Voices From The Great Famine In Ireland 1845-1847

Today Ireland and England are friends, (and that of course is a good and great thing) but its long history was one of bitter enemies. The harsh facts behind the great famine, despite the lack lustre attempts at famine relief, lies in the penal laws that kept Ireland in servitude to England incased in  the perceived notion within the British upper classes then, that the Irish were no better than primitive apes and to be treated as slaves.

                                                  A British cartoon of the day from 1847

That aside, with all this came the marketing skill to sell this famine to its friends and alliances as a genuine natural disaster rather than the mass starvation that it really was. It is an inescapable fact that for every year of the famine there was record levels of wheat, pigs and cattle being exported from Ireland to Britain as over a million Irishmen, women and children died, and starvation is the cruellest death of all. It is also an irony that today England stands as our largest trading partner. They are also our bodyguard should an aggressor or despot from elsewhere decide to attack. It is another fact that any hardy anti-brit has to accept whether he or I like it or not. 

Below are some of the testimony of witnesses from that dark time  

Barry Clifford  

"I am sorry to state that... the prospect of the potato crop this year (1846) is even more distressing than last year- in that the disease has appeared earlier and its ravages are more extensive”

“An inquest was held by Dr Sweetman on three bodies. The first was that of two very young children whose mother had already died of starvation. Her death became known only when the two children toddled into the village of Schull. They were crying of hunger and complaining that their mother would not speak to them for four days; they told how she was 'as cold as a flag'. The remains had been knawed at by rats.”

                                                         A drawing of the famine 1847

"These poor creatures, the country poor, are now homeless and without lodgings; no one will take them in; they sleep out at night. The citizens are determined to get rid of them. They take up stray beggars and vagrants and confine them at night in the market place, and the next morning send them out in a cart five miles from the town and there they are left and a great part of them perish for they have no home to go to.”

"Among the thousands I meet, I have seen no one who had clothing corresponding to the bitter cold which is experienced; on the contrary what is beheld is emaciated, pale, shivering, worn-out farming people, wrapt in the most wretched rags, standing or crawling in the snow, bare-footed" 

"Between today and yesterday, I saw the corpses of a girl, a man and an old woman who died of hunger. This day I saw a woman sinking into a faint, while I was giving out relief at Pullathomas to some peculiarly wretched families. Placed in the midst of a starving and mendicant population, whom... they [the Relief workers] are unable to supply with enough even to support nature, they are liable to continual charges of unfairness, partiality, indifference or want of judgement. It should be remembered that those who thus labour for the poor do so at a great sacrifice of time and trouble, and are in continual danger of being attacked by the pestilence which rages around them." 

                                                Another image of the famine in 1847

"In the bedrooms we entered there was not a mattress of any kind to be seen; the floors were strewed with a little dirty straw, and the poor creatures were thus littered down as close together as might be, in order to get the largest possible under one miserable rug - in some cases six children, for blankets we did not see"