stranger died in her bed. The passer-by asked to be allowed to rest and died an hour later of exhaustion. Her body lay in this hovel of six feet square for four days.
The old woman had some money. She asked neighbours' children to buy her food, but they were too taken up with themselves. She now wishes "to depart and be at peace, and had blocked up the door that she might not be disturbed".
About 600 people have been buried in Swinford paupers' plot this spring without "coffin or sermon or anything denoting respect for the dead".
At a by-election in Galway, the government candidate defeats a Repealer by four votes (510 to 506), due to "enormous bribery, horrible perjury, unlimited exercise of landlord intimidation", according to the Nation.