April 5th, 1847: The Treasury orders a 20 per cent reduction in the numbers employed on relief works.
This policy is further evidence of England's indifference, according to William Smith O'Brien MP, who estimates that 240,000 Irish people have died unnecessarily of starvation. Unofficially, the constabulary puts the death total during the winter of 1846-7 at 400,000. Those who survived the terrible winter are dismissed before the of soup kitchens.
The Nation does not charge Lord John Russell with wilful murder. But "we say of the Whig premier and his fellows this holding the interests of England, her merchants and people, superior to our lives, they did not endeavour to save the latter, unless where the attempt would not injure the former; and that, through ignorance of the means best adapted for the preservation of the lives of our countrymen and also through ignorance of their necessities, this foreign cabinet first thrust upon us a system of `relief' which was a system of gradual killing, and has now changed it secondly into one of killing at fixed periods so many per cent ...
"It may attribute to an all just God the sorrows it has inflicted upon us - nay, Him it may blasphemously arraign for the results of its own robbing imperialism, its ignorance, its incompetence and its brutish insensibility."
A gentler voice, the Quaker William Bennett, is an eyewitness to the suffering in Co, Mayo: "We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs, on removing a portion of the filthy covering, perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stages of starvation."
An old woman lying on straw moans piteously, imploring the visitors to give her something. "Above her, on something like a ledge, was a young woman with sunken cheeks - a mother I have no doubt - who scarcely raised her eyes in answer to our inquiries, but pressed her hand upon her forehead, with a look, of unutterable anguish and despair. Many cases were widows, whose husbands had recently been taken off by the fever, and thus their only pittance, obtained from the public works, was entirely cut off. In many cabins the husbands or sons were prostrate under that horrid disease [typhus] in which first the limbs and then the body swell most frightfully and finally burst."
Reflecting that thousands are dying of hunger and its kindred horrors, Bennett asks: "Is this to be regarded in the light of a divine dispensation and punishment? Before we can safely arrive at such a conclusion, we must be satisfied that human agency and legislation, individual oppressions and social relationships have had no hand in it."