January 11th, 1847: William Edward Forster joins his father and a Quaker delegation in Co Mayo. He finds Westport is "like what we read of in beleaguered cities, its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger struck look a mob of starved, almost naked women, around the poorhouse, clamouring for soup tickets; our inn, the head quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work".
Connemara has changed since a previous visit. In Leenane the boatmen are pale and spiritless, "so different from their wild Irish fun when I made the same excursion before". On that occasion one woman whose cabin he visited did say: "There will be nothing for us but to lie down and die." He tried to give her hope of English aid. Alas, however, "her prophecy has been but too true. Out of a population of 240, I found 13 already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons; the men stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children ing with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand."
The young Mr Forster is struck by the patience of these sufferers. In Bundorragha men have been at work for up to five weeks on the roads. Due to the negligence or mistake of some officers, no wages were received until this morning - but still only with pay for a few.
"It was wonderful, but yet most touching, to see the patient, quiet look of despair with which the others received the news that they were still left unpaid. I doubt whether it would have been easy to find a man who would have dared to bear the like announcement to starving Englishmen."
In Clifden, "of burials without coffins we heard many instances; and to those who know the almost superstitious reverence of the Irish for funeral rites, they tell a fearful story. In two cases, my father told me he had had applications for money not to keep the people alive, but for coffins to bury them.
Rumours about the "arming the peasantry" are hardening - many English hearts. But James Hack Tuke, on returning from the west, writes that it is the sons of large farmers "who buy guns for the protection of property; the starving, even if weapons were put into their hands, have not the strength left to use them.
The Northern Whig records that "it would be impossible to exaggerate the awful destitution that exists in the town of Clones and neighbourhood... No day passes but some victims of this frightful calamity are committed to the grave.
"The number of deaths in Clones workhouse during the last week has been 25 at the lowest... The workhouse contains upwards of 100 over the regulated number, and most of them were all but starved before they obtained admission. Their exhausted frames were then unable to bear the food doled out to them, and hence they are at this moment dying in dozens.