May 23th, 1846: The Board of Works, hopelessly understaffed and deluged by applications, is already overwhelmed. While the Treasury has allotted £50,000, applications for works to cost £800,000 have been received.
The authority which Charles Trevelyan exercised over the distribution of food for relief, through the Commissariat, is now applied to the administration of public works; item by item, Irish relief plans come under Treasury scrutiny.
Furthermore, public works are to be "of such a nature as will not benefit individuals in a greater degree than the rest of the community and therefore are not likely to be called for from any motive but the professed one of giving employment." It sounds like a road leading to nowhere.
Commissary General Routh observes: "Something more direct, more immediate is necessary.
Ireland experiences a kind of famine each year between the old and new crops. The height of the season of "normal distress", greatly intensified by the potato failure, is approaching. In many parts of the country, holdings are left uncultivated as crowds flock to relief 1 committees eager for paid employment. Larger numbers than can be employed force themselves on to the public works.
The Cork Reporter finds the street where the relief committee meets impassable. Bands of half clothed, half famished men walk up and down, "silently appealing to public commiseration" and kept at bay by the police.
Their haggard looks give no idea of privations suffered secretly in lanes and garrets. But the poor tenement dwellers are comforted by the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
The relief committee of Clonrush, Co Galway, has obtained £65 from the Lord Lieutenant. The committee says there are no resident gentry in the area but myriads of squatters, "the refuse and evicted tenantry of other districts.
"There are 236 families, amounting to 1,307 individuals, totally unemployed, without provisions and therefore daily becoming victims of famine."
May 27th: In Co Wicklow, Elizabeth Smith and a large party picnic on the top of Blackmore Hill - where rebels camped in 98. "One of the pleasantest sights of the day was our group of attendants over the fragments men who never taste meat twice in a year truly enjoying what we had left of our luxuries; the saddest was . . . a little ragged, frightened boy who had collected on a stone the shakings out of the table cloth, and who was piling up crusts of bread with one hand and holding bare bones to his mouth with the other - the impersonation of famine."
May 30th: Father Thomas O'Carroll, of Clonoulty, Co Tipperary, notes in his diary that the crops are very promising and people are beginning to feel less apprehensive with respect to the anticipated failure of the potato crop this year too.