May 31st, 1847: The clergy appeal frantically for help on behalf of their people, who are "dying a slow but dire death".
Father Eugene Coyne writes from Clifden, Co Galway, that scarcely a day passes without two or three people being found dead: "I have often seen from eight to 10 corpses meet at a churchyard in a small segment of this parish, and the persons bearing them to the grave had more the appearance of walking skeletons than human beings."
In Ballinasloe, Father F. Whyte has observed "health, strength, youth, childhood and - old age - all withering before the face of this frightful Famine. To its victims I broke `the bread of life'; the bread that perisheth I could not command; and frequently, indeed, I have wept bitterly in quitting the abode of misery, unable to aid its wretched inmates."
Father Whyte has just returned from administering the last rites to a man aged 40 dying in his cabin. His wife was boiling weeds for their three children. "We were getting the relief meal, we were struck off and now we have only these weeds to eat," she explains. "Good heavens," he exclaims, "can it be possible that man, created in the image of the living God, is forced to live on weeds."
The poor have lost all hope, writes Mary Theresa Collis from the Presentation Convent, Dingle, Co Kerry. "The children of our school are shocking to behold. They are in a filthy, ragged condition. They and their parents have parted with every decent article they had to purchase food.
"We would recoil from their appearance did not compassion for their miseries induce us to attend to them. Their night and day clothing is the same. Many of them have parted with their bed covering, laying it in the earth with the bodies of their deceased members.
The relief given by the Sisters of Mercy to starving children in Kinsale, Co Cork, has been of immense benefit, Father D. Murphy avers; "for the past five months, hundreds of these dear little children have been thus preserved from a premature grave."
A Christian Brother writes from Lombard Street, Galway: "Look at our two great school rooms, each 100 feet by 30, crammed to suffocation with famishing, fainting, emaciated little creatures, some of them striving to beguile the cravings of hunger by application to the food of the mind, others pining away in listless inaction and calculating as to when or where they may get a breakfast for today, or a crumb for tomorrow; infants of three years crying to their mothers for bread, and the mothers, asleep in the cold green grave.
The brothers are concerned, not with the risks to their own health in the midst of such misery, but at being unable to feed more than half of the 1,046 hungry boys crowding into their schools.
Thanks to "the charity of our friends in England", the Christian Brothers in Peacock Lane, Cork, are able to give one meal daily to 400 children.