December 21st, 1846: Famine is raging in Skibbereen union. Since November 5th, 197 have died in the poorhouse, the principal cause of death being "the prevalence of a fatal diarrhoea, acting on the exhausted constitutions of the persons admitted".
Nearly loo bodies have been found in the lanes or in derelict cabins, half-eaten by rats.
The guardians want to open soup "shops", but the Poor Law Commission insists that relief is to be provided only inside the poorhouse.
The Cork Examiner describes the horrors of Famine: "Disease and death in every quarter - the once hardy population worn away to emaciated skeletons - fever, dropsy, diarrhoea and famine rioting in every filthy hovel and sweeping away whole families - the population perceptibly lessened - death diminishing the destitution - hundreds frantically rushing from their home and country, not with the idea of making fortunes in ether lands, but to fly from a scene of suffering and death - 400 men starving in one district having no employment, and 300 more turned off the public works in another district on a day's notice - 75 tenants ejected here, and a whole village in the last stage of destitution there - relief committees threatening to throw up their mockery of an office in utter despair - dead bodies of children flung into holes hastily scratched in the earth without shroud or coffin wives travelling 10 miles to beg the charity of a coffin for a dead husband, and bearing it back that weary distance ... every field becoming a grave and the land a wilderness."
James Hack Tuke reports on a Quaker visit to Co Donegal.
In Dunfanaghy, where the sea is teeming with fish, the people starve because they have no one to teach them to build seaworthy boats. In Dungloe, the crowds are crying with hunger and cold. While thousands of acres of reclaimable land lie neglected, thousands of anxious men are unable to procure work.
The Quakers find the inmates of Glenties workhouse half-starved and half-naked. "The day before they had but one meal of oatmeal and water, and at the time of our visit had not sufficient food in the house for the day's supply. The people complained bitterly and begged us to give them tickets for work, to enable them to leave the place and work on the roads. Some were leaving the house, preferring to die in their own hovels.
"Their bedding consisted of dirty straw, in which they were laid in rows on the floor; even as many as six persons being crowded under one rug; and we did not see a blanket at all. The rooms were hardly bearable for filth. The living and the dying were stretched side by side beneath the same miserable covering. No wonder that disease and pestilence were filling the infirmary, and that the pale, haggard countenance of the poor boys and girls told of sufferings, which it was impossible to contemplate without pity."