May 19th, 1846: The government Indian corn goes on sale in food depots. At 1d a pound, it is by far the cheapest food available and the depots ar besieged. But Whitehall in tends to restrict Irish relief to the corn purchased on the orders of Sir Robert Peel. It is to be sold to the people in a once of operation. Indignant relief committees are told that the aim of the depots is to control the price of food "they are not intended to feed the whole population and are not adequate to do so".
May 23rd: The Galway Vindicator reports starvation in the city. At the insistence of Father Peter Daly, a woman near her confinement is called before the local relief committee. She and her husband have not eaten for two days and he is now "ill through starvation".
Father Daly declares that if it was an isolated case, while he had a coat on his back he would allow no fellow creature to perish with hunger. But hundreds of his parishioners are in the same condition and he has no means of helping them.
The parish priest of Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, Father Martin Doyle reports that farmers are not sowing their usual amount of potatoes. "The poor, who heretofore made efforts to sow a little, seem now indifferent altogether."
The Morning Chronicle has sent a special reporter to Co Clare, who writes: "I cannot tell you how melancholy a sight it was to me, in walking and riding through the county to see a band of 30 or 40 people appear in sight young men, young women and children, with probably two or three carts containing a few articles of bedding, furniture etc. The men for the most part just rising into manhood - active, clean limbed young fellows, with every mark of intelligence and energy in their features."
They are on their way to the US, via Canada. It is difficult to conceive the force of the bonds which the peasant snaps asunder when he makes up his mind to quit the village of his forefathers.
The Sligo Champion observes that it is not the destitute who are swelling the tide of emigration but "the better classes of the peasantry", who have given up their farms while they have the money to enable them to emigrate.