January 13th, 1847: The Young Irelanders attempt to revive the Repeal agitation. Having "reluctantly resigned all hope of reconciliation" with O'Connell, they meet in the Nation office - 4 D'Olier Street, Dublin - under the chairmanship of John Blake Dillon and issue an address in which they defend the principle of integrated education, denounce any alliance with the Whig government and deny they seceded from the Repeal Association last July on the issue of physical force. "Certain members of the committee were, on one pretence or another, excluded because they held opinions opposed to Mr O'Connell."
Divorced from the reality of Famine, the middle-class intellectuals advance nationhood as a panacea: "The accursed Union is yet bound like a yoke on our necks, crushing down the national spirit, corrupting the public morals, draining away the very blood and marrow of the human beings, who waste and pine in dreadful famine on our teeming soil."
James Fintan Lalor, who is emerging from seclusion in Queen's County, sees that under existing circumstances an agitation based exclusively on the national question is doomed to failure; ultimately, it must be coupled to the engine of agrarian revolution.
This policy is unacceptable to most of Young Ireland, which looks on nationality as a unifying force and still hopes to win resident landlords to the Repeal cause.
None the less, while G.H. Moore, of Moore Hall, and the sons of O'Connell are attending a levee in Dublin Castle, the Irish Confederation is being launched in the Rotunda, with a reluctant William Smith O'Brien at its head.
The Liberator is "sumptuously entertained" on a visit to Maynooth College, where he receives "the gratitude, the love, the confidence and the prayers of 500 faithful Irish ecclesiastical hearts". O'Connell asks has "the government no feelings of accountability? Englishmen have now supplied the world with a crowning proof of their utter incapability of dealing with the affairs of this country."
January 17th: Meanwhile, Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Caesar Otway reports on the state of Castlebar workhouse. Since November 21st, the paupers have been left without breakfast three days a week, the master having no fuel to cook it. This means the inmates receive only one meal on those days. The sick lack the diet prescribed by their medical attendant.
The Rev Mr Gibbons sums up: "Those able to creep are preferring to brave want abroad [outside] to dying by cold and hunger inside."
Collecting the poor rate is proving impossible in this western union. A vast number of the ratepayers are being reduced to pauperism, while landlords claim they are unable to produce rates due to non-payment of rents. Already the local proprietor, Lord Lucan, is being known as the "Great Exterminator".