December 20th, 1847: As the year draws to a close the poor face a new threat besides famine and fever, death through exposure. The homes of evicted tenants are levelled to prevent them returning. They huddle in scailps, made by placing their cabin roofs on ditches, there to perish not only of hunger, but also from cold.
"How I wish the real sufferings of the people could reach the ears of the rich of this life," writes a priest from Clifden. But the satiated never understand the emaciated. The destitute starve in one world, the land-owning classes inhabit another.
James Maher, a parish priest in Queen's County and uncle of Paul Cullen, rector of the Irish College in Rome, describes the Famine deaths as a "hecatomb" or holocaust. If priests speak against oppression they run the risk of being accused of incitement to murder. Denouncing the 16 ounces of food given to the paupers in Carlow workhouse, Father Maher comments: "Talk indeed of a conspiracy against life! Here we have it . . ."
The inmates of Sligo poorhouse are "actually beginning to starve," a Poor Law inspector reports.
Bishop John Ryan of Limerick, while condemning agrarian violence, denounces the upper classes for being "cold and callous to the voice of humanity . . . untouched by the cries of famine and pestilence, the wailings of hunger, the lamentations of women and children".
Sir Vere de Vere, of Curraghchase, is an honourable exception. He has reduced the rents of his tenantry; he plans to provide employment for the labourers on his estate; and, "under the directions of Miss Vere, work suited to them will be furnished to the labourers' wives".
The labourers are worse off than last year, according to the Tipperary Vindicator. Hundreds of families in the county are now reduced to living on one meal of turnips a day. "At the market cross of Nenagh, from one to 200 men may be seen every morning in the vain hope of getting a day's work."
After standing sometimes for hours in the wet and cold, they are compelled to return to their homes to hear the cries of famishing children. In Templemore, however, a humane farmer gives three acres of turnips to his neighbours.
The parish priest of Duagh, Co Kerry, informs Tralee guardians that there are 13,500 destitute people in his district.
Father Thomas Walsh, of Rosmuc, says his parishioners are like spectres without hair, the result of fever, or clothes except for a few flannels in awful weather. Galway city is swamped by a tide of evicted cottier paupers from Connemara.
Shortly before Christmas, three villages are reduced to ruins in the Mullet Peninsula. The evicted families implore the landlord's "drivers" to allow them to remain a short while "as it was so near the time of festival, but they would not . . . "
Concludes next week