November 23rd, 1846: The public works relief scheme is failing to provide the destitute poor with adequate means of subsistence.
Those employed are paid, irregularly, from 6d to 8d a day - with the price of Indian meal rising to 2d a lb. Mallow, relief committee describes the wages as "arbitrary cruelty" and declares "the men on the works are starving".
The labourers are not paid because there are no pay clerks to pay them; works are not started because there are no engineers to lay them out; task work is not measured because, there are no stewards who can be entrusted with the calculation.
Lord Monteagle (Thomas Spring Rice) describes to the viceroy, Lord Bessborough, his difficulties with Board of Works staff. On his Mount Trenchard estate, the first official resigned and the second "walked out in the midst of our troubles, with works to be laid out on which human lives depended". He paid the labourers out of his own pocket. A mass of discontent is being created.
"You must have pity on us," the new Commissioner for Relief Works writes to Lord Mounteagle. "We are perfectly unable to meet the requirements for engineers. The inspecting officers are all failing us.
"You must have pity on us," the new Commissioner for Relief Works writes to Lord Mounteagle. "We are perfectly unable to meet the requirements for engineers. The inspecting officers are all failing us.
Officials are worked hard - "up until 2 and 3 a.m. and up again at 7 a.m.," writes Col Harry Jones. At presentment sessions they meet with opposition and insults from a "yelling mob"; they have to travel long distances and are subjected frequently to severe wettings. "Some resign from inability to support the strain, some from intimidation..."
The public works are suspended in the Tulla district of Co Clare because of "a system of insubordination and outrage, which endangers the lives of the officers and overseers, and deters the poor and peaceable inhabitants from labouring on the works".
In Rosbercon, Co Kilkenny, the starving are being driven "frantic by repeated delays" in starting relief works.
A Board of Works inspector observes that Co Limerick is regularly riddled with roads".
The rector of Castlebar writes: "Never has such a calamity befallen our country. The whole staff of life is swept away; the emaciated multitudes are to be seen looking in vain for food, with hunger depicted in their countenance."
Father Cornelius O'Brien, PP of Lorrha and Doorha, informs the editor of the Tipperary Vindicator "of another victim of starvation". Daniel Hayes, who survived for several days on the refuse of vegetables, was found dead.
"Our relief committee has been formed and sanctioned three weeks, and the names of persons in need of employment returned to the proper officers; but scarcely any notice has been taken of our returns. Ere many days I fear there must be need of an increase of coroners and a decrease of civil engineers, if matters go on in this way.