JUNE 14th, 1847: The wealthy are immune to starvation but not to fevers, particularly typhus.
Every rich person who contracts fever in this town dies, a Cork Examiner correspondent warns. The rich should look to the frightful condition of pestilence carriers, for their own if not for humanity's sake. "By night some of them, though not actually recovered from fever but driven by the gnawings of hunger, leave the fetid straw on which they were stretched and go around the town clamouring for something to eat at the houses of the wealthy classes."
Father Mathew's cemetery is full, 10,000 bodies having been interred there since last autumn, "exclusive of those buried from the workhouse".
Crowds are flocking into Mallow since the new relief committee started to issue free rations. Poor creatures place a little straw at a hall door or outside some public building, and remain there until they die.
The Belfast General Relief Fund is providing grants to relief committees in the south. In addition, a day asylum has been established in Belfast; it is now admitting 900 people daily, an estimated two thirds of whom are described as strangers from outside the city.
The Carmelite, John Spratt, organises an interdenominational relief committee in Dublin, where "to perpetuate the kind feeling now so liberally evinced in favour of our starving people by those of every class and creed, in the distribution of relief there shall be no religious distinction whatever".
In Limerick the Christian Brothers in Sexton Street, with the support of Quaker families, have a cauldron of stirabout ready for the boys each day.
The Presentation Convent in Cork city has provided over 50,000 breakfasts for girls since January, with the help of "our English brethren".
The English Catholics have stood by us, writes Father James Brown, of Ballintubber, but "we are betrayed by government". His parish is living on weeds. "We have sent up our estimates to government and were to be relieved in four days. Fourteen days have passed and no relief, I procured meal for £60 on my own credit. It is all gone . . . Our dead are buried without coffins, and a parish once of 600 families is now reduced to 60." In Paris a committee led by Archbishop Denis Auguste Affre and Count Charles Montalembert coordinates assistance to the Irish, "a people to which France is bound by so many memories".
The Irish branch of the Society of St Vincent de Paul - which includes John O'Connell, the Liberator's son, and Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation - distributes aid collected by the parent body in France.
The poet "Speranza" invokes the lesson of revolutionary France in the Nation.
The students and staff of the Irish College in Rome do without meals to raise money.
Asenath Nicholson, who first became acquainted with the sufferings of the Irish peasantry in the cellars of New York, begins her tour of the north of Ireland.
Edward Nangle, of the Achill Herald, fears "she is the emissary of some democratic and revolutionary society". In contrast to the Rev Mr Nangle, Mrs Nicholson believes that God is slandered when famine is attributed to divine providence.
The radical Howitt's Journal regards her as a brave woman "with a pen of the most singular independence", who delights in stripping away the complacency of the rich. Her first sight of a starving man occurs in Kingstown [Dun Laoghaire]: he "was emaciated to the last degree; he was tall, his eyes prominent, his skin shrivelled, his manner cringing and childlike".