MAY 24th, 1847: The panic-driven exodus from Ireland gathers momentum.
Before the Famine, emigration did not come easily to the Irish. But now the people, terrified and desperate, flee a country which seems accursed.
The Cork Examiner notes: "The emigrants of this year are not like those of former ones: they are now actually running away from fever and disease and hunger, with money scarcely sufficient to pay passage for and find food for the voyage."
For the most part, however, only those with some stake in the land can afford to emigrate; for the landless poor, with no savings or assets, the cost of a passage to British North America - £2 - remains too high.
In the words of the general manager of the Provincial Bank of Ireland: "The best go, the worst remain."
Getting out of Ireland is a matter of life or death. Thomas Burke writes from Co Roscommon: "They are Dying like the choler Pigs as fast as they can Bury them and Some of their Remains does not be Bur[i]ed for 10 or 15 Days and the Dogs eating them some Buried in mats others in their clothes."
Letters anticipating money from America paint stark images: "Our fine country is abandoned by all the population"; "one ile of our Chapel would hold our Congregation on Sunday at present"; and "for the honour of our lord Jasus christ and his Blessed Mother hurry and take us out of this".
Bands of up to 700 people have been passing through Mayo on their way to the ports. The land, says the Mayo Constitution, is one vast waste; not a soul is to be seen working on the holdings of poor farmers.
The numbers emigrating daily from Tyrawley to America "is astonishing: whole villages are deserted and the houses locked up... Mayo will be ruined irretrievably." For six miles around Westport there are not 10 acres under cultivation.
The weak and destitute flock to institutions like, Ballinrobe workhouse, which is "one horrible charnel-house." The paupers are not the only victims of fever, however; the dying and the dead include the master, clerk, matron, doctor and chaplain.
The Catholic clergy and people walk in procession at the funeral of the rector of Westport, the Rev Pounden, who has died of disease caught while attending to the poor of his parish.
The priests of Derry have compiled a list from the parish registers of all deaths attributable to starvation between November 1846 and April 1847. They place this list in the diocesan archive, rolled in black crepe and inscribed:
"The records of the murders of the Irish peasantry, perpetrated in AD 1846-47, in the 9 and 10 Vic., under the name of economy during the administration of a professedly Liberal, Whig government of which Lord John Russell was Premier.