February 14th, 1847: This Diary seeks to unearth the stories of the unrecorded. Churchyards are being enlarged throughout the country.
In Co Galway, a priest meets a man with a donkey and cart. On the cart there are three coffins, containing the bodies of his wife and two children. He is alone. On arrival in the graveyard, being weakened by starvation himself, he is unable to bury his dead.
February 15th: Next day, the priest finds ravenous dogs eating the bodies. He hires a man to dig the grave, in which what may be literally called their remains are placed.
Conditions are horrendous in the workhouses, 100 of which contain an excess number of inmates. Deaths number approximately 2,700 a week. In Gort, Co Galway, one quarter of the paupers are suffering from fever or dysentery. The Cork poorhouse, built for 2,000, houses 4,400 paupers in one day a hundred bodies" are consigned to a mass grave.
From Roscommon to west Cork the dead are being buried without coffins, frequently in unconsecrated ground.
In the House of Lords, the Earl of Lucan is censured for serving 6,000 processes on his Mayo estate.
Lord Brougham comments: "The landlord in Mayo had thought it necessary to serve his tenants with notice to quit in the midst of one of the most severe winters that had ever, been known, in the midst of the pestilence too which followed, as it generally did, in the train of famine."
What, he asks, is the result of such wholesale clearance? A great flood of destitute Irish has begun to pour across the Channel into Liverpool and Glasgow.
Harsh and pitiless, the Earl, Lucan replies that anyone who knows anything about Ireland realises the organisation of the country has broken down. Anyone who knows anything about Lucan is aware that he believes there is only one solution for Ireland - a large part of the population must disappear and he has declared that he "did not intend to breed paupers to pay priests".
His lordship is chairman of Castlebar board of guardians, whose workhouse children have "death like faces and drum stick arms".
To Lord Lucan the Famine horrors are convincing proof of the need to clear the land of people. He is getting nothing from his estates and considers he has done more than his share. Lucan's generosity in paying the expenses of Castlebar workhouse for a month is overshadowed by his policy of evicting small tenants.
Wherever the parish priest of Ballyhaunis, Eugene Coyne, goes he encounters "the poor crying and saying that they have no person to tell them what steps they are to take in order to procure food or relieve them unless I do it, so may God relieve them".